[learc83]

Under the legal framework most anti-copyright people propose, claiming something as your own would still be fraud, and illegal.

It wouldn't stop you from publishing it, but it would stop you from claiming to be the original author.

[adgar]

Under that legal framework, how does Stephen King make money selling his book? I see an enormous race to the bottom in terms of prices, especially with ebooks. The official ebook comes out and within minutes it can and will be sold for less elsewhere. Given the triviality of duplication, it'll be essentially free, soon. I'm certainly not buying the official one if I can get it for 10% the price - and I think that's being generous.

Paper books actually cost money to print, so people who love the paper book experience will likely be the only ones buying books. I strongly suspect the ratio of those purchasers to those who consume ebooks is steadily decreasing. And if ebooks race to the bottom as I have no doubt they would, I suspect that ratio would drop even more.

[jellicle]

Easy. He writes the book. He decides he wants to make one million dollars from its sale. He lets everyone pledge $5 or more toward its release. If he gets one million dollars in pledges, he releases the work and sends a copy to everyone who pledged him money. If not, he deletes it (or has it eaten by rats and zombie cats).

Copyright not required.

[snowwrestler]

Ok, that might work for Stephen King today, but how would it have worked for JK Rowling in 1995?

[learc83]

Who knows? Maybe she could just sell the ebook, then start taking pre-orders once it gets popular.

The majority of published authors don't really make much money at all. it's not uncommon to make less than $10k for a book that took over a year to write. Clearly they're not all in it for the money.

Maybe you wouldn't have as many mega successes, but are the current mega success really anything more than a product of the artificial scarcity caused by the publishing house gatekeepers. Again, who knows?

[Tycho]

That's just like a really inefficient way of achieving the same goal (ie. getting the people who want it, to pay for it).

People have their priorities all wrong. You can get brilliant art/music/whatever for negligable prices. Or at least as much of it as is healthy to consume.

Removing copyright places a draconian burden on creativity, while only providing a slight real gain in accessability.

[hxa7241]

You imply the current way is more efficient, but how so?

The basic structure of copyright-based business is this: the creator expends effort up front, then hopes buyers will pay later. The information flow, or rather lack of it, introduces a large risk of producing what is not wanted. Also the copy restrictions necessarily raise prices far above the real marginal costs of near zero. That means there is a large potential value the public is prevented from getting.

Such a structure consumes a scarce resource -- creative effort -- wastefully, and restricts an abundant resource -- copyability of information -- needlessly.

That seems very much the opposite of economically efficient.