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You obviously do not understand the concept of copyright or its history.

Should we be required to pay the descendants of Francis Scott Key every time the National Anthem is played at a ballpark, or Shakesphere's descendants whenever Othello is performed?

The public domain is a common repository of our culture. It was never intended to become a perpetual state of affairs for any work, hence the "limited times" provisio in the Constitution.

From the referenced link.

When Congress passed the first copyright law in 1790, the copyright term lasted for 14 years, with the option to renew for another 14 years if the copyright holder was still living. Before 1978, the copyright term was still 28 years from the date of publication, renewable once for another 28 years — but 85% of copyrights were not renewed and went immediately into the public domain. Under the 1976 Copyright Act, which went into effect in 1978, the term became 50 years from the date of the author’s death (with no need to renew to have the full term). And in 1998, the copyright term was increased to 70 years after the death of the author, and to 95 years after publication for corporate “works-for-hire”, locking up an entire generation of works for an additional 20 years. With these and interim extensions, the copyright term has been extended eleven times in the past fifty years.
The 1998 term extension — which increased the copyright term to life plus 70 years and 95 years for corporate authors — was not only granted to future works. It was retroactively applied to works that had already been created and enjoyed their full copyright term, and were set to enter the public domain. None of these works will enter the public domain until 2019. The already diminished public domain has been frozen in time.
In addition to extending the copyright term, recent laws eliminated the requirement that authors “opt in” to copyright protection by affixing a basic copyright notice — the word “copyright” or © with a name and year next to it. This change took effect in 1989, and copyright now adheres the moment a work is fixed, whether or not the author wants to protect or sell the work, with no easy way to "opt out" — think of all the amateur videos, travel photos, blog postings, witty musings, jam sessions, or useful tidbits that people want to freely share and don’t intend to commercialize. Estimates are that under the opt-in system perhaps only 10% of works included a copyright notice; the remaining 90% went immediately into the public domain. Compare that to today, when 100% of works automatically have life plus 70 years or 95 years of protection and are off limits to artists, educators, archivists, remixers, scholars, and everyone else who might want to freely use them. As a result, the chart above only shows part of the story — the shrinking of the public domain has been exponential.

Copyright is a necessary evil that we use to make sure that creators can be compensated by their work, but it was never envisioned to be as far reaching as it has become. The current terms and conditions actually reduce the mount of material that can be called upon from our cultural heritage in the creation of new works. Should Disney have had to pay Kiplings great, great grandchildren for the right to produce their Jungle Book cartoon, as I mentioned in my original post?

All the current assanine state of the law does today is encourage people to disregard it. Personally, I have no problem with passing along a copy of Dark Side of the Moon to a friend because the underlying Constitutional foundation of the law has been far exceeded by its current reach and breadth. Just like I'm not willing to obey a law that says my handgun can hold no more than seven rounds, I'm not willing to support the protection given to 40+ year old music.

If the state wants us to respect the law, they need to start respecting us as well. Copyright law is a compromise established because we want people to encourage the arts and science. The public domain is the rightful place for all works, because one may not call back words and ideas once spoken. As a society, we've decided to grant a time of exclusive control to authors and others because it benefits society as a whole to have such grants exist. However, corporate interests have purchased terms that have impoverished the public domain, leaving us with orphan works with no clear legal guidelines to determine the status of a work.

Contrary to your assertions, it's not about just wanting everything for free. Most of us who oppose the current copyright regime simply demand something that fulfills its stated Constitutional purpose.