Copyright prevents creative impersonation. If I take your creative work and try to pass it off as my own--whether for profit, reputation, etc.--copyright gives you a legal tool to stop me.<p>Without it, anyone could get away with pretending to have done anyone else&#x27;s creative work.<p>To illustrate with a recent example, Andy Weir wrote &quot;The Martian,&quot; and distributed it online for free, originally. Without copyright, Crown books could have copied the text, put a different author name on it, sold thousands of copies and kept every dime. Same with the movie--they could have just copied the story and made a movie without paying Andy anything.