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Comment by pleasecalllater | Hacker News Reader

Cool. I have no idea what you do for a living... but imagine you write a blog, or you write books, or you are composing some music. Are you happy being hungry all days just because everyone can just copy you work and sell it on their own?

So when you will have an idea to pay your rent with the money you will get from your new book, just remember what you wrote: "Knowledge isn't a property. Copying is not theft.". So I assume it's fine that you will get nothing. So the choice is simple: you will be either a hungry homeless writer or you will find some other job.

And we will end with little books, little knowledge, little art.

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There a billion books, songs, blogs, software projects, paintings, photos, and other copyrightable things no one ever made a dime off and most of the creators aren't homeless. It can be made while working another job, raising a family, dealing with life. The only people making money off this stuff are the very few you hear about. And the people that "dedicate all their time" to it will, of course, tell you it's the only way to make stuff as great as theirs (via twitter, from a private island, while doing anything but creating), and enough people believe that is true to keep the money machine churning. Creativity isn't going to dwindle away with no laws "protecting" it.

> The only people making money off this stuff are the very few you hear about. And the people that "dedicate all their time" to it will, of course, tell you it's the only way to make stuff as great as theirs

That's absolutely wrong IMO. In almost every nice subject I'm interested in, there are a bunch of people creating wonderful content. This is in topics that most people have never heard of and wouldn't care about even if they did.

These people can have a career or a decent second income creating works that few people will ever hear of, and funny enough, there's a good chance that they need that extra money more than the few names everyone's heard of, since they don't have alternatives like e.g. concerts, selling signed copies, etc.

We didn't always have this system. Things still worked.

Removing copyright may let a better system be out in place

Anti-copyright people seem to exist in a world where the only people who make things do so at big C&D-happy corporations. They mistake the cost of reproduction with the cost of creating and think the creating will happen with no control over reproduction.

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