I don't understand why copyright exists.
Are there studies showing that copyright brought an increase in creativity or art excellence?
Are there studies showing that copyright brought an increase in creativity or art excellence?
What copyright did was create financial incentives for distributing the existing levels of creativity far and wide--so people other than rich patrons can enjoy creative works.
Without copyright I can just copy your book, claim it as my own, sell thousands of copies and you don't see a cent.
It wouldn't stop you from publishing it, but it would stop you from claiming to be the original author.
Paper books actually cost money to print, so people who love the paper book experience will likely be the only ones buying books. I strongly suspect the ratio of those purchasers to those who consume ebooks is steadily decreasing. And if ebooks race to the bottom as I have no doubt they would, I suspect that ratio would drop even more.
Copyright not required.
The majority of published authors don't really make much money at all. it's not uncommon to make less than $10k for a book that took over a year to write. Clearly they're not all in it for the money.
Maybe you wouldn't have as many mega successes, but are the current mega success really anything more than a product of the artificial scarcity caused by the publishing house gatekeepers. Again, who knows?
People have their priorities all wrong. You can get brilliant art/music/whatever for negligable prices. Or at least as much of it as is healthy to consume.
Removing copyright places a draconian burden on creativity, while only providing a slight real gain in accessability.
The basic structure of copyright-based business is this: the creator expends effort up front, then hopes buyers will pay later. The information flow, or rather lack of it, introduces a large risk of producing what is not wanted. Also the copy restrictions necessarily raise prices far above the real marginal costs of near zero. That means there is a large potential value the public is prevented from getting.
Such a structure consumes a scarce resource -- creative effort -- wastefully, and restricts an abundant resource -- copyability of information -- needlessly.
That seems very much the opposite of economically efficient.
You don't need copyright law for that.