Do any authors of books actually manage to prosecute piracy in a way that makes them money? As best I can tell, artists lose money paying for lawyers to litigate supposedly lost sales, but whether they actually lose sales is very questionable.
> The photographs that I took and have up on the web (all rights reserved) could be printed and sold without me seeing a dime.
Yup, which is good! You put them up on the web without expectation of making a dime, right? Cool. Your expectations are fulfilled, and someone gets a cool image too.
> trying to remove copyrights completely disincentives people who are creating material that is protected with copyright from sharing their material
And yet, the majority of people who post instagram images and tik-tok videos don't even realize their work is protected by copyright I'd wager, but they're still happy to share their material.
People who write open source code apply such a license specifically because they want to share the material more broadly than copyright would normally allow.
If removing copyright means that we end up with fewer people who are seeking a profit producing content and then praying on others who share and remix it, that seems good to me. We have plenty of people who are willing to produce content and be happy when other people enjoy it, use it, and share it.
If I wrote a book, I would be overjoyed to have people read it and copy it to share with their friends. It seems like a very dark mindset to think that a profit-motive is the primary reason someone might produce anything.
If copyright was abolished, the GPL and all open source would lose all its teeth.
The photographs that I took and have up on the web (all rights reserved) could be printed and sold without me seeing a dime.
The people who write books on here (and then have to fight to keep people from doing on demand pirating of them) would be given a big shrug when they try to go after them in court for copyright infringement.
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Its possible to argue about the term of the copyrights on different media or the threshold for what is novel for a patent... but trying to remove copyrights completely disincentives people who are creating material that is protected with copyright from sharing their material.
And let's face it... you'd have to rewrite the constitution to get rid of them. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.
> [The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
And they're right.