[Retric]

Shakespeare, web comics, and fan fiction have all have produced and distributed plenty of good content without meaningful copyright protection.

I suspect a world without copyright would look a lot more like the sistine chapel than it's defenders want to admit.

PS: I would accept Movies as a good counter argument except even 10 years of protection is overkill in most cases due to both the diminishing income streams and time value of money.

[throwawaykf05]

Funny that you should mention web comics and fanfic because I spent a substantial amount of time going through websites dedicated to both for a few years, and I can tell you that the vast majority of the content was unmitigated drek. There certainly was a lot of content, but "good" content? Like a diamond in the rough. That's the reason I stopped visiting those sites.

The internet has certainly made it easier to get content out there. But it has also made it very evident how rare good talent actually is. The good ones deserve to be able to be rewarded for their work so they can continue to produce more, and unless someone comes up with a better system, copyright is what we have.

[Retric]

There are over 700,000 HP hp fanfiction works out there chances are most people who liked the series could find 10 that they liked without reading most of them. Traditional publishing's has kept a lid on things easily stopping the bottom 95%, but there are plenty of terrible books out there so you still need a way to find the good ones.

Minimally biased raiting systems seem like an effective way to seperate the dreck. Yet, paid content has huge incentives to game the system, but with unpaid content that's far less of an issue.