1. What is Intellectual Property ?

1. Goal of Copyright
2. Fair Use Clause
3. Towards Creative Commons License
1. History of Copyright
1. Trademarks

1. Goal of Copyright

The Real Issue Copyright Was Solving

Is copyright really about making sure that authors are not begging on the streets or is it about something else ?

Your point exposes something important: copyright was designed primarily to solve the profit-distribution problem ("How do creators earn money in a scarcity economy?"), not the attribution problem.

In a non-profit commons:

The profit problem disappears — no one is extracting value from your work
The attribution problem remains solvable — and arguably solvable better through transparent, traceable systems than through law

A creator in this world might actually prefer perpetual attribution with no legal gatekeeping over exclusive copyright that becomes invisible once the work enters the commons. Your name becomes the brand, not the legal restriction.

2. Fair Use Clause

It would be very difficult to determine what is fair and what is not. It is very vague for a reason, so you can never really be sure if it is going to work or not. The

Chilling effect,

if in doubt cut it out

Among essayist, academics, book writers, musicians,

Our culture is getting narrower and narrower

3. Towards Creative Commons License

Since we promote the open source mindset and reduction of Big Tech in any sector of life we would like an open source equivalent for artworks. Luckily that already exists for a long time and it is called the Creative Commons License. Just to quote from there official website they state that

Copyleft vs Creative Commons License

Creative Commons licenses offer a standardized, legally-sound way to grant permission in advance, so that creators can clearly communicate how their work may be used, without negotiating individual permissions every time. This enables access to knowledge by offering a “some rights reserved” option for content that would otherwise be closed off.

Creators choose CC licenses for many reasons:

Share their work widely while keeping credit
Encourage remixing, collaboration, and learning
Reach global audiences more easily (
In essence, CC licensing transforms your work from something people must ask permission to use into something people can freely share and build upon, dramatically expanding its potential audience.
)
Support open education, research, and culture
Build visibility, reputation, and impact

For the public, CC licenses:

Eliminate legal uncertainty around reuse
Make it easier to find openly usable content
Enable lawful remixing, adaptation, and redistribution
Support education, research, journalism, and creative work
Reduce permission friction across borders

Without copyright, someone could:

Sell your art commercially without paying you
Incorporate it into their own products
Modify it and claim it as theirs
License it to corporations without your consent

You're describing a situation where your work spreads freely, but that "freedom" cuts both ways—it's free from your control too.

1. History of Copyright

Wikipedia - The Venetian Patent Statute of March 19, 1474, established in the Republic of Venice the first statutory patent system in Europe, and may be deemed to be the earliest codified patent system in the world.^[1]^[2] The Statute is written in old Venetian.^[1] It provided that patents might be granted for "any new and ingenious device, not previously made", provided it was useful.^[3] By and large, these principles still remain the basic principles of patent law

Notable copyleft licenses include the GNU General Public License (GPL), originally written by Richard Stallman, which was the first software copyleft license to see extensive use; the Mozilla Public License; the Free Art License; and the Creative Commons ShareAlike license condition – with the last two intended for non-software works, such as documents and pictures, both academic or artistic in nature.^[3] Wikipedia is copyleft under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license

According to Creative Commons many people do not regard default copyright as helping them in gaining the exposure and widespread distribution they want. Creative Commons argue that their licences allow entrepreneurs and artists to employ innovative business models rather than all-out copyright to secure a return on their creative investment.

The copyright developed in the USA. They did not in 1886 sign the Berne convention only since 1989. However, since then the USA has turned the tables nad introduced much more exstensive protection for created work.

Software programs are literally works, by created the vast proprietary software industry where it extracts huge profits year after year.

Long history of

In copyright law it has worked over and over again

Eventually, people thought well give it a 100 years why not haha

1. Trademarks

These range from direct counterfeiting (fake products with copied logos) to brand dilution (using similar marks in ways that weaken the original brand's distinctiveness) to nominative use disputes (referring to a brand while discussing it or comparing products

Proponents contend that blockchain and decentralized ledgers could replace copyright by enabling direct, micropayment-based incentives or timestamped proofs of creation without monopoly grants, though empirical implementations like NFT marketplaces have largely reinforced rather than supplanted IP norms.^[105] AI's data-hungry training paradigms, requiring billions of copyrighted images, texts, and code snippets, have escalated these claims, with some scholars arguing that prohibiting such uses would stifle causal chains of innovation akin to how libraries historically permitted transformative reuse