Would it be nice if we did away with book scarcity and paid all authors exclusively through Patreon? Sure, that'd be great, but we can't force authors into that scheme against their will.
Peoples' access to that information was and is not in danger. If you can't afford a book you can take the tiny legal risk of pirating it yourself. Lending books is cute and handy but the important part of the IA is, well, the archive of the internet. People are upset because they put the archive in existential danger by pulling an incredibly stupid bit of legal activism. It's like protesting the illegality of raw milk by feeding it to your immunocompromised child.
> Sure, that'd be great, but we can't force authors into that scheme against their will.
We certainly can't force authors to continue publishing, but we wouldn't be forcing them into anything by revoking some or all of the privilege referred to as copyright. That would simply be a long-overdue recognition that we no longer consider this experiment in social engineering to be in the best interest of society.
I certainly don't care for DRM, but I recognize publishers' right to use it—so long as it isn't backed up by force of law. We can't force anyone to make content available in any particular format, after all. However, most of the effectiveness of DRM (such as it is, which isn't much) comes from the fact that you can't legally talk about how to circumvent it or distribute tools for doing so. Obviously that needs to go; it's an even more blatant violation of freedom of speech than copyright itself.
From a purely technical perspective DRM on books is particularly futile. If the page is visible to a human reader then it can be imaged (perhaps with an external camera) and OCR'd at least as easily as scanning a physical book. DRM for audio files is in a similar position—not quite lossless, but very close. With video there is a bit of quality loss from the capture and re-encoding process, but nothing too serious. It's a bit more effective with interactive content such as games but still far from unassailable.
If we revoke those copyright protections for the most part the only people that will be able to afford to ‘write’ or create art will be the independently wealthy. How many books would not be written? Protecting copyright means more is created and shared not less.
This is obviously false. People who are far from independently wealthy write and create art right now despite never having any realistic expectation of receiving a dime for it, regardless of copyright. Frankly, if your main reason for writing is the misguided hope that it will make you rich then you probably don't have anything worthwhile to say. Revoking copyright probably would reduce the volume of publications in this area; to which I say "good riddance". On the other hand, if you do have something to say, it's never been easier to get it published and distributed to a worldwide audience at practically zero cost.
Copyright is sowing conflict, crippling our technology, and impoverishing our public domain—our shared culture—all to maintain subsidies for something that never needed to be subsidized.
> People who are far from independently wealthy write and create art right now despite never having any realistic expectation of receiving a dime for it
So rich people and hobbyists - everything in between is gone.
> if your main reason for writing is the misguided hope that it will make you rich then you probably don't have anything worthwhile to say
I don’t think all creators are just hoping to get rich - how about make a living doing something they are passionate about?
Corollary: When youtube allowed creators to monetize content, did the quality of content on YouTube improve? Absolutely it did. So many educational channels only exist because they can make a living doing it. Pre-monetization it was just hobbyists.
Similarly copyright enables authors, artists (and youtubers for that matter) to make a living creating.
> Copyright is sowing conflict, crippling our technology, and impoverishing our public domain
Take that kind of crap to /r/im14andthisisdeep you clearly have no bearing in reality. There is a reason every country in the world recognizes and strives to upholds copyright.
Peoples' access to that information was and is not in danger. If you can't afford a book you can take the tiny legal risk of pirating it yourself. Lending books is cute and handy but the important part of the IA is, well, the archive of the internet. People are upset because they put the archive in existential danger by pulling an incredibly stupid bit of legal activism. It's like protesting the illegality of raw milk by feeding it to your immunocompromised child.