> Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating

Seems questionable. You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. In fact I often pirate things that I otherwise have access to via e.g. Amazon Prime.

> but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?

Well this is an appeal to consequences, right? It's probably true that increased protectable output is a positive of IP law, but that doesn't mean it's an optimal overall state, given the (massive) negatives. It's a local maxima, or so I would argue.

Plus it's a bit of a strange argument. It seems to claim that we must protect Disney from e.g. 'knock offs', and somehow if we didn't, nobody would be motivated to create things. But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?

▲

klez 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days.

Maybe for you that's something you can afford. I can't. I just consume less music. Or sail the high seas if I really want something.

	▲	0x3f 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If we're purely talking about music then almost everything is on YouTube, which has a subscription cost of $0/mo.

▲

lurk2 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days.

The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.

> But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?

Ten years ago there was a popular blog that got posted on /r/anarcho_capitalism with some frequency. IP was a contentious topic among the then-technologically literate userbase. At some point, a spammer began copying articles from the blog and posting them to /r/anarcho_capitalism himself. This caught the attention of some users and the spammer was eventually banned. A few days later, I followed a link back to his site and found all the articles he had stolen now linked back to a page featuring the cease and desist letter he had received from the original blog, the URL being something like: “f*-statists-and-such-and-such.”

Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model. YouTube and the wave of Short Form Video Content are the two most obvious case studies, though it happens on every social platform that moves faster than infringement notices can be sent.

▲

0x3f 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.

I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video, nor the technical skills to do it, so we're not really talking about global averages here.

> Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model.

I don't think you understand my argument. I don't deny that this may be true. I deny that it is ipso facto the best outcome to have high-quality creator content, or whatever we are talking about here, at the cost of the massive benefits of free use. You might as well tell me New Jersey gas pumping laws lead to nicer service experiences, and getting rid of them would ruin that.

We can arbitrarily prop up any industry to make it cushy and a 'nice experience'. That doesn't make doing so the greatest overall good.

I would argue that even if all that we achieved with the abolition of IP law was the provision of cheap generic drugs, long out of research, it'd be worth far more than the YouTube creator economy.

	▲	_DeadFred_ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Anyone is free to release under free use in our current system. You already can live with the benefits of no IP law by just limiting yourself to those people that chose to to release this way.