Putting up more barriers to protection would do nothing to protect authors or encourage their creativity. Most works protected by copyright have no value and ar

Putting up more barriers to protection would do nothing to protect authors or encourage their creativity. Most works protected by copyright have no value and aren't even worth registering. Of those that are registered, most aren't worth renewing. But if those works weren't protected, non-authors could exploit high-quality, unrecognized works instead of expending resources to create something new. An obvious example might be the brilliant novel that goes ignored by critics. If it were to easily lose copyright protection, then a producer could adapt it into a movie and pay the author nothing. But there are thousands of great novels (and many more terrible ones) for every successful one, so you need to protect all of them, and do so cheaply, in order to make sure the successful one is protected.