Well, there is nothing to distribute if the author is not incentivized to write... which you seemed to skip past.

Indeed, perhaps I should have said

There needs to be a way to support the creation of art.

Great, that way is called copyright. The author has the right to control who has the rights to distribute their work, and can require compensation in exchange for that right; what economists refer to as "selling".

The entire thesis of my commrnt is copyright is not that.

It awards a few creators outsize rewards, but suppress creation of many more.

It does not petform the job that it is supposed to do.

People have been paid artists before copyright even existed, what some might call patronage.

And?

Therefore copyright is not necessary.

That's a big leap

>There needs to be a way to support the creation of art.

Yeah, it's called "copyright."

If money is the only incentive, then it's not a product of artistic work.

Also current copyright laws only exists to fulfill the constitutional mandate to promote the progress of science and useful arts. There are a lot of alternative ways to fulfill that mandate that don't include a lot of the baggage we have presently in copyright law which is now slowing down progress.

>If money is the only incentive, then it's not a product of artistic work.

This is just bullshit and no one said it's the only incentive.

> There are a lot of alternative ways to fulfill that mandate that don't include a lot of the baggage we have presently in copyright law which is now slowing down progress.

such as??