I'm not opposed to some type of protection for intellectual property, especially considering how real property has all kinds of protection (and all kinds of middlemen).

The period of protection for intellectual property like copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret is arbitrary. Brikwall seems to think 50 or 75 years after death is a good timeframe. But in the U.S., for decades, a work was protected for only 28 years. It could be but was not automatically renewed for an additional 47.

In 1976, that was changed to the author's lifetime plus 50 years (or a total of 75 years for a work of corporate authorship), and the 1998 Sonny Bono act extended the 50 to 70... which means that no works will enter the public domain in the U.S. until 2019 unless the author specifically puts it there.

(This system would collapse overnight if it were possible for individual consumers to place their credit history under copyright.)

Creative Commons depends entirely on copyright law. A CC license is a vehicle for assigning author rights, much like a rental agreement lets a landlord assign certain property-use rights to a tenant.

So it's inaccurate to imply that someone who favors CC is "too goddamned lazy" either to enforce a copyright or to create his own work. It's much more the case that an author recognizes the unlikelihood of much financial gain from, say, a blog post or a given photo. Similarly, when I'm looking for an image to enhance work I'm doing, purchasing custom photos or stock photos isn't realistic. So I do without, or I look for a CC-licensed image that I can use, and for which I post attribution.

As for the people who reuse fixed expressions of original authorship, few of them are deterred by copyright, and few copyright owners other than corporations have the resources to go after violators.