I’m curious, Wendy, how you would expect authors like me to make a living if you abolished copyright? I mean, I could certainly give up writing and go and do another job, but I don’t see how that would be a positive move. I wonder if people like you realise just how much time and effort goes into creating these works that you think should be free for everyone. You talk about slavery, but I don’t see how people getting paid for creating works is ‘slavery’. Quite the reverse.

Maybe you think you’re saving authors like me from some giant corporation, but you’re not. The copyright belongs to me, an individual, not a corporation. Take it away and there’s nothing to stop Disney, for instance, making a film from my work and not paying me a penny.

If my being able to support myself is putting a tollbooth on creativity, then I wonder what not being able to support myself would be.

Copyright interferes with economic development by putting a tollbooth on innovation and creativity. Licensing is a racket and speculative invoicing is but legal extortion.

I propose that we attack the notion of copyright as property, reminding people that it’s actually a monopoly privilege that was only ever intended to be temporary. Until we have that fact firmly established in the public consciousness, we’ll always be on the back foot trying to stop the maximalists making things worse for us by increasing the terms and scope of the copyright regime.

You mention abolitionism: slavery was recognised as a form of extremism only when the economy based on slavery in the south became less strong than the industrial economy of the northern countries. I’m not sure what example history offers us to do the same with the copyright monopolists.