this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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that original intent never mattered. no one's gonna make mickey mouse shorts and people be like "oh that must be their character, not Disney's". Mickey became famous and profitable from Disney's amazing animation and enjoyable writing. Without copyright, that's still the case. Queen and David Bowie didnt fall from financial or celebrity grace because Vanilla Ice copied them, because being copied doesnt detract from you. Again, all it did was enable the rich to profit from more things they didnt make. Get rid of all of it.
I think a short copyright period is fair enough to stop corporations putting out word for word copies of your book a week after you publish it. But it doesn't need to be more than 5-10 years, the current death+70 that the USA has pushed on the world is obscene.
Any author popular enough to be copied by a corporation is already well supported by fans. People prefer to support artists they like.
It's not the popular authors that would be getting ripped off, it'd be the small ones. Corps would have people scouting books en masse, find one worth taking without a reputation to back themselves up, then present their own version and crush any momentum you might gain against their millions of dollars in marketing.
The small ones already dont make money from their work. If theyre undiscovered, they dont have any fans to buy their book. If they are discovered, they have fan support.