Perhaps the article is true but it appears to disregard what already is.
Nearly everyone of the "little people" (voters) has already given up their copyright by using facebook. Very, very few people benefit financially from the content industries. Mr Cowell certainly, but probably not even most of the x-factor bands. Content becomes successful due to promotion, not creative genius. Do you think you can outbid Mr Cowell's blanket advertising purchases?
The "creative industries" are already slanted against the little chap. The fabled experience of Sun with IBM shows how that works. You can't invent anything because the industries are full of patent trolls and legitimate businesses who will tie you up in legal red tape and lock you out with patent pools rather than let a new competitor in. Ask AMD how easy it is to protect a new architecture from being copied by someone like Intel.
In the face of this environment, there aren't too many people who care about what Google et al are doing. If 1D never happened, who would really care? What would "we the people" have lost? If BlackOps2 was never made, would the world be worse off? If Windows 8 never saw the light of day....
When it comes to copyright I see a lot of comments that "even the GPL needs copyright enforced." That may be true, but the GPL is there to prevent companies from taking the work and wrapping it up under copyright so that other people can't use it. The GPL isn't there to stop you taking the code, the GPL is there to stop you taking the code and hiding/placing restrictions further restrictions on it, restrictions created by mostly by copyright.
The pragmatic response is, "does IP make the people better off or worse off?" I suspect mostly, worse off with money flowing to large overseas corporates. That doesn't mean there is no benefit to IP, but it does mean that we need to monitor it closely. As for the proposed UK laws, IP law has always been a bit of a sledgehammer, almost certainly only accepted by the people because it is badly enforced. With ever better enforcement, I suspect the taste for it is going away and people are willing to swap copyright of their holiday snaps for a free copy of the latest junk coming out of x-factor. That's about the value they place on both.
I know, this is simplistic. There is far more to the creative industries than 1D, but Hollywood is far away and that is mostly what we see.