If you have to ask you have no idea how important copyright law is.
Do you really want to live in a world where someone, anyone, can take something you've done and give it away to other people without your permission, or commercialize it and leave you with zero recourse?
Most people think copyright protection is for important, significant creative works like a book or a song, but it's equally important for less visible things. For example: A single method in your code that someone else appropriates.
If you had to register copyright for every line of code you wrote, you'd never get anything done.
I'm not talking about getting rid of copyright. Of course I want copyright protection for my work, and of course I want other people to enjoy that protection as well.
I don't see any reason, however, that I need that protection for every single thing that I create. What purpose does _automatic_ copyright serve?
I stick a copyright notice in every software project already, but when I don't want the copyright I also have to explicitly disavow it. Why shouldn't the model be flipped to claiming copyright with a simple attached notice, instead of disavowing it?
You stick a copyright notice on things so people know who to contact if they need to license it. That clarifies ownership, it does not establish it.
> I don't see any reason, however, that I need that protection for every single thing that I create.
This is the social network problem. When the network starts to co-opt copyrights, demanding they're able to license the work you submit to them for any purpose, for any reason, without compensation, people understand that's a form of property theft and fight back.
The problem with "intellectual property" is it comes in forms both inconsequential and profound, and in the middle is a very, very grey area. There's been flippant comments on Reddit that have turned into screenplays. There's been stuff posted on Instagram and Pinterest that turned into a line of merchandise. These things have a way of growing in importance when you're not even looking.
Like code, where a quick throw-away hack might actually turn out to be a big breakthrough and gain popularity. This is why we have license like GPL, MIT, and CC that describe how your work can be used.
You're talking about a pre 1970 world where copyrights had to be registered, and honestly, that sucks. Can you imagine having to get each and every revision of your code officially copyrighted? What about someone stealing your idea you write about on Medium, or ripping your content wholesale and publishing a book. It's not stealing if it's not copyrighted, but thankfully it is. Automatically.
Which...is something else that can and probably should change. What purpose does this serve?