For the record, the world can and did thrive before vaccines were invented, so you don't have to imagine it. Sure there was more sickness and death, but we have plenty of that now, and I doubt you'd consider today's world "not thriving."
But ok, then. Imagine that world without copyrights for me. In detail. And answer these questions:
1. You're an author, who's written a wildly successful book in your free time. How do you get paid to become a full-time author? Remember, no copyright means Amazon, B&N, and every other place is making tons of money by printing up their own copies and sells them without giving you any royalties.
2. You've developed some open source software, and would like to use the GPL to keep it that way. Amazon just forked it, and is making tons of money off of it, but is keeping their fork closed. How do you get them to distribute their changes in accordance with the GPL?
3. You're an inventor, and you've spend years and all your savings working on R&D for a brilliant idea and you finally got it working. You don't have much manufacturing muscle, but you managed to get a small batch onto the market. BigCo saw one of your demos, bought one, reverse engineered it, and with their vast resources is undercutting you on price. They're making tons of money, and paying you no royalties. How do you stay in business? Should you have even bothered?
Regarding your other points:
1. That is a bad argument. Imagine that some people called collectors get to collect royalties from you every time you post a HN comment. Such collectors are paid for moderating comments. Some such collectors are wildly successful. Imagine that "commentright" law protects such people. If commentright law were to go away, how do such people get paid? (It's a fake problem, and copyright law is similarly no different.) In essence, if you love to write, go write, but don't expect artificial laws to save you.
2. To my knowledge, Amazon is not known to violate a preexisting GPL license. Amazon forks only things that were open in the past, but are now no longer open. In doing so, Amazon ensures the fork stays open. There is no license violation. If Amazon is making tons of money, it's probably because the software wasn't AGPL licensed in the first place.
3. This has already happened twice to me, and frankly, I am not worried. I can still carve out my limited focused niche.
I try to look at the bigger picture which is the picture of AGI, of the future of humanity, not of artificial protections or even of individual success. Your beliefs are shaped by the culture you were exposed to as an adolescent. If you had grown up in Tibet, or if you had tried LSD a few times in your life, or were exposed to say Buddhism, your beliefs about individual greed would be very different.
