"Copyright was never about rights holders making money."

Here's a quote from the Statute of Anne:

"Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing... Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors... to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families:"

Also copyright doesn't protect ideas.

Also the "high quality ideas (and shit)" are not free. High quality work is expensive, but may be free to you because they are subsidised. A model not without its problems.

Well, one problem with this is that most authors don't hold the rights to their works and it's not possible to get their permission. I think if all I had to do to publish a homemade video to Weird Al song was get Al's permission, it would be pretty sensible. But he signed away his right to a corp who will fight to the death to extend and exclusively control the work. The authors would have a much better sense of whether a derivative work robs them of income or is reasonable.

Also, high quality work is expensive. And in the old days, it probably took decades to recoup costs when books were prohibitively expensive. But when a film these days make 100MM in its premiere, I think we need to seriously shorten copyright terms.

Thanks for that. I am assuming too much in favor of the public interest at the expense of authors. However, today's debate does acknowledge that there was and is a public interest in dissemination, which helps to support copyright law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

Linguistic amendments were also included; the line in the preamble emphasising that authors possessed books as they would any other piece of property was dropped, and the bill moved from something designed "for Securing the Property of Copies of Books to the rightful Owners thereof" to a bill "for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies".[39] Another amendment allowed anyone to own and trade in copies of books, undermining the Stationers.[39] Other changes were made when the bill went to the House of Lords, and it was finally returned to the Commons on 5 April. The aims of the resulting statute are debated; Ronan Deazley suggests that the intent was to balance the rights of the author, publisher and public in such a way as to ensure the maximum dissemination of works,[40] while other academics argue that the bill was intended to protect the Company's monopoly or, conversely, to weaken it. Oren Bracha, writing in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, says that when considering which of these options are correct, "the most probable answer [is] all of them".[41] Whatever the motivations, the bill was passed on 5 April 1710, and is commonly known simply as the Statute of Anne due its passage during the reign of Queen Anne.[42]

My apologies for having a very US-centric view-- it's all I know. The US Constitution says: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

I have a problem with how the law has been twisted by the copyright industry to render "limited Times" to mean a virtual eternity. Fix that and I have no beef with copyright. The public domain is important and needs to be nourished. The "Founders' copyright", with respect to duration, has been shown by multiple studies to be more than sufficient to create economic incentive while, at the same time, not starving the public domain.

Not sure I agree with you, copyright laws were created with a profit motive - to protect author's work from being stolen or inappropriately used.

Without copyrights, what incentive does an author have to produce new work? Someone will take it and redistribute it, take credit for it, or otherwise profit from it.

What incentive does a blog author have to produce excellent work? Ego, satisfaction, reputation, altruism ... Many others, and we have an incredibly diverse, informative and entertaining collection of work today, much of it distributed for free. The authors get whatever the authors get.

I think the web is evidence that copyright monopoly is no longer necessary to promote publication. People figure out how to get paid in some way, or they get some other benefit.

I've learned at least as much reading blog posts and other web content as I have from my college texts.

Copyright is not the only way, and I don't think it's even necessary anymore. People write and converse because they want to write and converse. Some of those want to make money from it, and they'll figure out a way, either by selling their work directly or by using their work for reputation to gain entry to employment and other activity.

I don't think the founders sat around thinking up ways for people to be paid. The money earned by copyright wasn't the point, that was just the necessary incentive at that time to achieve the goal: that people wrote for publication, so that people could read.

There are lots of great works produced today which simply would not be produced without copyright. For example, Pixar movies.

A world with Pixar movies is better than a world without them.

Playings devil's advocate: There are many ways to incentivise even complex, large scale investment absent copyright. From project finance to Kickstarter, it is well beyond self-evident. On the flip-side, the cost of supressing academic and sciendific knowledge through academic publishers dwarfs whatever entertainment value might come from their library (~12 films)[1]. I think your comments on this are too simplistic.

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[1] Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Ratatouille; WALL-E; Brave; A Bug's Life; Cars, Cars 2

And there are probably other great works that might be produced, were it not for copyright.

No model is the only possible world, and certainly not the best possible world. Different models give you different things.

People figure out how to make a living in whatever system is available.