And to be frank, I'm unlikely to be swayed by the kinds of pages you linked to indirectly in your reply, either, because they appear to repeat the same poorly thought out arguments as everyone else.

Sure, performing musicians can make money playing live. Shame if you're a composer or lyricist or a technician in the recording studio, I guess.

Sure, people can make low budget computer games and sell them for a nominal amount to an audience of geeks sympathetic to their pricing model. Shame if you want to play a AAA grade game with realistic graphics, professional quality character designs, professional quality voice acting, professional quality orchestral score, well-balanced gameplay, non-repetitive level designs, and an AI smarter than a snail, I guess.

Sure, we can find plenty of pulp fiction quality self-published stories on-line for free. Shame if you need a well-structured, professionally edited textbook for your kid's math class complete with a full set of exercises, I guess.

The same pattern comes up time and again in the cheap shots against copyright. Usually, the argument is either some variation of "plenty of work gets made anyway" but looking only at quantity and not quality, or some variation of "the artists can earn money by {some other model}" but without taking into account all the people who genuinely contribute to producing good work but aren't the immediate performer.

And then someone comes along and points out the isolated exceptions: a handful of big name FOSS products (invariably in fields that are widely applicable and attractive to a lot of geeks, which is a tiny part of the overall software landscape, and invariably ignoring any role copyright played in the development model of those products), a couple of performers who've made money with a high profile online experiment (usually people who were already well known thanks to their earlier work funded by more traditional models), and so on.

One of these days, I'd like to start a page with all the eternally repeated examples in this context and try to figure out how many of them there really are and what proportion of their overall industries they actually represent. Alas, since no-one is going to pay me for that work, I had better go back to building my copyright-protected company where the revenues do go straight to the handful of people who are putting in huge amounts of hard work to do things no-one has ever done before, which apparently doesn't exist in Falkvinge's mind because we're all under 40.

An industry's failure to create a sustainable business model in the face of the reality that technology has created isn't a failing of the technology. It would be nice if business would just optimize for reality instead of trying (and repeatedly failing) to bend reality through legislation.

I would be interested in a survey of the public, which said we can dump copyright, in return for losing almost all high cost games, movies and TV. I would guess the majority of people would vote to keep copyright.

I don't accept your premise. The situation is too similar to a tragedy of the commons, with a large dose of ignorance mixed in: most people outside the creative industries have no idea how much hard work by how many different kinds of people ultimately contributes to that smash hit music recording or novel or computer game. They just think of it as the latest track from $singer or the latest book from $author/$publisher or the latest game from $studio.

Take a look at how long the credits are the next time you watch a blockbuster movie that you enjoy, and see how many of the job titles you even understand. Unless you work in the movies, it will probably be a small minority, yet without all the others you probably wouldn't have enjoyed the movie nearly so much, assuming it even existed.

The trouble is, a lot of people have got used to two conflicting views in recent years: we expect ever higher creative values in works (which come with a higher sunk cost to produce the work initially) and yet we see that we can redistribute them cheaply and quickly (which implies a marginal cost near zero). If you don't have copyright, or some other economic tool, to amortise the huge sunk cost over a similarly huge audience, then you can't afford to make the work in the first place and the fact that the marginal cost of physical reproduction/redistribution is now near zero doesn't help you.

But huge numbers of people apparently value the works we do produce today that have those expensive production values, and in the case of works created for utility rather than entertainment, the usefulness of the work may drop off rapidly if it's not as well made.

Technology has changed the landscape, and unless you're willing to live in a police state with strict regulations on general purpose computing and communications technology, that genie isn't getting back in the bottle.

Technology has changed many landscapes, but just because we can do something, that doesn't mean we should. Most people recognise that certain acts are harmful to specific people or to society as a whole, and we legislate to make those acts illegal. We can certainly debate whether copying a knowledge work under various conditions is such an act, and if so, whether copyright is an appropriate response, but I don't think "This is the way the world is, deal with it" is a compelling argument. Anarchy would be very unpleasant for many members of society.

When patronage was en vogue, we didn't have as high a rate of literacy or access to digital editing tools. These facilitations of the process of creation, even ignoring things like cheap paper and disposable writing implements that last months and cost less than a bottle of water, dwarf any legal changes that might otherwise apply (notwithstanding France's dark period of outlawing the printing press altogether as a tool of sedition). If copyright has anything to do with the current rate of creation, it is primarily by impeding the spread of inspirational materials that might otherwise hasten creative people's efforts. Compare copyright-controlled England with mostly copyright-free Germany in the 1800s to see how the freedom to copy and resell lit a fire under the asses of both writers and publishers, and created a lot more writers by spreading knowledge far and wide and as rapidly as possible to create a (for the era) highly educated population.

> it would take lots of very rich people giving up a lot of their wealth to get anywhere near funding just what today's movie industry costs

I think it's pretty clear that there is little correlation between relative level of funding and relative quality in the movie industry. In any case, there are other ways to get funding without relying on copyright than purely status-related patronage.

This is basically how blockbusters are financed nowadays, so it's a viable proposition. There's no evidence that changing from copyright to patronage would change that outcome.