Please accept my apologies. I mean that the ostensible reason for copyright is to protect and thereby incentivise the production of artistic work. By extension,

Please accept my apologies. I mean that the ostensible reason for copyright is to protect and thereby incentivise the production of artistic work. By extension, without copyright, artists would not create anything. But artistic work existed before copyright was created in law in 1710. Ergo, protection of 7 years would seem more than generous when, for example, builders are not paid every time somebody enters their buildings, or lawyers are not paid every time somebody reads the contracts they wrote.