The publishing and recording companies will fight this change tooth and nail, but they will not be acting for the benefit of society. They will only be trying to protect the huge profits they earn from a technology that is becoming obsolete. They want us to pay for their gigantic, expensive infrastructures, even when almost everything they do can now be done at much less expense. They use copyright laws to file lawsuits to block the natural, efficient operation of the new system. There is one area, however, where we need to keep copyright.
Most movies still require an investment in the millions to produce.
If works are any good, then their creators could probably make as much or more this way as through the copyright royalty system. Imagine that the printing press and the record never were invented, and we went directly from hand copying and only live performances to the personal computer and the Internet. If people had thought out the best way to organize things in this situation for the benefit of both audiences and authors and musicians, it is extremely unlikely they would have come up with the idea of copyright and royalties as the way to do it. Let's not keep hanging on to a legal idea that made sense in an earlier technological era, but doesn't any more. Instead let's wipe the mental slate clean and think out from the beginning what is the best way to organize this incredible set of new technologies for the creation and distribution of artistic and intellectual works.