[ChiMan]

This gets to the heart of why we have copyrights. They’re not to make writers rich. They’re to make us all rich with the content they produce.

The modern abuse of copyrights by the likes of Disney does not negate this otherwise wonderful institution.

[_DeadFred_]

It blows my mind people here don't understand this. Copyright is a huge benefit to society. And under copyright, people that don't want to use it are free to release their rights to the world, so you get two approaches. Which one do we see contributing the most to modern thought? To modern entertainment? To education? Imagine if all text books were open, the only authors would be overworked grad students assigned to update them for next quarter.

[fragmede]

> Copyright is a huge benefit to society.

Is it? We don't have the technology to duplicate the Earth in, say, 1776 but without copyright, and run an experiment, so all we can point at is a logic argument that we need to incentivize writer and artists and creators. Which I mean, sure. I want to write the next great American novel and not have to work for the rest of my life. and for my children and their children to not have to work either. Is that really for the betterment of society though? You can give some additional logic arguments in favor of that, but without Earth duplication technology, there's nothing that really constitutues real actual proof. The closest comparison we have that I know of is to look at China, which has far weaker intellectual property laws, and, well, they haven't fallen into lawless anarchy.