A point I've always found interesting is how the advent of the printing press was initially a massive boon to writers in the absence of copyright as books didn't keep their value for long so publishers need quite a large supply of new books to make a profit (some details listed in [1], ignore the NFT crap). I suppose this may no longer hold in a world where illegal copies can now spread in a matter of hours, if not minutes, but it's worth thinking about how copyright helps the publisher more than the creator of a work.

[1]: https://virginica.substack.com/p/the-printing-press-nfts-and...