This discussion probably doesn’t fit in HN comment boxes, but how would you a) motivate people to create without any form of compensation or b) create the artificial scarcity needed to force compensation for goods with essentially infinite supply?
This discussion probably doesn’t fit in HN comment boxes, but how would you a) motivate people to create without any form of compensation or b) create the artificial scarcity needed to force compensation for goods with essentially infinite supply?
Among the various options:
- Pay in advance, before the product exists.
- Pay for early access that other people don't have. (Yes, in the absence of copyright, people could take the early-access version and share it with others. People already do this today, and that doesn't stop folks from continuing to be patrons anyway.)
- Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money than they otherwise might have. Small price to pay for having a rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things and modifying things.
> Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money
For books and music maybe the difference is not quite that big, but for games and movies these 0.0..01% cost so much more to make that they would definitely not get made if they made significantly less money.
Nobody is stopping you from monetizing your own creative work via the methods you described without a publisher involved today. If those ways of getting paid would create a “rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things”, why doesn’t it already exist?
They do already exist, in multiple forms. The reason why they're not the norm, and copyright law still exists, is because the publishers with the most money won't make as much money that way.
How are the publishers forcing creators to engage with copyright law? Anyone who creates a work can decide to waive their rights under copyright law today, no need to wait for it to be abolished. Why do so few of them do it?
You don't need to motivate people to create. That's a spontaneous move of human beings. Humans were making music and were paintings on walls far before any obsession of legal owning started to haunt their mind.
Crowdfunding. Services like Patreon, Kickstarter, GitHub Sponsors.
People should be paid for the labor of creating, not for artificially scarce copies of the finished product.
Patronage has been known as an alternative to copyright since around 200 years ago:
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
The cited drawbacks are valid: creators are beholden to the elites who fund their work, and their influence in their creative process is felt to this day.
With modern technology, however, funding is diffused through large groups of people which minimizes this impact through diversification.
The ideal model is one where lots of people pitch in to fund a creator for the full cost of creating something, then the resulting work is released directly to the public domain.