alt Hacker NewsSo your position is that almost nobody who sells their content should be able to make a living doing that?
You either must be able to fund it through ads, host it on platform which make piracy effectively impossible and/or impractical like Apple's App Store, YouTube etc. or be independently wealthy and just do it as a hobby?
e.g. screw all the authors who are writing books, Amazon should just be able to distribute (or sell for some "convenience" fee) books to everyone who has a Kindle without paying anything to them? That (which would be the logical outcome of nothing having no IP protection) certainly sounds like a reasonable opinion..
Replies
In practice I agree with your points, but it's also important to consider that the open source model is alive, well and is directly and indirectly at the heart of employing many people. I won't make the argument that society is willing or could switch to that model successfully, but I also wouldn't be willing to say it couldn't work, either.
Throwing away these abused IP laws wouldn't prevent creators from making a living off their art.
Plenty of ways for artist to monetize. Selling a copy of the art is one way, very cherished by publishers. Creators for the most part don't make money off copy distribution of their art. That was the case with physical copies, still the case with online distribution.
The good old "let's protect the artists" is a fallacy. It's only to protect publishers and distributors. These IP laws, at least their interpretation acts against the public interest, creators included.
Other forms of monetisation of art? Performance, training and teaching, patronage, custom requests, etc.
Ask Taylor Swift where most of her money is coming from, that's not from Spotify.
other sources of revenue exist, lot of creators get their revenue through donation, either one time or recurring (monthly, yearly, by release).
On another level, we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating ressource to enforce fake scarcity.
Piracy is product of artificial scarcity, people pirate mostly because it is easier and more convenient than the legitimate counterpart, music piracy almost disappeared when convenient streaming services appeared, same for movies until studios decided that they wanted “cable tv 2.0” Make something as easy as pirating and people will pay for it.