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You seem to be understanding me correctly.
When one buys a physical book, they are paying for the paper and the printing process.
That is the barrier to entry for producing such a copy for sharing, distinctly different from producing a shareable copy of, e.g., a .mp4 file. This person did not have this barrier to entry and therefore they did not see value in selling what they copied.
The work does not have value in a market unless the value is propped up artificially as is currently being done by copyright law. > I am sorry, I am not sure this is a genuine argument. If it helps, these markets were clearly viable when certain resources were required to copy and distribute works.
The difference with today is the public internet and the proliferation of personal general-purpose computers that people like to keep on themselves at all times.
It's new and it's causing market disruptions. Finally, I'll say that many people will choose to give money for things even if they aren't otherwise required to pay: Humble Bundle, Patreon, Youtube, Twitch, etc.
People donate to the Wikimedia Foundation only because they are asked, to the point that that the organization now has an order of magnitude more money in the bank than Wikipedia's annual operating costs (recent funding controversies aside, they donate because they think it helps keep around something they'd like to see stick around). |