Note that the overwhelming majority of writers -- the mid-list majority -- make relatively little money from their writing, even under this "pay per toll" arrangement and have to subsidise their art by keeping their full-time jobs and writing for a few hours at night to keep the art flowing.
Is this viable for all authors? Perhaps not, but between the new self-publishing market, Patreon, and pay-by-what’s-read models like KU, there’s more options than the shitty ebook racket that the publishers have created.
An extremely relevant example: Veritasium. He creates well researched and scientific videos on YouTube (at a rate of maybe 3-4 a year), and has almost 5,000 patrons.
Again, can every author survive this way? No, but there are other options; please don’t get hung up on the familiar and call it the only way.
How does anyone get a following? You build it over time.
The argument that piracy doesn't hurt sales is reductive and unhelpful.
Of course it hurts sales in the sense that if you could somehow invent a perfect DRM that is unbreakable, more people would buy things. But it's also true that not all pirates are lost sales. Some people if stopped by DRM just won't consume the content at all.
But more importantly, since piracy can't be stopped, the debate is moot. We have to accept it as widespread and inevitable rather than debate what would happen if we could stop it.
We could at least consider a compromise where slightly older works, let's say 10+ years, or even 25+ years (same duration as patents) would be the ones included in the noncommercial infringement proposal.
I'm not sure what the right answer is for copyright, but I think going back to a 10,12, or even 20 year time frame for protection is a better starting point. Let's get the definition of "limited (time) period" fixed before subjecting another term to misuse.
This is a question of consumer culture versus cultural participation.
Allowing noncommercial infringent just perpetuates the big producer/small conser dichotomy. Begging for access proves the high worth of whatever the producers make.
Instead if copyright terms are reduced to 14 or 28 years, then if you want to watch something for free you just wait a bit, as long as there are provisions ensuring non-DRM access when terms expire.
But then after that time, you can remix, remake, fanfic, etc. to your heart's content. Thus the culture becomes free for everyone, not just the content.
Also keep in mind that legalizing noncommercial infringement also legalizes noncommercial derivative works. Remix all you want. Just don't make money on it.
I think it's important to point out derivative works specifically because that doesn't necessarily follow. However, making money is also part of the point after terms expire.
What gives someone a moral right to produce a derivative work of something I create and make money doing it? (I think people seem to forget that legalizing noncommercial infringement also legalizes noncommercial derivative works.)
I am an author in the UK. Revenue from digital book sales – i.e. what you would call "paying a toll for copying a file" and what I would call people buying books they want to read – went up 3% between 2018 and 2019. I'm not sure sales increasing is very good evidence for a business model having been "obsolete for years". Sure, there a lot of serious problems with the publishing industry, but if this is the "pain" I'm "prolonging" then I think I can endure it for a little bit longer.
Surely this is exactly why the Emergency Library has had such a rapturous reception! Because it's exactly what I described – an (apparently) legit, feel-good, well-publicised, reasonably simple way to get any book you want for free. That has not existed before. Otherwise why would anyone care?
As such, I think if every such work was instantly converted to a pay what you want model with a default asking price set, below which you're presented with a bunch of ads and an annoying email harvesting form or something, the majority of people would still pay the default price out of a combined desire to avoid annoying ads, avoid annoying forms, and to support the author.
Some would pay more if given the option to increase the amount paid in exchange for relatively trivial perks. Even I—defender of piracy extraordinaire—have voluntarily paid for luxury tiers for freemium content on numerous occasions.
Publishers getting richer is not a sign that the system is working as intended.
This seems to work fine in Japan, and it's not even technically legal. Comic and game publishers tolerate (often pornographic) infringing works created with their properties as long as they're non-commercial, because they raise awareness for the licensed version.
In the US, we can't even have that because license-holders are legally required to aggressively defend against all forms of infringement, however harmless, which leads us to situations like Disney suing a daycare for painting Mickey Mouse on a mural.
What is "noncommercial"? For instance, if I post the complete text of a someone else's book on Facebook or Reddit or in a blog at Wordpress.com, is that noncommercial because I am doing this on my personal account and get no money from doing so? Or is it commercial because those are commercial sites that monetize visits to their sites by showing ads?
nit: we created copyright to ensure the content creators receive compensation.
What you said is technically correct, but let's be clear that authors are creating something and they deserve to be compensated.
Virtually every country in the world except for the USA pays authors for library lending.
If the authors didn't retain copyright ownership, how would they enforce the terms of the license? The GPL would be unenforceable.
Of course the National Emergency Library is a good thing. We created copyright law to stop people from selling the work of others as their own, not to force people to pay a toll every time they read a book. We created free public libraries so that people could consume as much culture as they want for free. File sharing sites on the Internet serve exactly the same purpose to society as free public libraries. They allow people to consume as much culture as they want for free.
It's long overdue to bring copyright law into the 21st century with one small tweak: legalize noncommercial copyright infringement. Commercial copyright infringement should remain illegal. Nobody should have the right to profit from your work but you. But demanding a toll be paid every time a file is copied is an unrealistic fantasy that is widely ignored in the real world by public and private file sharing venues.
I understand why authors find arguments like mine upsetting. Their "pay a toll per copy" business model is obsolete. It's been obsolete for years. But instead of cheering on the Author's Guild's dinosaur argument and going down with the sinking ship right along with them, authors should be thinking hard about new business models that can adapt to the reality where consumer payments are—in the real world—optional.
I don't have an answer to the business models question. I have a few ideas I think are worth experimenting with, mostly involving freemium. All I know for sure is the artificial scarcity model is not the answer and the longer authors try to cling to it, the longer it will prolong their pain.