Somebody from an alternate universe without our type of draconian copyright laws would think our world is utterly dystopian.
A world where all of our culture is owned by mega corporations and traded as a commodity.
This is done under the pretense of protecting authors, but the ones who are really protected are the oligarchs who have spent millions of dollars making the copyright system as oppressive as possible. Especially to the actual creators who work for them. Because the creators who make characters for the mega corporations do not own their own characters.
The person from this other universe might ask how people are able to iterate and retell stories. Because in their world, it's normal for somebody to create a character, and for others to create new stories with that character. Each one putting their own spin on it as it evolves over time.
One person makes a character, and another makes a story with that character with a different spin on it. And another makes a spin on that person's interpretation of the character. And so on and so forth.
And you would explain to this person from the other universe how things used to be like that. 500 years ago, characters couldn't be copyrighted. Stories were passed down from generation to generation. Different authors would retell stories their own way. Each iterating on the previous.
And to an extent, we can still do that today. The internet is filled with fanart and fanfiction. As long as we don't make profit from it, most of the corporations will ignore it. We can make works using popcultural icons, we just can't make any money off of what we create.
But even this really only exists as long as the mega corporations allow it. If they chose to bring the hammer down on fanfiction websites, there's really not much that could be done. The way the laws are written now, courts would probably deem a lot of fan works as not falling under fair use.
And companies could make reasonable claims that fanfiction hurts their bottom line. Why would somebody buy a poorly written Star Wars novel when there's tons of Star Wars fanfiction they can get for free?
If Disney or Warner or Paramount decided one day to use their billions of dollars to target fanfiction websites, those communities would probably find themselves demolished overnight.
This person from that other universe would be able to see things more clearly than we do. They would see what we ignore because this is how things have been as long as we've been alive.
They would see that our culture is owned.
They would see that this isn't normal.
They would see that humanity is meant to tell stories and to be able to retell the stories they've learned. And that claiming the rights to a story, to a character from a story, to our very culture, is a perversion of what humanity was meant to be.
