Why does anyone think abolishing copyright is a good idea?

Your friend writes a novel. They've never been published before, so they shop it around to various publishers, but no dice. A little while later, they see a hot new entry on the bestsellers list, and surprise, it's their novel word for word - one of the publishers took it.

Without copyright this can happen to writers, musicians, film creators, artists, and so on.

There should absolutely be limits on copyright. Disney should not be allowed to turn the copyright laws into their own personal tool. But I see so many people who get angry when corporations take advantage of copyright, and so few of them seem to consider the fact that the same laws protect the little guy against those same corporations. Unless we want Disney to literally be able to get away with stealing art from anyone and everyone, we need intellectual property laws.

As for patents, the general idea behind patents is that in order to get one, you need to describe your technique. The motivation is furthering shared knowledge - we give you the promise of exclusive use of the patent for a limited time in order to encourage you to divulge your invention. Patent law is more ripe for abuse than copyright but its general policy motive is still sound.

Also there is no copyleft without copyright. I agree though the term should be much more limited.

If there was no copyright, you wouldn't need copyleft.

Wrong: Copyleft ensures that the users of a given program can get access to its source code and release modified version of it, and that the users of that modified version have the same rights to access, modify, release it, and so on. Without copyright, there would be no way to enforce this preservation of user rights.

That's a good point; I didn't consider that.

The cost of giving my friend a one in a million chance of living out his Hemingway fantasy of making a fortune by writing a novel by himself while sipping coffee in some Parisian cafes is billions of people with little access to the world's best knowledge.

> Why does anyone think abolishing copyright is a good idea?

Because entire industries, like fashion, have no intellectual property protection—and work just fine. In fact, they're extremely wealthy industries, with very low costs for consumers.

An example of a design patent issued to Yves Saint Laurent:

https://www3.wipo.int/designdb/en/showData.jsp?ID=USID.D8883...

The application guide: https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/types-patent-applicatio...

And the Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

This isn't correct, the fashion industry uses a wide array or different IP protection methods, trademarks for specific colors, sketches of design can by copyrighted, you can then get a design patent to prevent others from creating fashions that resemble your sketch, designs on clothing can be protected by copyright, even textile design can be copyrighted.

And as for the low cost to consumer, seizing and processing counterfeit goods cost consumers nearly $500 million a year in taxes to pay for law enforcement alone.

Aren't design patents used to protect many fashion products?

With R&D costs near 0.

When R&D costs are high, competition is minimal because it's so expensive to compete.

Example: (patent-free) SpaceX