One of the supposed justifications for the intellectual monopoly called copyright is that it drives creativity and culture. In the last few weeks alone we have had multiple demonstrations of why the opposite is true: copyright destroys culture, and not by accident, but wilfully. For example, the MTVNews.com site, along with its sister site CMT.com, …
At the same time, everyone can profit from your work and you can’t do anything about it. And big businesses, having more capital than you or I, would abuse that to their benefit like they do the current copyright system. But at least the current system gives small copyright owners some semblance of protection and an avenue to contest abuse. Not having copyright would give a creator no avenue to stop someone else abusing their hard work.