Re: He does have a point
It does not matter if J.K Rowling had it bad and now is a billionaire with copyright but would have just been sad without it or 'heaven forfend' without the definite potential upside of making *billions* from beleaguered parents everywhere she did not write Harry Potter.
If copyright did not exist, JK Rowling would probably not have written the Harry Potter series at all, and the studios certainly would not have made film adaptations of it. Now you and I may be fine with that, but as you allude to further down, we two are not "*all of us*" so we don't get to destroy the entire system solely for the benefit of our own prejudices.
Copyright is a *grant* intended to make things better for *all of us*, not just a tiny select group of authors and a mountain of rent seekers. It does not make the world a better place and hence it does not serve its function and hence should be withdrawn.
The only people who determine profit from copyright are the creators. The "rent seekers" as you describe them can only do with the material what the creators allow them to do.
[Snipping bit about Thalidomide as it presumes net negative of copyright, which has not been shown.]
I am Canadian..
We'll get to that in a bit...
[Snipping rambling replies which again presume that the system is a net negative which has YET to be shown].
Re: "both copyright an patents arose to make marketing and sales more fair."
If you think that is true and, worse, think that it is what sustains it, I can't help you. If you care, the writers of the U.S. Constitution were fairly clear with their intent and it has nothing to do with marketing, sales and fairness. [quotes US Constitution]
So, you're Canadian, posting on a UK site about an article about an International standard, and your choice of authority is the US Constitution? Why? Copyright was invented in Britain in the 15th/16th century (source), and patents were invented (but not patented, apparently) in Greece in 500BC (source) In both cases, they were created to ensure that those behind development of innovative ideas were protected from others wishing to profit from their work.
Now, I am a US citizen, and I hold our Constitution dear, but I do not believe it to be either infallible or the final authority on concepts which predate it and have international scope. Our founding fathers were wise in many ways, but they were also supremely skilled at attributing idealistic motives to decisions based primarily on base calculation and supporting said justifications with rather flowery language (cf. Declaration of Independence.)
Marketing and Sales are largely to overcome the fact that without marketing and sales people neither need nor want what is being offered.
Actually, the primary purpose of marketing is to determine what people want to begin with, so that production can focus on items that are saleable. Sales exists to those things which are produced for money, regardless of their market value.
For things, like boner pills, that have a genuine demand, marketing and sales demonstrably *increase* the cost and *decrease* the utility of the product.
Without marketing nobody would know that your boner pills would be in such demand, nor how much. This would lead to production under- or over-runs, which would drive up the cost of the product. Utility would not be affected on a per-product basis, but if the wrong products were to be produced, the energy put into them would not be available to improve the utility of desired products.
Without sales to ease the distribution of desirable products and find a way to offset at least partially if not in whole the cost of offloading undesirable products, the inefficiencies of marketing and production would lead to a glut of waste, which would increase the cost of all products.
You claim these basic definitions are demonstrably false. Fine. Demonstrate that fact, with a valid study which properly accounts for all confounding variables.