alt Hacker NewsAmong the various options:
- Pay in advance, before the product exists.
- Pay for early access that other people don't have. (Yes, in the absence of copyright, people could take the early-access version and share it with others. People already do this today, and that doesn't stop folks from continuing to be patrons anyway.)
- Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money than they otherwise might have. Small price to pay for having a rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things and modifying things.
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Nobody is stopping you from monetizing your own creative work via the methods you described without a publisher involved today. If those ways of getting paid would create a “rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things”, why doesn’t it already exist?
> Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money
For books and music maybe the difference is not quite that big, but for games and movies these 0.0..01% cost so much more to make that they would definitely not get made if they made significantly less money.