A Copyright Writing Contest
The World Without Copyright – Short Story Series No. 1
One late afternoon,
a middle-aged woman stood before me, holding a single sheet of paper.
Her eyes were strangely resolute—quiet on the surface,
but her expression resembled someone who had waited years
for a moment to prove that she had once existed.
She handed me a poem.
The sentence in it was familiar.
It was one I had just flagged for deletion from the archive.
I checked again.
The very lines she brought had already appeared on dozens of platforms—
as advertising slogans, subtitles in meditation apps,
openers for famous speeches.
You could find them anywhere,
yet no one knew where they began.
She spoke:
“I wrote it when I was twelve.
I remember it all—the sound of the wind, the sunlight falling through the window.”
Her name was Lara.
It wasn’t her real name—
in this world, it’s a name given to those who had lost theirs.
Lara wasn’t a single person,
but a face shared by many who live unnamed, unseen.
In official records, Lara does not exist.
In December 1996, at the Geneva Diplomatic Conference,
the WIPO Copyright Treaty was amended under a new declaration:
“Creation belongs to everyone.”
From that day forward,
humanity officially abolished copyright.
No one could claim a sentence as their own.
In this world, no one asked who made what.
Names became taboo—luxuries we could no longer afford.
I work at the Bureau of Memory Sentence Preservation.
My job is to categorize unattributed sentences
and register them as public-use content for open replication.
I see hundreds of lines a day.
And some, inexplicably, touch something buried deep inside me.
But by regulation, I’m not allowed to feel anything.
Then, Lara appeared and unraveled the rules of my day.
That night,
she led me to a place she called “The Tower of Librarians.”
It stood in the heart of the city, yet was absent from every map.
It held the final archive of named creators—
those who once existed, before copyright was erased.
I had a faint childhood memory of borrowing books there.
Back then, the building had a different name.
Inside, the tower had long surrendered to the dark.
Each step we took made the creaky wood beneath us groan—
as if testing our right to enter.
We felt our way down the spiraling rail toward the deep stacks.
She pointed to a metal drawer.
With a cold screech, it opened,
revealing a faded notebook—meant for children.
I brushed the dust off with my fingertips and opened it slowly.
Crooked handwriting stretched across the lines.
Each sentence stirred a forgotten sense of self.
Nights spent beneath a blanket, dreaming entire worlds.
The clumsy discipline of sharpening a pencil after every break.
A memory of naming a mumbling, mirror-bound creature: “Bliver.”
“Bliver only speaks from inside the mirror,” she once said.
“He only talks to me.”
And there it was—on the very first line:
“I live in this mirror.
No one’s here to let me out, so I’ll speak only to you.”
Someone beside me had once whispered:
“That’s brilliant. No one else could’ve written that.”
At the time, I had no idea
how long that one sentence would keep glowing inside me.
My throat felt dry,
and when I spoke, my voice cracked—
like someone who hadn’t spoken in years.
“This… I wrote this.”
In that moment,
a drumbeat echoed from the back of my heart.
It wasn’t something stolen from me—
it was a part of myself I had forgotten, finally returning home.
Memory poured in like light.
My heart beat fast and cold.
Terror was ice.
Hope arrived like the beat of a distant drum.
Around midnight,
I snuck into the digital archive known as Oblivion.
It is the core of this copyrightless world.
All content is disassembled here—
analyzed, reduced,
and redistributed anonymously.
I stood before the biometric scanner.
The module on my wrist scrambled the signal.
The metal doors opened, revealing a corridor of silence.
The walls were transparent glass.
Behind them, enormous mechanical arms
endlessly cut and recombined sentences.
Nameless fragments floated past like drifting blocks of text.
At the heart of the system, I sat and began to type.
On one content record, I entered:
“Novel: The Walker of Dawn. Author: Ian.”
My hand froze.
To write a name was to expose myself to the world.
To risk being erased again.
But I didn’t want to disappear anymore.
The screen trembled.
The system flashed red, blinking warnings in every direction:
“Protocol Violation. Input Error. Warning. Alert...”
Then, slowly,
a blue light engulfed the screen.
The system didn’t shut down.
I typed one more line:
“Poem: Beyond the Dread of Night. Author: Lara.”
And in that moment,
the world shifted—ever so slightly.
Laras everywhere realized:
they could reclaim their sentences.
They could be authors too.
At dawn,
beneath that content file on the Oblivion platform,
a single line blinked softly—like a star just before sunrise:
“Author: Ian.”
Some dismissed it as spam.
Some ignored it altogether.
But one person—Lara—never looked away.
She spoke my name quietly:
“Ian.”
Then, after a long gaze,
she smiled.
Her eyes held more memory than words could ever carry.
Memory begins in late afternoon, drifts through the darkness of midnight, and returns as light—at dawn.
And like the coming day,
my forgotten sentence began to rise again.
Perhaps we once enjoyed too much freedom,
and in doing so, lost too much along the way.
A sentence that isn’t remembered disappears.
But the moment someone speaks its name—
it returns.
To have my sentence remembered
is to know that I truly existed.
Author’s Note
This story is based on a fictional premise: that in 1996, during the WIPO Copyright Treaty,
humanity abolished copyright under the declaration that “Creation belongs to everyone.”
The story unfolds over the course of one day: from late afternoon to night, midnight, and dawn. This temporal arc mirrors a journey through forgotten memory, grief, and eventual reclamation. It is a poetic metaphor for the return from darkness to light.
The title—“Beyond the Dread of Night, the Walker of Dawn”— fuses Lara’s poem with Ian’s novel into one continuous sentence. It embodies the moment when authorship, long forbidden, is spoken again.
This story proposes that copyright is more than a legal structure— it is memory.
It is the proof of someone’s existence, preserved in the name we dare to write down.
Let us remember: A sentence forgotten disappears.
But once it is named—it begins to live again.
* The Korean Version: https://brunch.co.kr/@jahakimeash/48