I had the same problem. He seems to define the problem quite elegantly (it's use isn't exclusive, so it's not property, and the word 'property' leads to fallacious reasoning), but he never offers any idea what we should do/say instead.
Here's the key summary:
We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what's fair and what isn't at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.
Hopefully my small extraction here does not fall astray of the copyright laws.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/29/copyright.l...
The problem, as always, is in the details. I want to understand what Doctorow thinks are the essentials of this putative "age-old normative consensus" which he finds so compelling.
Just stating that such a thing exists doesn't get me any farther along to understanding the intellectual framework which he wants to use in order to make the trade off between the creator's interests and those of society at large.