That's an interesting perspective. What system would you propose to allow people to be "paid to do" this sort of creative work in a fair manner? Particularly since it's not always clear what the value of that work is until you see the finished product. (E.g. It's possible for two movies with identical multi-million dollar budgets to be produced, and one to turn out to be unwatchable garbage and the other a masterpiece that everyone loves.)

It's a good question, and I don't know. Perhaps some model like Patreon; perhaps just having voluntary payments (actually not dissimilar to what we have now, which seems to be working reasonably well); perhaps sponsored by wealthy individuals or corporations; perhaps something I haven't thought of. People would figure it out, and we could finally stop trying to pretend that you can prevent computers from copying bits.

I am an author in the middle of my career. I make my living on book sales. Personally I would prefer not to gamble my survival on this airy assumption that "people would figure it out".

What did you have to put up with?

How do you pay people to "do work" instead of "done work"? What's that mean exactly?

All the stupid crap we've been dealing with for the past 20 years. Stupid DRM; HDCP compatibility issues; YouTube copyright strikes; this lawsuit which threatens to kill a valuable resource; $222,000 penalties against an individual for pirating 24 songs; large companies locking our shared culture away for centuries. It's trivial to think of more examples of the harmful effects of copyright. It's all caused by an old business model that depends on scarcity trying to force an artificial scarcity into a domain where scarcity doesn't exist.

How is this any different than the protections for other products that you have to buy? The whole point is you need to pay for it, and the producer needs to ensure you actually did so. I understand the technical issues with DRM which can have a poor UX sometimes, but for the most part it's only a problem if you didn't actually pay for the content. The rise of Netflix and streaming services show that it's working fine for millions.

Your arguments seem to be based on the assumption that content should be free. That's the fundamental issue, and I don't agree. I doubt many creators and producers would either, not without some alternative answer to monetization. Do you have a solution for that?

> I understand the technical issues with DRM which can have a poor UX sometimes, but for the most part it's only a problem if you didn't actually pay for the content.

Actually, most of the UX problems only show up if you did pay. The people who download the content for free get the better product: an unrestricted file that they can use pretty much anywhere. Subscribers taking the legal route are stuck dealing with a bunch of different services, each with its own special blend of UX issues on top of the poor UX from the fragmentation itself.

> Your arguments seem to be based on the assumption that content should be free.

Not content should be free per se but rather content should be freely redistributed. Many people producing new content will still want to be paid for their work, and that's fine. They just need to ensure that they get paid before the content is out in public where anyone can copy it, since they will no longer have a legal monopoly on distribution after that point.

Patreon, Kickstarter, and others offer one model for funding the production of creative works for public distribution. Others would include sponsorship and donations. Open source development is another option which can be applied to more than just software—just look at the various Blender open movie projects[1], all of which are distributed to the public for free and were funded with a combination of donations, sponsorship, and volunteer contributions.

[1] https://www.blender.org/about/projects/