> large publishers would probably just wait out artists and steal their work

But it's public domain. You can't exactly "steal" something that already belongs to everyone, including you.

Sure, but a big company can absolutely find some little-known creator's work, spin off their own products with it, and use their size to absolutely dominate search results, marketing, and distribution.

While it may no longer be legally considered theft, it does seem to be a shame that a creator has a window of only a couple years to find success with their work before they're at risk of it becoming worthless to them. In creative fields it often takes many years to build up a portfolio and a following, if you've not been picked up by a major promoter.

Wouldn't have been a problem for Charles M. Schultz. One month of copyright would have been enough to keep him well fed. Same for Nassim Taleb.

In the age of the web, the big company's shitty bundled product may have a hard time competing with the creator's website. How many laptop vendors ship a custom fork of Ubuntu? But of course Ubuntu's kernel isn't exactly Linus's mainline, but I don't see him complaining.

Copyright affects a lot more people that the vanishingly few who are lucky enough to experience instant success.

Torvalds is in a whole different situation. Public domain is very different than GPL. Linux probably wouldn't be what it is today if not for the GPL requirements to publish source, which don't exist under public domain.

In fact, that's a scary consequence I didn't initially think of -- in a world where copyrights on Linux have expired, we'll may very well see contributions drop dramatically as the largest contributions start to closed-source their branches of Linux.

> Copyright affects a lot more people that the vanishingly few who are lucky enough to experience instant success.

Right, that's why we're trying to find ways to limit the damage it does to everybody else.

The GPL-vs.-BSD flamewar you're trying to start is only mildly relevant. The various BSD and Apache contributors aren't campaigning against the use of their code by Apple and Microsoft, either. The point is that there's nothing wrong with going out and making derivative works of other people's creative work; it's how all creative work is done.

> Copyright affects a lot more people that the vanishingly few who are lucky enough to experience instant success.

It affects everyone. Most only negatively.

> How many laptop vendors ship a custom fork of Ubuntu?

I would be really pissed if i got a "custom fork" of a novel and didn't also get the original, or at least a diff of changes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-...

What is stopping that from happening now? Most small creators don't have the money to defend their copyright

I am clearly using the word in a functional, moral, non-legal sense. The entire premise of my point indicates that I understand what public domain means.