I'll ignore that we are debating this(and both getting upvotes), and thus it's debatable.
For most of human history if you, say, heard a poem someone else wrote you were absolutely free to copy it, reproduce it, even sell it! Even if you didn't do the work of actually writing it. And this was the norm, and no one thought the author should have the right to stop you. So saying that it's not debatable whether this is still the case from a moral standpoint (hence the "should" in the debated statement) seems to me shortsighted.
What's more, even today there are countless ways in which content is distributed without permission from it's makers that we don't deem wrongs. Libraries were named in this thread, and we have all kinds of lendings, readings, quotes and all use that is allowed by fair use. Where the rights of the makers should end (and those of the consumer start) is very much debatable.
You have a point if you ignore that under the "anything goes" regime, vanishingly small amounts of new content were created regularly. Now that we have a legal framework whereby you can potentially get rewarded for your output, we literally have more creative output than any one person can ever even understand. That's a situation many of us would like to see continue, despite the constant attempts to make it seem like the current copyright regime is somehow suppressing artists.
I did not say no IP is necessarily better than some IP, or even that it's better than the insane copyright system we have today (though personally I believe strongly that the latter is true). I'm just saying that this is a debate worth having, and that it is not happening.
The invention of IP is one possible explanation of why we have so much content nowadays. Other possible contributing factors include the population explosion of the previous century, the fundamental improvement of communication technologies, and the overall increase in the material conditions of the majority of the population.
>under the "anything goes" regime, vanishingly small amounts of new content were created regularly.
I'm inclined to believe you but I wonder how we can possibly know that. Before modern communication and distribution technologies, lots of content was simply lost and forgotten.
For most of human history if you, say, heard a poem someone else wrote you were absolutely free to copy it, reproduce it, even sell it! Even if you didn't do the work of actually writing it. And this was the norm, and no one thought the author should have the right to stop you. So saying that it's not debatable whether this is still the case from a moral standpoint (hence the "should" in the debated statement) seems to me shortsighted.
What's more, even today there are countless ways in which content is distributed without permission from it's makers that we don't deem wrongs. Libraries were named in this thread, and we have all kinds of lendings, readings, quotes and all use that is allowed by fair use. Where the rights of the makers should end (and those of the consumer start) is very much debatable.