[Jaime_Astorga]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

But while you can have dozens of amateur writers cranking out fanfics of various quality in their bedrooms and release it for free, it's still going to cost millions of dollars and require scores of professionals to produce the TV series that is the object of said fan's affection.

Not necessarily. Fan and individual videos have been produced. For a live action example, check out the Harry Potter and the Dark Lord Waldemart series. The videos are a little short, but they are sound in principle. For animation, flash cartoons like the Neurotically Yours series (warning: NSFW) and various machinima videos are worth a look. Computer created animation is actually gonna have the biggest growth in ease of production in the future, since computer technology is always improving and making it so in some years high end desktop computers will be good enough to produce respectable CGI animation. While the video game engines the machinimas depends on would probably slow down without copyright to act as an incentive for companies, I think the FOSS community could pick up the slack of making 3D rendering engines for making videos. A FOSS-like distributed model of production could also be adopted for creating such 3D content, where several people who have never met all come together in order to make a great thing. And speaking of FOSS:

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Even the Free Software Foundation (which holds the most extremist views on the subject) acknowledge that putting works directly into the public domain opens the possibility that a given work may get re-absorbed into proprietary software -- i.e. that putting their code directly into public domain strips the code of all protection. Their idea of "Copyleft" explicitly relies on the powers of copyright to protect the open nature that they want to see for software. In their own words: "Copyleft is a way of using of the copyright on the program. It doesn't mean abandoning the copyright; in fact, doing so would make copyleft impossible."

Free software is defined as such by four "freedoms;" the freedom to run the program for whatever you want, the freedom to study the program, the freedom to redistribute the program, and the freedom to change the program (numerated 0, 1, 2, and 3, respectively). The GPL enables those freedoms. Freedoms 1 and 3 depend on availability of the source, so the GPL requires the source code be released as well.

Please note that freedoms 0 and 2 only need to be protected because copyright currently exists. That leaves us with freedoms 1 and 3 to consider. Since with a public source code the company couldn't restrict those freedoms, either, they would have to keep their code hidden as a trade secret, and have no recourse if it leaks out. So overall, some gains and some losses for software freedom from copyright abolition, since without copyright the GPL would lose the ability to force people using software copyrighted by it to release the source code of their modifications.