I think you have bought into the lie about copyright that has been fed to us. It is really hard to look at something objectively when you have been propagandized about it your entire life.

Currently copyright and the bigger category of intellectual property only exist to benefit commercial interests, this is self-evident. It is not a natural right by any means and is a perversion of the way art and science has existed for all of human history.

We have to face the reality that in a world of billions of people nothing is really unique. If you are anything like me you would have had many great thoughts, ideas, and projects and seen many other people throughout your life with similar or sometimes identical concepts.

Who should get to rent seek for these? If I create a very similar painting or song without ever seeing or hearing of another similar one who is the first? Well the current system is first come first serve, but is that really right?

What about teachers. Should not your teacher get a portion of your creation since they inspired you? What about exposure to other art, should you pay a portion of your earnings if you were inspired by other artist?

Even when looking at case law with derivative works, what is or is not okay is hardly settled and constantly changes based on the whims of ill-informed judges.

These questions only begin to scratch the complexity of the situation because of the artificial constraints put on us by intellectual property. I don't pretend to have the answers except to say there really is no need for any of this.

Even when looking at something you may think is relatively simple like putting a characters likeness on merchandise it is never cut and dry. I have often wondered if Tigger inspired Hobbes. The likeness including even behavior is rather startling.

Who has the rights is sometimes not even the person that created it originally. This is especially evident in productions that require lots of people like movies. This leads to interesting facts like most major recording artist don't even own their own songs.

Commercial interests love to have it both ways as well. Microsoft used piracy to its advantage to spread its OS across the globe and only cracked down on it after becoming a monopoly.

I am not trying to muddy the waters here but I want to make it clear that intellectual property, including copyright was created by and for monied interests. It was ill-conceived from the start, based on false premises, and has been pushed to the breaking point from years of coordinated legal tactics.