The common people have always found it inconvenient.
Pirated media routinely has a better user experience than otherwise. AO3 shows how powerfully people are drawn to fan-fiction (which still exists in a very legally grey area, despite the size of the community). I don't think a lot of people here support what happened to Aaron Swartz. "Information wants to be free".
If it's also now inconvenient to the rich, I think one can reasonably ask who exactly is benefiting?
> I think one can reasonably ask who exactly is benefiting?
My guess would be the authors, photographers, etc. Many of who are not the rich but middle class. I would think if they did not benefit, none of this would even be an issue as they could release their work and waive the copyright-isn't that what the Creative Commons license is for? If copyright were forced on the author and they had no way to share their work freely, if they choose to do so, then that would be a problem, imo.
Copyright only exists to protect the rich. The lowlys don’t make patents, they don’t make money from their songs they put on Spotify, and they have to pay to watch movies.
There is a pile of economics literature dedicated to what would happen if copyright didn’t exist (anarcho-something-capitalism, if I remember).
For starters, industrial nations all raised when copyright wasn’t a thing, including China in 1980-2020.
You build wonders when you don’t need to track who owns every imaginary concept, idea, song that you can sing, bytes that are so easily copied from one disk to another, and in hindsight, our descendants might think it was totally strange that we used so much state resources, jurors, policemen, heaps of lawyers, to give a task to the state related to preventing people from reusing each other’s imaginary concepts.
It protects the photographs that I've taken from the rich to be able to steal it and reproduce them much more cheaply than I can.
It protects the open source contributions that I've made from the rich, by being able to take them and hide them away in a product that doesn't need to abide by the license enforced by copyright.
