To make an analogy, it might take you five years and your life savings to prototype a new invention. Once done, it can be mass produced for pennies.

Would you invest that time and money if patent protection did not exist? Probably not, because your competition will copy your work and bankrupt you.

At any point, society could opt to eliminate patent protection and make all existing inventions public domain, at the cost of losing future inventions. But instead we settled for 20 years.

This concern did not previously apply to art styles, because they took nearly as much skill to copy as to originate. But now it does, and with no protections, we can expect nobody to put in the work of being the next Studio Ghibli. The styles we have are all we will have, but we can mass produce them.

Because now it’s too easy to rip off another artist’s work and style with no effort. And the current rules in place are not enough to protect the original artist.

The original artist used to be protected by the fact that it took so much effort to copy or reproduce their original work and style at a high quality, so it rarely happened at a scale to directly impact them.

But now it’s so easy and effortless that anyone can do it in mass and that now impacts the original artist greatly.