[StableAlkyne]

> If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things

How do you explain the creative works of writing, music, and art that existed in the millennia of human history between the Mesopotamians and the Enlightenment era?

[bjt]

They tended to be solo productions, or sponsored by aristocratic patrons. Anyone suggesting that we could create movies, TV, music, or games on the scale we do today, without copyright, does not seem worth taking seriously.

[joquarky]

I wonder which is more valuable: commercial movies, TV, music, and games or intellectual freedom?

[Terr_]

I support copyright reform, but that history has a large portion of "get lucky while sucking-up to the local rich dudes for a patron", which... isn't ideal either.

[jaccola]

Copying was prohibitively expensive.

[StableAlkyne]

The original statement was about there being little incentive to create a work you don't "own"

Difficulty in copying is irrelevant to owning it.

Moreover, this does not address music or spoken word. A pre-copyright musician can just listen to a piece and play it in the next town over. A poet or storyteller can just memorize a work and retell it.

[alok-g]

>> previous comment said "Copying was prohibitively expensive."

I think this statement does have important truth value in it! Copying books used to be done by hand (someone writing manually). Then printing press came, which lead to problems. And that is when copyright concept and law was created!

PS: IANAL and nor a historian. Just sharing my current understanding.