The entire reason we even have copyright is because it was already so cheap to make copies several hundred years ago.

BTW, open source -- the darling of the "information wants to be free" crowd -- would also be toast. Proprietary vendors would simply take all open source code, strip off its authorship and add proprietary features, then 'extinguish' by leveraging vertical integration and UX to make it 'theirs.' Independent OSS ecosystems would cease to exist as no-one would dare release open source code... it would just be appropriated without even giving credit to the original author, let alone any form of compensation.

Intellectual property law is indeed broken. That brokenness probably starts with a flawed bit of reasoning by analogy; trying to extend the concept of physical property into the intellectual realm is an ugly hack to shoehorn intellectual value creation into ancient frameworks of property and contract law. Its brokenness also stems from self-serving lobbyists taking it over, e.g. the endless "Mickey Mouse protection acts" that have extended copyright terms to infinity.

That being said: abolishing it without replacing it would simply abolish writing, music, art, journalism, etc. as primary disciplines or careers. Without copyright the only way to make money in these fields would be to turn all of your work into advertisement; Buzzfeed would be the future of all art. That's a hellish dystopia if I've ever seen one.

I wonder if the solution might not be technical. Google "homomorphic encryption."

When was copyright invented? Why? What were things like before then? What would prevent that from still working today?

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Independent OSS ecosystems would cease to exist as no-one would dare release open source code... it would just be appropriated without even giving credit to the original author, let alone any form of compensation.

Which is why SQLite doesn't exist. [ http://sqlite.org/copyright.html ]

This also assumes there's no distinction made between copying and attribution.

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That being said: abolishing it without replacing it would simply abolish writing, music, art, journalism, etc. as primary disciplines or careers. Without copyright the only way to make money in these fields would be to turn all of your work into advertisement

For music at least, I seem to recall hearing that most bands already get the bulk of their money from live shows?

I agree with your point with respect to open source code however. Open source software licensing, especially permissive licenses, is largely divorced from attribution--especially in the context of those actually using the software.

There may be a more elegant and fair solution, but no solution and pretending the problem does not exist is not it.

We've had copyright almost as long as we've had technology to easily reproduce artistic works.

Because they sold their copyright on their music to record companies in exchange for funding their studio recording and promotion.

The whole point of royalties is to reduce the amount of litigation by having an organized and honorable system of compensation.

The reason YouTube and Pandora have spent the last decade in the courts is precisely because they don't want to have to pay. Instead of being respectful members of society, they decided to hide behind lawyers and put a burden on our publicly funded civil justice systems.

There is nothing in our legal system that will ever allow someone to use someone else's intellectual property and profit from it without compensating the original author. That means that every time someone is selling advertisements on a website around content that is not being compensated, they can be successfully sued for damages, with hundreds of years of common law precedent and statute.

There is no doubt in my mind that intellectual property and copyright have changed drastically from the author-centric in to the corporate-centric form that we have today.

What's needed is reform and a return to an author-centric model, not the wholesale abandonment of copyright.

"Shall have the power", "to promote the progress".

As far as I see it, that's all we need to drop every single copyright law now founded on actual research (just about all of them) and swap them out for something else entirely, if we find something that has a better effect for society.

And I disagree entirely on the view on Youtube and Pandora. You may not like their position, but as far as I can see they haven't destroyed anybody's creative career. We shouldn't be building intellectual minefields and be petty and territorial.

I don't dislike their "position", I dislike the fact that they're essentially even more parasitic on musical creators than the old majors used to be.

Have you ever heard of a streaming service paying a talented band/singer an advance? Or taking out ads? Or setting up press interviews?

Spotify pays about the same per play and listener as radio does. How is that worse than the labels?

Pay for what? YouTube, at least, only hosts user posted content.