Which is why there are so many competing interests (in this thread, and elsewhere) trying to say it should be 100% legal to steal from those companies. They all want to profit unfairly off the work of others.
Well it wouldn’t be stealing if the work was not covered by copyright. It also wouldn’t be “unfair” if the rules were changed. —- I’m asking that we imagine how else could our information economy look if we had some other legal foundation. Maybe, like markets, copyright is already close to an ideal, but perhaps there’s some economic innovation here yet undiscovered or unexplored?
But the concept and closer to the original (creators lifetime + x years or some such) seems still very valuable.
Copyright is still the bedrock of how many tech software business actually can make money.