Songs should not have government protection. Many of hte artists I listen to encourage free sharing via the internet, since many of them network that way to find new listeners. I know several aspiring hip-hop artists who regularly upload music to torrent sites in order to network their songs. They don't make a dime off of their music. What you have in corporate IP law (Crony Capitalism at its worse--"Crapitalism") is a rejection of free market economics. Corporate recording studios use the government in order to keep all the profits to themselves, and to shut out competition.
This recently was a debacle for the 80's band Def Leppard. Their recording studio retained the rights to all of their original recordings. For fear of losing profits by going digitial with Itunes, etc., the studio refused to allow the old recordings to be distributed by online sellers in mp3 format. Def Leppard thought that this was retarded, and so they re-recorded all of their songs this year, taking care to sound exactly like their old recordings, and then distributed the new recordings online.
This is the insanity of IP.
When musicians and studios whine about IP, they are trying to wring every last dollar from a temporary grant of government monopoly simply b/c America's IP laws are so antiquated and irrational as to allow such practices to remain legal, when clearly patents/IP ought not to be.
Govt. monopoly is not rationally defendable, and it ought to be destroyed ASAP. Is it likely to happen? Not sure. But if Universal Healthcare (Govt. monopoly on health insurance) is a sign of anything, it's not likely to happen anytime soon.