If you look at the history of any major problem, the solution has involved the freeing of information in some manner. For diseases it involved understanding the transmission, immunity patterns, and eventually understanding the actual bacteria and viruses. World War II was largely an information war, with mathematical feats used to free information and hide it, to gain the upper hand in the conflict.
Is hiding information okay? It depends on the information being hidden. For example, for a military campaign in the aforementioned war, a certain amount of hiding was necessary. But that sort of information has a short half-life (the time until the sensitivity of the information is halved).
Other information is private. That means the information may be necessary to the person’s well-being. It’s up to the person (or organization) to determine when and if to share that information, and who to share it with.
But, all things being equal, the more information that is known about a problem, the easier it is to solve the problem. That means systems that try to tie up what is really public information, like scientific and artistic works that have been published (from the same general origin as public) are failures from their inception. They are confusing control with revenue.
It makes sense for people that create works have a decent quality of life. But that’s different than what’s being done. What’s being done is you have people afraid to share their works because they don’t want someone else stealing their works. You have people who are doing everything in their power to lock down a perpetual copyright law enforced under penalty of death. You have people fighting for the right to share art and scientific knowledge with each other. And you have people missing crucial pieces of information in their endeavors to become better scientists, artists, citizens, because access is blocked.
That’s all bad enough, but the same tools being sold to the Copyright Armada are also turned against people fighting oppressive regimes the world over. You have the same information blocks leading to huge recessions because the traders are naive enough to think an information gap is their best way to make money.
Information is the critical element that makes us more than mere animals, just as when a crow picks up a piece of bent wire and uses it as a tool it is something greater than a crow with a piece of wire. Information is what allows us to do something other than forage and hunt all our days, without shelter.
It is critical that we improve our flows of information. It is information alone that can prevent our worst acts and enable our best acts.