[pwinnski]

Yes.

Yes.

No.

(Yes, it protected independent creators from having their work directly monetized by others, like Disney did.)

(Yes, by providing protections for creators to profit from their own works, it motivated some number of people to write, compose, and create who might otherwise not have done so.)

(No, the government did, using copyright as a pretext.)

Note that points one and two do do not suggest that copyright is useful in its current form, rather than its history 14/28-year form.

[Terretta]

There's no evidence that lack of copyright stops creation. We had poetry, music, and painting before we even had money. Creativity will out.

There's meaningful evidence that copyright slows knowledge sharing and evolution.

Profitable for a single creator, a problem for mankind.

[danShumway]

But unless you have a plan to convince the average person on the street, and the president, and a fillibuster-proof majority of Congress, and a number of international US allies that copyright was a mistake, comparing AI-training on copyrighted material to the printing press is an invitation to create regulation, not an argument against that regulation.

[pwinnski]

I agree that copyright as it exists today is ridiculous, but a complete lack of copyright would destroy a large number of industries that currently exist, and for little benefit.

I'm all for pulling things back to the terms originally in place in the US, for example, despite the changes that would bring to society. But the answers to the questions asked still seemed pretty clear.