[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.