Well then you're viewing it wrong. Laws to keep business fair and on the level aren't antithetical to a free market. Capitalism isn't anarchy.
You have to look at the history, Copyright was established to protect the little guy from the big fish, basically, it was the ensure that Authors coulden't have their work taken and mass produced by printing firms without them seeing a penny for their authorship.
The Statute of Anne describes it as "for the encouragement of learning", the idea beeing that if Authors where sure to be compensated for their writing, they would continue to write books benifiting society at large.
That is the spirit of the law, protecting the little guy, and serving society as a whole.
But that is a far cry from what we see thease days, where a pharmacutical company could actually sit on the cure for cancer, and sell it for 10 million a pill simple because.. they can, that is neither protecting the little guy, nor is it a benifit for society at large, and it is definately not stimulating any kind of healthy competition when any attemp to sell a similar pill is damn near garuenteed to be met by a long and expensive legal battle over weather or not Copyrights and Patents are beeing infringed upon.
Hell knows how many legitimate claims never see the light of day, simply because individuals, small retailers and companies cannot afford to engage a giant corporation in a legal battle.
Ours is a system that breeds monopolies, keeps the big fish big and blocks the little guy, seldomly does it work as intended, and there is something very wrong with the system when entire companies can exist on just buying up Patents and Copyrights, and grow embarresingly wealthy from doing nothing of value, they just sit there, legal document in hand, and cash in on someone elses invention and product whilst inflating prices to absurd levels for their own profit, how is this advancing the human condition? and how exactly is it protecting the little guy? or even stimulating competition and the free market?
There may have been a good intensions behind thease laws circa 1710 when they where first enacted, but the whole thing is rotten to the core thease days, it is in dire need of beeing torn down and rebuild from the ground up, hell, at this point i think we'd be better off not having them at all than letting them stay the way they are.