I often see a sentiment expressed in social media comment sections (reading those is my first mistake) that we would all be better off without copyright, and that authors should be writing for the love of the craft rather than for money anyways. Although there may be problems with US copyright law, and, in general, works made by people who enjoy creating are better, I think removing copyright altogether would be an incredibly dangerous and damaging idea.
First of all, if a writer cannot generate income through writing, they will have to support themselves through some other full time job. So instead of spending forty to sixty hours per week writing, they would only have time to spend ten to twenty hours each week writing. Book releases would be slower, and there would be fewer total releases of books throughout the author’s entire lifetime. Therefore, at most, only fifty percent of your favorite author’s books would release. Additionally, I think authors would be less likely to create long-running series, since they would not be confidant that they could finish the series. So you might get the Hobbit, but probably not the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Webcomics are a good insight into what this might look like. Aside from a minority hosted on subscription services like Patreon, they are free to the public. Anyone can read them for free, and although some authors will have print versions for sale or some ad revenue, the vast majority of webcomics do not provide their authors with a livable income. The effects of this are clear: going by page count, they update at a much slower rate than traditional comics. A fast update rate for webcomics is about 3 strips or pages per week, meaning about 12-15 pages/month. One page per week is more common, and some webcomics will update on a more infrequent or irregular schedule. Compare this to paid comics, which regularly release 20 full pages/month (with some titles published bimonthly at 40 pages/month).
It is extremely rare for a webcomic to run for longer than twenty years (see Webcomics Long-Runners) and the longest webcomic I can find in terms of page count is Homestuck, weighing in at 8126 pages. Incidentally, this means that Homestuck beats out Spawn as the “longest running independent creator-owned comic”, at least going off of page count. (Spawn is also beaten out by dozens of manga series, since it’s a norm in Japan for mangaka to own their manga, but that’s neither here nor there).
Webcomics are a much younger medium, but even in the 1950s/1960s, you had dozens of comic series which easily beat out 99% of modern webcomics, both in page count and time. If these were to be limited in the same way webcomics are limited, we would all be much poorer for it.
I think it’s excellent that we have so much independent media available for free, but I also think having paid media allows authors to dedicate more time to honing their craft and creating works, which most of them would prefer to be doing over regular jobs anyways.