[_DeadFred_]

Yes, having the incentive so that people create and release works is better than people not releasing the works. If people want to release free they can under out current system.

It's not lawless anarchy, it's just less of the works that copyright rewards (you get more of what you reward). So all those free books/music/movies that are made each year you still have, but you have less professionals taking a year off to go write their book. You have less decent funding for educations books. You have less sharing of knowledge and ideas, and I would say that makes society worse. If people were going to release it for free, they would be doing that today. People just don't work like that.

[hakfoo]

An alternative would be to provide broad grant opportunities to make it possible to have a lot of people exploring creative endeavours at modest scale.

Very few creative works require kazillion-dollar budget, and presumably many of the current ones are subject to technical improvements making them accessible (you could probably produce a film/series with "1995 broadcast TV" production quality with consumer equipment today).

Copyright enables the runaway success "I made enough selling records/prints of my painting/copies of my novel that none of my children for five generations have to work." But we only say that to a handful of people per year. A reasonable grant programme could say "I can spend a couple years touring the country playing small town ampitheatres, writing my dream novel, or trying to put together a movie with friends and still be able to eat at the end of the day", to thousands of creative types every year.

[fragmede]

Wikipedia, as well as untold unpaid hours that go into moderating all of the Stack Overflow family off sites, as well as Reddit and elsewhere, seems to say some people do.