The quality stuff also doesn't get written without copyright. Take Charles Dickens, who rallied against pirating of his works. Luckily he had the protection of

The quality stuff also doesn't get written without copyright. Take Charles Dickens, who rallied against pirating of his works. Luckily he had the protection of British copyright law, so he still had motivation to publish. Or take the Godfather, a movie that cost $6 million to make in 1972, which was a significant sum. Do you think the studios would have put up the money otherwise? Yes, our current system optimizes for Marvel comics movies and tabloids, but there's also a significant market for high brow stuff, and those people should be entitled to a fair living from the right to exclusively own their work. Otherwise, some of them simply won't be able to afford to that work and we'll lose it. Before the advent of copyright, we had wealthy patrons who supported the arts. Beethoven had many patrons who helped him along (I have no doubt that he loved doing it, but perhaps wouldn't have been able to without support). But is this system really better than what we have now? It just means that instead of the market dictating what gets made, a select group of wealthy people do. Doesn't seem like an ideal system either. Finally, there are things like Patreon, which are a more democratic way to support content creators. But at the end of the day, there's a free-loader problem where I can benefit from your donation, so this system hasn't really taken off. Very few people make a decent living off of patreon and even among those who do, how often can they pay expenses such as editors and the other support staff who help to make great art. At least in the old system, you can get some prestige and bragging rights from being the guy who supports Beethoven. However, there's not much prestige in donating $5/month to your favorite author on Patreon (even though I think it's the right thing to do).