In the internet world, no publishers are needed - or if they are needed, it will only be as manufacturers of a physical commodity (bound printed pages) that people like better than what they can roll off their own printers. And in fact, you find publishers living this way now -- I can still get recent printings of Mary Shelley's book _Frankenstein_, or Melville's _The Whale_, even though the copyrights on them are long gone. So somebody out there is making a profit manufacturing bound volumes of public-domain words. There's no reason the whole industry can't work that way. A long time before there was copyright law, as it is now understood, there was literature. When Virgil sat down to write about what the Gods had been up to lately, he didn't have to worry about who owned the characters; the characters were clearly in the public domain. (He did have to worry about what the priests would think, though - the practice of stoning heretics was well-established). But anyway, from the greeks forward, you get plays and works composed by many different authors, drawing upon characters and storylines and situations that had been dreamed up by earlier authors. In Italy, characters like Scaramouche and Pantaloon emerged, and the entire Commedia Del Arte coalesced around them - written by dozens of different people, none of whom had to ask the others for any kind of permission. In Germany, new stories were written about old characters like Tyll Eulenspeigel, each author developing something about the character that other authors had left out. And these people, acting in defiance of the principles that would later be enshrined as copyright law, created powerful, thoughtful literature. How did this happen? First, there were _Patrons_. I use the word not in the sense of a movie watcher or theatre watcher today, but in the sense of its coinage. At the time, a _Patron_ was someone who would underwrite the living expenses of an acting troupe or an author, in exchange for the right to have first access to any new work or new performance. Sculptors and Painters also had their _Patrons_, but in those cases the works were non-copyable and the _Patron_ simply wound up owning it. Today we would call such things "works for hire", or simply say that the _Patron_ had bought it and paid in advance. But in the case of the acting troupes or the authors, the work the _Patron_ paid for would eventually be enjoyed by everyone. You still find such people today, teaming up to support local ballet companies and theatre groups. Considering that the incremental cost of copying bits is very near zero, I suppose that several _Patrons_ could easily support an author working on his next book, and then simply hand it off to public domain when it was finished. With very few exceptions, the artist isn't going to get rich, but as someone who's seen publishing contracts, that doesn't really make a difference. With very few exceptions, the artists don't get rich now. The second reason such powerful literature was produced without the benefit of copyright, was because the characters themselves became Archetypes. Each was formed not by a single quirky hand, but by hundreds of authors scattered by thousands of miles and many years. Innovations in an established character were either greeted with delight or shouted down, depending on whether they appealed to an audience's perception of the character. And each author was free to develop new facets of the characters that hadn't been developed before. Thus we see Scaramouche, in hundreds of plays, as the jester, the prankster, the happy-go-lucky ne'er-do-well. But we also see him, a couple of times, as an old man, experiencing regrets, and as a sincere lover, striving to redeem himself, and so on... These outlier plays, which would never have been dreamed up by the original author (whoever that might be) of Scaramouche, develop facets of the character that are a vital part of the whole. Without copyrights, characters and stories are free to grow beyond the vision of the artists who created them. I don't think copyright is still necessary. It existed for the sole reason of making new ideas profitable so that someone could afford to publish them. But publishing new ideas is effectively free now, so it's become obsolete. And our literature is sadly missing some of the things that copyrights destroyed. Bear