Balancing the interests between creators and users has been a delicate one in the context of copyright laws and protections. Historically, the balance has been more in favour of creators but we have seen a shift in case law that leans more towards users rather than balancing the needs between creators and users.

However, some argue that there's been a shift more in favour of users over the last few years with recent judicial decisions in Canada and the introduction of non-profits like The Creative Commons. Have they really changed the copyright landscape and status quo for protecting users? but the Internet has changed the game and the interest has shifted

As a lawyer, I am hired to protect my client's copyright protected works. In other words, to prevent others from using, reproducing or publishing their work without their permission. Copyright law provides an author of a work the exclusive right to the use, reproduction and distribution of the work for a certain time period (subject to certain exceptions) until it falls into the public domain.

The Creative Commons is a non-profit that offers an alternative to full copyright(See creativecommons.org). Congress shall have power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody The exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society."

Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813