I didn’t read that wall of text

You should, it's a good read. But I now see where you're coming from, I spend some time writing an argument and you didn't value that time. A patent or a copyrighted product doesn't mean anything to you because you don't value the time behind it.

If you're still up for a read, I wrote the following before realizing you'd probably skip it.

I'm not going to correct you on your assumption of my intention because you are making a strawman argument here. But I'll put my personal opinion at the end none the less. I'm going to try to correct your understanding of copyright and patent law. These laws are in place to protect wealthy entities to steal ideas or products from the poor because they have the actual funds to put them to use.

You're metaphorically suggesting stopping air polution by burning all the oil fields down. You have cause and effect mixed up. Copyright and patent laws are what keeps the wealth gap from expanding further.

But as I see your point. Every idea or product should be open to everybody. I should be able to put some other artists songs on a CD and sell them as my own. Or print out a couple pictures I found on google and sell them as artwork at a street corner or put them on t-shirts when times get rough. My competitor should also know how I managed to increase part yield without affecting quality to stay competetive in hope that they won't use their higher production capabilities to outbid me at every corner essentialy failing my business and bringing them one step closer to monopoly. That will surely close the gap in wealth.

"If everything is free to use by everyone, what's my motivation to create something new? I can just wait for the next guy to come up with it and then take it for myself." said everybody, everywhere, all at once.

The wealth gap is a simple problem but our greasy little fingers made it complex. Partially mathematical partialy mental. Money flows to money 1% of $100 is $1 and 1% of a $10,000,000 its $10,000. Hard to loose if you get more bang for your buck. And we are still animals that are hoarders at heart. We just switched berries and meat for dollars and dimes. We take more than we need - sometimes because we expect hard times coming - sometimes just to show that we can. I don't think the wealthy should get richer and the poor poorer. But poor people should be able to get rich by profiting of their own creativity. Copyright and patents allow that. We had millennia to solve this issue and nobody came up with something and lived to tell. If life wasn't actively working against entropy we'd be a warm sphere of chemicals orbiting the sun. Wealth distribution is in a way entropy and life is actively working against it too, if you want to get philosophical. Its like salt- and freshwater divided by a membrane you get pressure between them, you just need to make sure the membrane is possible to cross.

It's just not that easy.