The words you see me printing right now are illegal. Not because they're obscene or seditious or anything like that. In fact, the children's story. This printing is an illegal act simply because of copyright laws and the concept of intellectual property. Simply put, I'm not allowed to print this because I don't own these words, or this specific order of these words. Someone else does. Or should I say something else? See, we think of copyright as a way to protect your creative works from copycats like myself here. To do this, we designate its creator as the owner of the work. And give them exclusive right to copy it, to sell it, to display it, perform it, and even give these rights to someone else as they see fit. This might seem to make sense, at least at first look. But the truth is that trading creative works as property, that is intellectual property, does nothing for authors. I'd argue that this process stifles creativity, exploits authors, and only really serves large corporations who don't really care about the works, creativity, innovation, nor the authors. Before copyright, songs were folk songs. Some stories were folk tales or myths. They didn't belong to anyone. So everyone enjoyed them and retold them if it was worth retelling. Some ancient cultures like India and Greece had rich, remarkable cultures of memorizing and reciting stories, songs, poetry, and doctrine that became ever more complex. Theater was huge and anyone could act out their favorite stories. Without anyone owning these words, the culture became rich and very creative. The free flow of information was the whole reason Christianity took off. Christians took it upon themselves to translate the Bible as much as they could and spread the message to everyone, even as the Catholic Church used censorship as part of a plot to wage war against peace-loving Eccidic Christian heretics. But modern copyright had its start in England, 1710, a couple centuries after the printing press became a thing, and the press had everything to do with it. See, before Europe had movable type, European books were manuscripts that is written by hand. So when you commissioned a book, when you bought a book, you were paying for the sheer amount of labor, more so than the contents of the book itself. So what happens when you slash the amount of work necessary to make a book, and anyone can recreate it on moss from a single copy? The information wants to be free, and cheap copies want to be cheap. Literature in the form of scriptures, stories, and self-studies spread like commodified wildfire, and was now accessible to even the poorest of people who could now reach literacy. This was real, honest to God competition, and it was great for the people as a whole. But then copyright became law, and not without a fight. Opponents of copyright at the time argued that this would cause publishers to raise their prices, and thereby restrict books and learning in general for their own gain. It's much the same as critics of copyright are saying now, and wouldn't you know what they were right as exactly what publishers did? Those arguing for copyright law then and now didn't focus on the publisher and certainly how the customers, instead they focused on the author and insisted that these laws protected them and gave full control to them. But this was merely an excuse, as spectacle, if you will. Instead this was worse for authors and only benefited the publishers as companies. See now that copying was restricted, publishers needed much fewer works and fewer authors to make their money. Yet authors relied entirely on their publishers, since now you have to sell your IP to the publishers. So now you have to stand out to make it as an author, and you'll be paid less for it. After all if you won't accept low pay, there's plenty of aspiring authors behind you trying to make their own breakthrough. And this way copyright was merely a tool for publishers to gain more power and control over the author. This is essentially why you see the same few lead actors and all the Hollywood blockbusters and every retail store in the states placed Ed Sheeran. Publishers create a culture of breakout stars that are locked in and ignore everyone else looking for a creative career. Even then the average publishing job earns more than the average acting job. And that's the creative environment we're in. There are so many pieces of media that are vastly influential to our culture, all of which must be had for a price. Who does this benefit? Not the consumer, not the creators, even, but only the companies. And these companies do nothing but restrict authors, restrict copying, restricts derivative works, and even restrict the consumer base. It's always in the deliberate artificial restrictions that capitalist money is made. After all, I think about it this way. Fruit companies make less money if we all have fruit trees in our backyard. They need us to rely on them. But I know you're wondering how in the world an author, for example, would make money if everyone was allowed to copy their books for free. Well, before copyright law, publishers still paid authors, just not for exclusive rights. Instead they paid for the right to publish books first. Believe it or not, this worked out great. The publisher was making the most money when they printed something new, so they paid as many writers as they could. Short story and poem magazines still today work in similar ways. Why couldn't the same concept apply to musicians, actors, and software developers? Sure, it's different now that we can infinitely copy things digitally, but I don't think that's going to make too much of a difference. If I told every reader out there that it's easy to download pirated books and to even put them on any commonly available e-reader, most people wouldn't do it. Most movie goers don't download movies, or even though it's entirely possible. People want to pay for the things that they enjoy, and those that don't would, if they could. But what happens without copyright? There are many examples that I can point to where creators have waived copyrights or consumers ignored them, and in every case, even for the publishers, hip hop was created by sampling songs without permission. Plenty of cover songs are better than the original. Open source software like Blender and Linux have become industry standards, and are way more consumer friendly. People downloading is done by fans who, on average, spend more money on legitimate copies than non-pirates, and copying creates more fans by making that thing more available, more accessible. That's how the Windows operating system got popular in the first place. There are some works that are virtually impossible to obtain legitimately. Anyway, that's going to be it for my little rant, and I hope that I've shown that a world without copyright is better. And without it, we would have access to a wealth. Of information, education, and entertainment to use, share, and even improve upon, and thereby actually encourages innovation. I might even be able to print my own copy of a book from the 50s, whose author couldn't possibly need protecting because she's dead, and to do it, I wouldn't have to beg and plead a large publishing corporation who doesn't care about me, or even the author or her estate, and the slightest. Be the change you want to see in the world.