Just look at all the types of people that support themselves through patreon. There are many different types of people, and some of them are incredibly niche. Some are technical, some are artistic.
Really, the demand in the market would be same, so there would be similar content. The only real difference is we are killing the middleman who profits needlessly.
It's hard to see how under this funding model something as revolutionary as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring would even get published. The research in those took years and there was no demand for such titles on those topics previously.
A) Dwarf Fortress. It's an incredibly niche game where the creator has spent literally decades of his life working full-time towards the game. He has a vision for the game and he doesn't compromise. The community funding allowed him to do this. It realistically would not have been possible in the current system.
B) Pillars of Eternity 1 (and 2) were both great games that simply weren't getting funding to be made in the business world. Yet it was successful and both were very good games.
I'm not going to claim they are revolutionary or even that great. But I am going to say that without the process, they wouldn't have been developed. I also think that demand would work the same regardless of the system.
If somebody creates a book like The Jungle, it would become a success anyway and more people would fund the author through consistent or one-time donations.
Really, we've hit the point with technology that we simply don't need the middle men anymore. The creators themselves can work directly with the consumers. I don't see a reason to continue the current system besides inertia.
But you need something to actually get this going in the first place. It's worth noting that Dwarf Fortress only started getting a financially stable stream of donations because an alpha was bootstrapped. You can't really bootstrap a book based on investigative journalism, there aren't really stretch goals that a book can hit, etc. It works for small tidbits on a regular cadence like a podcast, but this isn't how a book works.
Books are also different from games, in that generally speaking when it comes to community funded games the creator and the patrons are broadly aligned. This is not a good dynamic for book publishing, because then people won't write content that for all its truths may just piss off their existing patrons and leave them destitute.
Should we cancel copyright before this system is well-established and stable? It seems like there could be arguments for it, if copyright is indeed a great abuse, but if it's not, it seems like it would be systematically better to establish the new system in parallel with copyright, and then we could argue not only that copyright is bad but it's no longer necessary.
Is copyright in fact no longer necessary? How many people support crowdfunding projects with digital rewards or join programs like Patreon specifically for access to copyrighted works (whether that's because they want legal access, or because there's some form of DRM, or whatever) vs. because they are happy to support the creator anyway? That is, to what extent would getting rid of copyright also reduce the profitability of crowdfunding/patronage?
(There's an inverse question - could we get rid of copyright and still have people interested in buying physical books from official sources? That is, could we change the legal mechanism but not the social one? If we think people will pay creators just because they like their work - and it seems that in fact they do - why wouldn't they buy copies of works from creators just because they like their work, even if not compelled to do so via copyright?)
How do new authors (or new creators/artists of any kind, really) get a living wage via crowdfunding? I contribute to the Patreon of a couple of creators I like, but they're all established in some way - i.e. I contribute to support these particular creators not needing to participate in the system of selling licensed works for royalties, but it doesn't seem to be a systematic change.
How much do creators make via crowdfunding/patronage make, anyway - do established writers tend to earn money comparable to the advances and royalties they'd get from a traditional publisher?
One feature of the current system is that if your books are popular with people who don't have much money (students being one of many examples), you still get paid through taxpayer-funded libraries buying copies of your work. How should we preserve that property - should we make it a norm for your local public library to participate in patronage?
Did Internet Archive do anything to advertise the crowdfunding sites of authors whose books they lent? Could they have?
Related to that, is it possible for the Internet Archive to continue operating infrastructure for digital lending for creators who want to be supported for their work by letting authors post e-books and linking to crowdfunding/patronage sites?
I just think that we can't go on like this. Copyright is based on a lie: artificial scarcity. It wasn't so obvious before the 20th century but computers and the internet changed everything. Society must change as well.
In order to enforce copyright in the 21st century, computing freedom must be sacrificed. I don't think anyone here wants that outcome. So I defend the end of copyright.
I'm not sure this is true. The publishers aren't demanding that Internet Archive add DRM to their e-books - they're demanding that Internet Archive stop distributing them entirely. I can certainly imagine a world where DRM-free e-books are the norm and unlicensed distribution is limited only by legal threat and not by technical means. Yes, the fact that information can now be copied instantly for free (it could previously be copied with some time and effort with a photocopier, or with typewriters samizdat-style, or with pen and paper monk-style) means the publishers are less confident that legal threat will be enough... but we did mostly end up in a world where DRM-free music is easily available.
But also, physical books aren't going away. As long as you can buy physical books, you can participate in a world of copyrighted books without running DRM agents on your computer. You miss out on some potential 21st-century gains like having the text of the book in electronic format and being able to share it without spending some time at a scanner, but you haven't lost anything you had in the 20th century.
(Also on the topic of computing freedom, how do we get the benefits of the GPL - especially receiving things like source code - if we no longer have copyright?)
The state of YouTube proves that the copyright industry will not accept such a world. They want the technology industry to prevent copyright infringement from happening. They don't want to have to sue anyone after it has happened. Copyright infringement is widespread, decentralized and international so legal threats simply don't work. Prevention is the only option.
Copyright infringement prevention is only possible if they seize control of our computers. That is morally objectionable and cannot be allowed to happen even if it destroys the copyright industry.
> how do we get the benefits of the GPL - especially receiving things like source code - if we no longer have copyright?
We don't. The GPL was created by Stallman in reaction to copyright protection being extended towards source code. Without copyright, the software development world might revert to what it was like before that event. I don't fully understand what it was like in those days but there are descriptions in his books.
It’s not obvious to me that enforceable copyleft licences have increased the availability of free software to such an extent as to outweigh the loss of freedom effected by normal copyrights. Abolishing copyright (or less radically, rejecting the prevailing interpretation of copyright law which says that software is a “literary work”) would do more to advance the four essential software freedoms than any copyleft licence. Notably, copyright is the only thing standing in the way of freedoms 2 and 3. As for freedom 1, companies would still treat their source code as a trade secret, but without copyright they’d have no recourse against people republishing leaked source code, which could then be incorporated into free software projects.
I think this was probably more of a critical mass sort of thing. Historically, it seems like copyleft licenses (and perhaps even GCC's horribly byzantine internal architecture) probably played a key role in getting free software off the ground. Once you have sufficient mind share though it no longer seems to be as necessary.
Actually, with the lack of copyright, they might just go the route of software anyways: Book-as-a-Service, Steam-for-books, license checks whenever you startup your book.
Authors should be paid for the act of writing, not the sale of the resulting work.
> How do we implement that system?
Crowdfunding and patronage seem to be gaining traction these days.