> The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits what you can do with property that you own.

People can own guns. Is it problematic for the government to limit what people can do with their own guns? I would argue that it's not problematic at all, and I bet you would, too.

I'm open to other systems than copyright to make it possible for creators to afford to create and sell their creations. I think Patreon is fantastic, but I don't think it would work well for things like code (or situations where people don't really care about the creator and just want the product).

Everything will have second,third,fourth order effects.

The fundamental problem of intellectual property is that it protects the interests of large corporations far more than those of small creators. IP only matters if you have the resources to defend it in court or if your content isn't worth the effort to steal.

US IP law was written far before the scale of indie digital content or the mere concept of sampling was a blip in lawmakers' eyes. It was made for broadcasters and publishers to go after industrial scale bootlegging of books and movies.

That sounds more like an implementation/enforcement problem than of the concept of IP.

If [

    1) disputes were decided on the merits and

    2) costs of dispute resolution were

        2.a) deferred until decision-time,

        2.b) born by the decided-against party, and

        2.c) made the decided-for party whole and then some

], I bet either

A) an industry would spring up to identify wronged creators and fund defenses of their IP, or

B) industry would just pay to license the copyrighted work.

Any system of IP will inevitably lead to some entities accumulating a disproportionate share of IP and abusing its enforcement against everyone else.

TBH I think the tech-bro fantasy of eliminating copyright is a non-starter for the larger business ecosystem. I mean see how long it took us to decide smoking is bad for us. IMO the we can do is incrementally reduce the copyright period length and let the industry adapt around it.

But In my experience once money starts to flow in any entity its much harder to dismantle it without sortof letting bleed out. I dont think disney would give up its claim on the works anytime soon. we need to slay the beast by a thousand cuts.

We don't need to eliminate it, just go back to the original 14 yr term, with a renewal only allowed to the original creator (as an inalinable right so it can't be sold away).

I agree, but your "just" in that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think the parent poster describes a more realistic scenario where the term is reduced incrementally over a fairly long time.

If a politician suggested changing the current term (often over 100 years, depending on the details of creation, publication, and ownership) so drastically, they'd be laughed out of office. Or, rather, defunded out of office by their corporate donors.