&gt; Instead you&#x27;re left with a bunch of low-quality rip off sites that have nothing original of their own.<p>Isn&#x27;t that what we mostly have now?  Before the net was commercialized, it was mostly people sharing things they had created or discovered and talking about things that interested them - original content.  People would also post interesting scientific papers, books, etc. and discuss them.<p>Once people decided to monetize the net it filled with spam and duplicated content alongside payperclick ads.  People started cranking out &#x27;original content&#x27; that isn&#x27;t very original and doesn&#x27;t have much content either just to make a few bucks on the ads.  Those papers and books that used to be shared became imprisoned behind paywalls.  The volume increased a lot, but signal-to-noise ratio dropped significantly.<p>That&#x27;s not really an argument to eliminate copyright, but vigilant legions of lawyers were never been needed to produce content, suing people doesn&#x27;t increase its quality, and the net wouldn&#x27;t necessarily be a worse place if a lot of that was gone.  At least some places are opening up and starting to share educational content.