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Really? Name the centuries-old historical counterpart to movies on DVD, music on CD, videogames, software suites, drug companies, ... I could go on. Sure, people used to go to live plays and concerts. Extremely rich patrons used to personally fund the top 0.1% of scientists and musicians. It was not the same.
It was indeed not the same, but it was still most certainly professional entertainment. I was going to go on to say that you meant they wouldn't exist in the form they do now, but I thought that would be putting words in your mouth.
Regardless, it is incorrect to say that professional entertainment wouldn't exist without ip laws. It would be different, but not necessarily worse. Take fan fiction - without ip laws they wouldn't exist. Instead we might have many shared universes akin to the star wars extended universe or the cthulhu mythos. They might even attain some oral history type qualities, with stories growing and changing for the audience and context. They wouldn't exist in the sense of fan fiction, but those authors were writing because they were inspired to, not for money, so I think they'd still be writing.
Anyway that's just one potential alternative to a world without ip laws, I don't think it's what would happen necessarily. Humans need stories, almost as much as we need air and water. So until we can get ai to write perfect stories, we will need storytellers of some sort.
Good points. I don't think we really disagree, then. I happen to really enjoy entertainment that takes hundreds of people to produce (AAA movies and games), and there just wouldn't really be any way for those to exist without IP. But music and fiction aren't like that, and it would indeed be interesting if there were no limits on fanfic. (Would people still gravitate to the original author - or their descendants - to add the "canonical" imprimatur to particular stories, a la Cursed Child? Or would the "oral history" aspect win out? I wonder.)
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