Copyright only exists to protect the rich. The lowlys don’t make patents, they don’t make money from their songs they put on Spotify, and they have to pay to watch movies.
There is a pile of economics literature dedicated to what would happen if copyright didn’t exist (anarcho-something-capitalism, if I remember).
For starters, industrial nations all raised when copyright wasn’t a thing, including China in 1980-2020.
You build wonders when you don’t need to track who owns every imaginary concept, idea, song that you can sing, bytes that are so easily copied from one disk to another, and in hindsight, our descendants might think it was totally strange that we used so much state resources, jurors, policemen, heaps of lawyers, to give a task to the state related to preventing people from reusing each other’s imaginary concepts.
It protects the photographs that I've taken from the rich to be able to steal it and reproduce them much more cheaply than I can.
It protects the open source contributions that I've made from the rich, by being able to take them and hide them away in a product that doesn't need to abide by the license enforced by copyright.
There is a pile of economics literature dedicated to what would happen if copyright didn’t exist (anarcho-something-capitalism, if I remember).
For starters, industrial nations all raised when copyright wasn’t a thing, including China in 1980-2020.
You build wonders when you don’t need to track who owns every imaginary concept, idea, song that you can sing, bytes that are so easily copied from one disk to another, and in hindsight, our descendants might think it was totally strange that we used so much state resources, jurors, policemen, heaps of lawyers, to give a task to the state related to preventing people from reusing each other’s imaginary concepts.