This discussion probably doesn’t fit in HN comment boxes, but how would you a) motivate people to create without any form of compensation or b) create the artificial scarcity needed to force compensation for goods with essentially infinite supply?

Crowdfunding. Services like Patreon, Kickstarter, GitHub Sponsors.

People should be paid for the labor of creating, not for artificially scarce copies of the finished product.

Patronage has been known as an alternative to copyright since around 200 years ago:

https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

The cited drawbacks are valid: creators are beholden to the elites who fund their work, and their influence in their creative process is felt to this day.

With modern technology, however, funding is diffused through large groups of people which minimizes this impact through diversification.

The ideal model is one where lots of people pitch in to fund a creator for the full cost of creating something, then the resulting work is released directly to the public domain.

Among 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.