Novels would 100% exist, I find it very odd that you suggest otherwise. People have been writing novels and making little to no money off them for absolutely centuries.
And how many pre-20th century novels and novelists can you name without Google to help you?
The novel, as an element of
shared culture, dies without intellectual property protection, because nobody has a motive to promote the thing. My promotional spend would go to other people's sales. Without promotion, no work becomes prominent enough to become shared among many readers. The engine that takes the ideas of a few writers and turns them into widely read works runs on money.
Heck, without IP protection, you won't even know who wrote it - because as soon as it is out, there's no reason to not steal it an attribute it to other creators.
In fact I would suggest the vast majority of novels - particularly good ones! - are written with surprisingly little expectation of actual monetary recompense. Again, this has been true for centuries.
Well, there's expectation, and there's hope. In the modern world, what new author doesn't dream of making it big?
But, without profit incentive, what you'd get is probably more like what self-publishing looks like now.
Giant budget movie blockbusters wouldn't exist, sure, but smaller films absolutely would
Why would they? When they'd be
instantly stolen, and attributed to other creators?
Also the whole "everyone would pirate it" thing has long been proven not to be true. Games release without DRM and make plenty of money, even though people could go pirate them. People are willing to pay for art they like.
You don't understand - the issue isn't the actions of individual consumers. Piracy by individuals is small potatoes.
The issue would be the actions of other corporations, who would no longer be prevented from reselling each other's content. Sony makes a picture? The next day it is on sale at Amazon and available from Netflix, with
no payment going to Sony, because they just aren't required to do so. It becomes largely impossible for Sony to make back what it invested in the picture, so it stops making them.
What we'd actually see, I'd suggest, is something more like Patreon/patron systems, where art is created by people supported by patrons large and small.
But, you realize that with no IP protections, it becomes pretty much impossible for you to tell if you are actually patron to the original creator? Mirroring content that is delivered electronically can be automated. You point a botnet at the original creator, and mirror their delivered content in realtime, and you have seventeen sources with the same content that all look like and claim to be the original. Good luck!