[CobrastanJorji]

> Everyone pretend the value of someone's work is the product of that work, not the labor.

Is it not? If I spend 10 years writing the greatest novel of all time, and you, a publishing company, make copies and sell 10 million copies, I feel entitled to some recompense.

My labor has value to me, but only the product of that labor has value to anyone else.

[z3c0]

The goal is the product, but what is being exchanged is production, ie labor for a certificate of your own past production, aka money.

[thomastjeffery]

You feel entitled to recompense from the publisher, because they are profiting from your labor. The problem I brought up is still there, just in the hands of the publisher, and not the writer. Now the publisher gets to profit from work they did not do, and you are lucky to get a good cut.

Your labor has value to everyone else, even if that value is speculative. If we don't have a mechanism to commoditize the ends of labor, then we can just speculate instead. Speculating the value of labor is more uncertain than valuing copyrighted works, which means that the business of labor speculation cannot compete with the business of copyright valuation. At the same time, copyright is a lie: the "product of a work" is a totally arbitrary imagined boundary that can't always be meaningfully drawn in the first place; meaning that entire categories of work are impossible to copyright at all. Removing that lie would put everyone on a level playing field, where all labor is valuable, and all valuation is fair.