Google really tried to do this but stopped digitizing books halfway through the worlds collection because of copyright law. It hurts to think of all the knowledge we could have shared if this had been permitted.
Getting rid of copyright and instituting a copy-anarchy would mean that creatives would have no real incentive to publish (no matter how much you do for passion, you still need to keep the lights on and put food on the table) - but our current system, with lifetimes tied to the time since Walt Disney's death, is a bit of a mess too.
Can there ever be a happy medium?
Short terms (15yr?) for unregistered or "implicit" copyright, renewable with registration and fees that increase year-over-year.
- free health care for all
- universal basic income at a really basic subsidence level
- voluntary patronage
People define themselves by their art if they can live a reasonable life and produce they will do it.
The idea being to allocate to each citizen an equal share, for equal voting power, and equal right to dividends.
The issue is not whether people should be able to profit off their own work but whether a rent-seeking gatekeeper should be able to hijack others' work and profit off it.
I specifically stated the sustenance level basic income plus patronage as I expect people must have enough to survive but ought to be incentivized to earn enough to live better.
I've heard others, not you, express the nonsensical idea that if people had enough to barely survive they would all quite providing value to society until the whole pyramid balanced precariously on the backs of the few remaining working people collapsed. This is a basic mis-analysis of human nature. People would strive to produce both for reasons of self worth and desire for a better than basic life.
I expect many to most writers with no readers and no earnings would eventually tire of the affair and move on to others.
Others would find a way to live a better than subsidence level life via patronage or doing other work to finance their hobby.
Do you really believe in a world without copyright that Stephen king wouldn't find any supporters?
1) Much of what I advocate for is based on how many human societies have operated for millennia. Collective management on the tribal level seems pretty common historically.
2) Some innovation is possible. Our society every day does things we didn’t do for thousands of years. Technology definitely changes this, but for example we didn’t do very large representative democracies until recently. It stands that there still exist some unpopular ideas that would work better that what we have today.
While that is true, would those books have been written without copyright protection? If you eliminate copyright laws today, will we see more or less (quality) books in the future?