How about a little full disclosure? The author of the cited article is Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, so not exactly an unbiased source.
Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another. I don't know anyone who supports copyright and believes it to be the only way for creative folks to make money.
The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it.
The economic argument is also very simple: the people making those works need to put food on the table. Despite all the rhetoric, nothing is stopping them from doing that in other ways right now, yet relatively few people actually are.
Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright. There's an entire world of creative industries and bazillions in cash going into those industries, so finding more than an occasional study and isolated success story shouldn't be that hard... if their position is actually correct.
>The author of the cited article is Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, so not exactly an unbiased source.
Source bias is a concern when the source is supplying unverifiable facts. When a source is supplying reasoning, it can be evaluated for consistency and validity independent of the source and attacking the source is just the ad hominem fallacy.
Incidentally, who do you think would be making anti-copyright arguments, Christopher Dodd?
>Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another.
A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation. Perhaps there are stronger arguments in favor of copyright than the ones the industry has been putting forward, but then let's hear those in the halls of Congress and stop hearing the ones that are so ridiculous that you think they're strawman arguments.
>Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright.
The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain? (And hey, if we try not having copyright for a decade or two and it turns out badly, we can always put it back.)
A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation.
Really? You can cite a lobbyist who actually claimed that without copyright, there was no way for any artist to make money? Or that with free sharing, no-one at all would spend money on entertainment? Or that no-one at all creates new art without the financial incentive?
Lobbyists say some pretty silly things, and distort reality to absurd degrees, but even then I've never heard anyone making such a black-and-white argument before a legislative assembly.
The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain?
That's a fair point, but it's not a counter to my argument. There is nothing whatsoever about today's copyright law that stops someone from funding completely new works using alternative business models and giving those works away such that they can be freely distributed. If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet?
It seems plenty of people are willing to try disrupting Big Media, given the number of people who are self-publishing books instead of relying on traditional publishers, putting their band's music on-line via their own web sites, and so on. But why does almost every success story seem to stop there? One possible explanation is that the only legal barrier between those self-publishers and an Amazon-scale operation redistributing anything good via a much better known web site and taking most of the profits is copyright...
[Edit: Clarified the wording in the last paragraph.]
That's a fair point, but it's not a counter to my argument. There is nothing whatsoever about today's copyright law that stops someone from funding completely new works using alternative business models and giving those works away such that they can be freely distributed. If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet?
That's pretty easy - the return for the creator is higher with copyright than without. Hence, in the current system, there is no incentive for alternative models to really develop (outside of some niches --- software is maybe a limited counterexample, with licences like the GPL demonstrating what might happen if copyright did not exist). Also, your argument does not take into account the fact that without copyright derivative works would be utilized to a much fuller extent.
Hence, in the current system, there is no incentive for alternative models to really develop
I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, if, as self-confessed pirates have frequently argued on sites like Slashdot, the advertising side-effect of sharing works freely ultimately generates more revenue for the creator than copyright-controlled distribution, then the logical move even with copyright is to put those works into the public domain and invite donations to support the creator. However, that risks the alternative possibility that the "advertising benefit" agument really is just another pyramid scheme, and without enough law-abiding (with copyright)/donation-giving (without copyright) people at the end of it to support everyone else, it's just rationalising freeloading.
Also, your argument does not take into account the fact that without copyright derivative works would be utilized to a much fuller extent.
There are definitely valid arguments against copyright based on greater use of derivative works. The problem is that it is also possible that derivative works would become dominant if it were easy to make them and much harder to create something original, with little incentive to do the latter.
I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, if, as self-confessed pirates have frequently argued on sites like Slashdot, the advertising side-effect of sharing works freely ultimately generates more revenue for the creator than copyright-controlled distribution, then the logical move even with copyright is to put those works into the public domain and invite donations to support the creator. However, that risks the alternative possibility that the "advertising benefit" agument really is just another pyramid scheme, and without enough law-abiding (with copyright)/donation-giving (without copyright) people at the end of it to support everyone else, it's just rationalising freeloading.
