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The most important avenue of creative work is derivative works.

Copyrights essentially ban almost all forms of derivative works -- thereby depriving society of the most important form of creativity.

Also, old works are mostly lost to society -- whereas if they were easily distributed they could compete as free works with contemporary copyrighted works, thereby driving the competition and thus quality up.

Whether or not you get to control distribution of the story you wrote, in fact, whether it is your story at all -- is subject to debate.

A world with short copyright terms (or perhaps even no copyright terms at all) might make some authors less rich -- and it might make the world of content available to everyone much richer, too.




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