How do you know that this benefit wouldn't exist in other schemes? Look at permissive open source software which is essentially public domain + shield from liability. No copyright does not mean no compensation. It just means different compensation that doesn't deprave other people of their right to share information.
Unlike GP, I support the complete abolishment of Copyright. Society needs to find another scheme to reward work. Perhaps kickstarter-style firms that direct oversight over funded projects or some other scheme that doesn't cause so much harm.
I still don't see how a person having copyright over the work which they have created and the ability to license it to their best profit is a harm.
From everything I've heard it kinda does. If you're writing something valuable then maybe a company will employ you to keep working on it, and the portfolio can certainly help in interviews (to write other software), but getting non-negligible compensation for the use of the software itself is rare. Even those projects that are well funded, like the Linux kernel, are done so not out of goodness of heart, but due to companies realising it's in their rational interest to have a common standard base of sorts
In terms of written works, the best comparison we have is Wikipedia, and while the foundation does receive funding from companies who realise how useful of an integration it can be for their products, the writers themselves do not get paid afaik (and when they do, it's rarely a good thing). But if you just wrote an open source textbook, I doubt you'll manage to make much money off it, and the prospects for fiction look even worse
> Perhaps kickstarter-style firms that direct oversight over funded projects
Sounds like a return to rich patrons and needing to flatter them to get grants. Luckily with the modern internet we do now have democratised layman patronage, but why the need to force everyone into that model? Also note that almost all successful Patreon artists do have perks for paying, even if it's just early access, and afaik make a lot of their money off commissions. Those who just post art for free, with no paid comms, and just have a "tip jar" make relatively little from what I hear
Successfully creating a permissive open source project expecting it to be magically funded by benevolent parties is just exceedingly rare. Usually the funding starts first, or effort proceeds in lock-step with funding.
There's a bit of a cart-and-horse here though. Non-permissive licenses like AGPL are often not the result of a single author hoping they might be able to negotiate some licensing deal in the future - it is the result of a commercial enterprise trying to be restrictive in the ability for people to use their source without compensating them.
Same with what is normally considered a more open license, than AGPL, the GPL - where MySQL was reported as going after others for using independent database drivers without buying a commercial license, saying use of the MySQL network protocol made the application using the driver a "derivative work" under the GPL.
Linux is a special case because there are a large number of commercial entities which realize contributing to Linux is way cheaper and faster than writing their own kernel and porting user land software to it.
Apache HTTPD, on the other hand, is an example of an application where corporations DID find the motivation to write their own alternative funded with a commercial model, such as NGINX.
p.s., I'm sure many of those vendors are not making money yet but they all aim to.
Most people who write non-fiction books do it because they want to contribute to human knowledge and be recognized as an expert in a particular field, not because they think that writing a differential geometry textbook is their path to riches. With the internet, more and more text books are made freely available by their authors - the reason this didn’t happen in the past is because there was no other way to pass knowledge around than teaming up with a publisher who is able to put your knowledge on to dead trees. It’s fair game to put older books on the internet, so that the whole world can benefit, not just rich people in rich countries.
The problems with authors making texts available directly are:
- no gate-keeping, so it's hard to find what is worth reading and what isn't
- no proofreading --- it kills me that errors in books are so casually accepted these days
- few authors have the skills to draw illustrations so as to have a meaningful and clear presentation
I've worked with raw author manuscripts --- in most instances they're not something anyone would choose to read given any other option.
Also you've said yourself that many people can and are offering their work for free. Awesome. So I would prefer not to force others to (though I would certainly be up to consider repealing many of the posthumous copyright extensions that are fairly recent)
The benefit of automobiles is that people move across vast distances.
Wrong. People used to move across vast distances before, using horses. Yes, automobiles are better and now traveling is easier. But we have no ability to figure out how many people would travel on horses if there wasn't a better alternative. It's even possible, that banning cars could eventually lead to an even better method of transportation (escaping a local minimum kind of a thing).
Authors who write books have tools to protect their interests, so they do so. Without these tools perhaps there would be less authors. Or maybe there would be more authors: I think Windows and Photoshop are so popular because they were pirated a lot; returning to the context of books, less and less people read them, but maybe if books (attractive books, not old books in public domain) were free, then the trend would reverse, books would popularize, people would start enjoying deeper entertainment, get smarter, transform the society for the better, and support authors on e.g. Patreon… Or maybe not, I'm just mentioning some nuance.
How many texts are created which are explicitly placed in the public domain and from which the authors have made a conscious decision not to profit thereby?