[belorn]

There are many methods to do this. Copyright itself is a privilege granted by the state, and as with any system involving the government, it could be refined to produce better results with less costs.

If we want to keep having a system dependent on the state, as which copyright itself is today, we could follow a system of taxes and support artist through grants. It would then follow the same system as with medical research, as tax payers are already paying for that. The majority of medical research are today supported by taxes, and the drug companies would the last people wanting to go pure capitalist system, as that would be billions of less dollars in free R&D.

Or we could go with no state involvement at all, in which case music for hire and concerts would become a primary method for artist to put food on the table. You would likely to see more live music, but also less healthy life style (see Troubadour lifestyle). Likely, systems like Flattr and other similar ideas would go large scale to support artist, somewhat like donations to medical research do today.

[VMG]

So the state decides which art is to be supported. What could possible go wrong?

[belorn]

Its how medical research money is handled today. Billions of dollars, and it hasn't gone horrible horrible wrong yet has it?

There has been several suggested methods on how to measure things like popularity with music, methods that remove any judgment call by some bureaucratic agent by the state. One is to measure a small sample (like with pre-voting polls), an other is to measure repositories, while a third is to only measure current places like radios.

All this method need to do is to be better than a state supported monopoly that has managed to give less than 1% of the revenue of copyrighted works. How hard can it possible be to beat that?

[jiggy2011]

You can only measure repositories if you have "official" repositories which everybody goes to in order to get content. This would require strong IP laws to enforce.

What happens if a lot of stuff gets distributed P2P or via an independent repo who don't want to hand their server logs to the gov?

Also medical research still has contentious issues like Stem Cell research etc. And it is easier to justify objectively like "will help X thousand cancer patients".

Creative works are more difficult, for example what if somebody wants to make a film that might be perceived to promote racist views? There are certainly people who would not want their tax money spent on that.

There would also be people who would see it as an affront to free speech for such a film to not have a fair chance of being made.

[wes-exp]

Let's speculate:

- People gaming the system to inflate "downloads" or whatever metric is used to determine payouts.

- Politicians pushing their views on others reaches a whole new level when they decide which media should be produced.

- For technology products like software, government has generally proven to be inept in the face of change. So entire industries would be held back due to bureaucratic "management".

- The entire export value would be ruined when products are released at no charge. US GDP declines.

This just sounds like a recipe for waste, cronyism, and job loss.