Sincerely, thank you for explaining this perspective. You make a lot of really good points!

You're right that it's a mess out there and stuff will always get stolen. And no, I never expect to coast on anything for a lifetime, but I still think if we were to abolish copyright as it stands, there should still be something enforceable that benefits creators of works.

One who publishes a book or a game should accept piracy as a reality, but having zero recourse for say, anybody uploading your exact work a dozen times on Steam under their own names would be pretty terrible wouldn't it?

If it were abolished out in the open, yeah, we'd basically need to not have to earn money anymore. Otherwise, there would simply be no point to anybody making anything.

We're already seeing such a threat from un-checked ML scraping everything in existence.

Thank you so much for the valuable discourse. I hope you have an awesome day :).

(P.S: I think you meant "pursue" rather than "peruse")