"I want things for free" isn't a good argument against copyrights. Without copyrights any random asshole can sell copies without giving money to the creators.

Intellectual Property laws are an abomination but this meme is a very young child's understanding of the issue.

I'm more concerned with protecting smaller artists and creators from big businesses that leech ideas

See, copyright is a good thing, public domain is very easy to exploit.

I think we should build upon copyright by using permissive licenses like gpl, creative commons, etc

We have to slowly try and convince people to use these, and use them ourselves(which I do a lot)

What about art copyright?