This argument is mildly ahistoric. It's moreso that artists would revolt if it wasn't watered down a bit - the people as a whole didn't really pay much attentio

This argument is mildly ahistoric. It's moreso that artists would revolt if it wasn't watered down a bit - the people as a whole didn't really pay much attention to copyright until way after fair use was a thing. Fair use was legislated from the bench. The Supreme Court had a case[0] in which someone had paraphrased someone else's biography on George Washington in a "change it a little so the teacher doesn't catch on" kind of way. They needed a reason to explain why this particular rephrasing could be infringing copyright, without expanding the scope of copyright as to trample upon the First Amendment. So they invented the concept of separability of copyright, derivative works, and fair use in the same court opinion. They basically said "yes, it's infringement to only take part of a work, unless that would impede upon free speech, and here's the factors for where we draw the line between the two." For the record, this court opinion is so old that the biographers in question could have interviewed people who actually served alongside George Washington. Fair use was entirely a creature of case law until the 1976 Copyright Act codified it - and the four factors in that act are taken directly from that case. People wouldn't start caring about copyright law until the 80s and 90s, when technology started giving people the practical means to violate copyright law. At this point fair use was already well established. Furthermore, there are countries that do not have fair use[1] and they did not revolt against copyright earlier than we did. The inciting incident for people revolting is just the fact that copyright is in the way. I entirely agree with the idea that fair use undercuts the nomenclature of calling copyright a property right. Though I wonder what Stephan Kinsella thinks of things like UK right-of-way laws, which actually did[2] let you make a 'fair use' of private land you don't own. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folsom_v._Marsh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folsom_v._Marsh [1] Fair use (and it's sister concept of fair dealing) is actually very much an Anglosphere concept! Of course, the EU has exceptions to copyright that amount to the same thing, except they're entirely defined by legislation, since many of the EU's countries are civil law regimes (i.e. precedent is called jurisprudence and we don't treat it with the same regard). Japan is said to not have fair use in the actual sense of it actually being illegal to review a creative work without permission; I imagine this is moreso because nobody is actually willing to sue to censor a review. [2] The reason why this existed was because, among other things, there was no central database of right-of-way and legally-recognized paths could be centuries old. Recently they actually put a cut-off date on new right-of-way paths and created an actual database of them, which ends the fair-use-like murkiness they once had.