Copying Is Not Stealing

Nintendo erased nine years of unpaid work with a single letter. Nobody had ever been charged a cent for it.

Fashion houses, stand-up comics, and professional kitchens have worked for decades with almost no copyright protection. None of those fields collapsed. Something else keeps those creators paid — and it's the same thing that will keep paying you.

This book is an audit, not a manifesto. Across ten chapters, Thomas Ortega tests the case against the record: what people built in the centuries before copyright existed, what the system quietly destroys now, and what's left of the entire argument once AI drops the cost of making a film to two thousand dollars.

Inside:

Why Warner collected two million dollars a year on four bars of "Happy Birthday" it turned out never to have owned
The finished games nobody is legally allowed to play — including roughly 87% of American titles released before 2010

What a studio did to a Star Trek fan film that had never sold a ticket, and the rules it still enforces on every fan production today

Where the money already comes from when copying is free: reputation, authenticity, physical goods, live events, and the people who pay because they want your next thing to exist
The one study that cuts hardest against this book's own thesis, laid out in full instead of buried in a footnote
Why the first short term of copyright earned its keep — and the ninety years bolted on afterward never did
You can read every chapter and still conclude that some protection is worth having. You'll just get there with better reasons than you started with.

Includes free companion worksheets to audit where your own work actually earns its keep.

Copying gets cheaper every year, and no legal theory has ever reversed a cost curve. Scroll up and start building what it can't touch.