> Open source business models couldn't work without copyright, and there is a minor rebellion underway in OSS against highly permissive licenses due to rampant

> Open source business models couldn't work without copyright, and there is a minor rebellion underway in OSS against highly permissive licenses due to rampant corporate exploitation (e.g. "SaaSification" and rebranding and commercialization that robs the authors of even credit). Here is a counter example. Up until a few decades ago, standards organisations like the ISO carefully guarded their standards with copyright law, and funded themselves off the proceeds of selling them. I'm sure they shared you're "standard organisations could not exist with the proceeds" outlook, right up until the IETF came along with there completely free RFC's, and won the networking standards war. One of the reasons ISO lost is it turns out a standard that can be read by everyone is implemented a lot more, and that in turn makes it worth more, which amazingly is actually recognised so people fund the development of more of those standards even though they know their hard work will be given away for free. The W3 works exactly that way, yet is funded by hard nosed corporates. In some cases, the value of letting every one use the thing you spent millions on developing simply outweighs the cost of charging for it. Today's classic example is AV1, the video Codec. It's competitor, MPEG was does rely on copyright to fund it's development. The initially hidden cost of doing it that way, was if you can force everyone to pay a little bit, why not a little bit more, and perhaps a fair bit more on top of that. It took 20 years or something, but is exactly how it has panned out. And surprise, surprise, a few hard headed capitalist companies (like Microsoft / Facebook and Google) got the shits with this and funded the development of AV1, and gave it away for free. Yes, the Patreon distribution model could a counter example. But understand that is an attribute of that particular method of distribution. If we removed copyright we may well lose that Patreon, it's unlikely we would lose what is being distributed by it. Music made it's way around the world long before copyright came along, the fashion design industry does perfectly well without copyright to this day. In fact music is the most glaring example. Music distribution was heavily dependent on copyright for most of my life. Now, that is gone. Almost any song can be downloaded legally for free, and if not trivially pirated for free. The methods of distribution dependent on copyright right has indeed succommed to the petty avarice of humanity as you put it, the avarice being piracy in this case. But notice while that method of distribution has died, music lives on, and methods of distribution that are so cheap piracy isn't worth it risen to replace the old methods. That's not to say copyright doesn't have it's virtues, but it very doubtful the world would stop if it died tomorrow.