Not sure if this is a pisstake on my argument, but a world without copyright (or something similar) would be a world of endless exploitation and stifled innovation.

Copyright as it exists today does an awful lot of exploitation-enabling and innovation-stifling in itself. (And that's ignoring the rest of the IP suite.)

This is like saying "cops today do a lot of nasty stuff, let's get rid of all cops". The result is pure, unmitigated anarchy, looting, murder, and lawlessness.

I don't find either to be useful lines of thinking.

Not really. Things would be pretty simple. You see something? You can copy it. Not a single legalese document in sight.

Don't compare this stuff to police brutality, looting, murder. They're not even in the same realm. Intellectual property is just ideas and absurd notions of ownership. It's like trying to own numbers. The real brutality is sending people to jail over this.

> a world without copyright (or something similar) would be a world of endless exploitation and stifled innovation

Says who? The copyright monopolists?

There's plenty of historical evidence to the contrary:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28330810

It seems obvious in hindsight. Less monopolies lead to more competition and better products. Even the US engaged in such infringement.

In the absence of copyright things like the GPL would have no power - a company could take your work and bundle it into their product and never contribute anything back ever.

And then you could copy what they produced the result without paying them, I expect the pirate sites would still exist without copyright.

In the abscence of copyright, copying some company's work would not be a crime either.