Indeed, and plenty of artists nowadays (both big and small) have experimented to a certain degree with this model. It has its benefits and downsides but largely your argument is not particularly relevant to the topic of the article: the question is not 'Would content creators be better off without copyright?', it is 'Would society be better off without copyright?' The economic optimum is for creators to make the fixed costs of producing the work and nothing else; there is little incentive for them to support changing the current system which gives them an essentially unlimited monopoly on their work. The article is merely meant to outline some ways in which creators could get their fixed costs covered without copyright.
There are definitely valid arguments against copyright based on greater use of derivative works. The problem is that it is also possible that derivative works would become dominant if it were easy to make them and much harder to create something original, with little incentive to do the latter.
Why is this a problem? Modern popular culture demonstrates pretty conclusively that most people have no problem with works that are essentially derivative..
The economic optimum is for creators to make the fixed costs of producing the work and nothing else
I don't think economics works the way you think it does. You just removed not only the incentive to make a better (but more expensive to produce) work but also the financial incentive to create any work at all.
Why is this a problem?
Why is it a problem to replace a system that supports the creation of original, innovative works with a system that pushes heavily toward creating endless derivative works and minor variations of the same tired ideas? Are you really asking that question seriously?
I think, contrary to your suggestion, that plenty of people are already fed up with the same old movie sequels and annual releases by the same computer game franchises and so on. But that's what happens when the system doesn't effectively support those who would create more interesting alternatives, which typically aren't as profitable on a first outing but cost more to produce. Coming soon: Cloned Sports Franchise 2013 edition, with ads shown every five minutes during your favourite fly-on-the-wall reality TV show.
From the Mark Lemley paper quoted elsewhere on this page:
Economic theory offers no justification for
awarding creators anything beyond what is necessary to recover their average fixed costs.
I think I'm fairly happy putting my faith in him knowing how economics works.
I think, contrary to your suggestion, that plenty of people are already fed up with the same old movie sequels and annual releases by the same computer game franchises and so on. But that's what happens when the system doesn't effectively support those who would create more interesting alternatives, which typically aren't as profitable on a first outing but cost more to produce. Coming soon: Cloned Sports Franchise 2013 edition, with ads shown every five minutes during your favourite fly-on-the-wall reality TV show.
Do you think Notch would have problems raising funding on Kickstarter? How about Quentin Tarantino? How about Amanda Palmer, of the Dresden Dolls? How about the XX? Stuff which has a cult following seems to fare well under the patronage model.
Most of the really high budget stuff turns out to be fairly derivative. There are exceptions, but they're rare.
>You can cite a lobbyist who actually claimed that without copyright, there was no way for any artist to make money? Or that with free sharing, no-one at all would spend money on entertainment? Or that no-one at all creates new art without the financial incentive?
I'll grant you that the phrasing of the 'myths' on the site is more absolute than is generally used by copyright proponents, but the arguments are extremely common with minor qualifiers, e.g. that free sharing causes an extraordinarily large (albeit not 100%) reduction in the amount that people spend on entertainment (see generally http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-...), and (most importantly) the counterarguments still apply to the less absolute versions of the argument more commonly encountered in the wild.
>If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet?
There is an extent to which we are. See: YouTube, github, etc.
But a big piece of the trouble is that if you take any given business model, chances are the artist can make at least trivially more money by exercising some of the control the copyright monopoly provides over the work. And if copyright exists, why not do that? The consequence is that most business models are seen to involve copyright, even if they would work very nearly as well without it.
More than that, a large part of the benefit of not having copyright accrues to content consumers rather than producers. The argument is that the benefit consumers gain exceeds the benefit producers lose, i.e. that no copyright is only slightly worse for producers and vastly better for consumers, and the benefit producers lose is insufficient to significantly impact the number and quality of works produced.
That content producers can't actually be better off without copyright is of course necessarily the case for the reason you point out. If a situation arises where not having the rights granted under the copyright act is better for the content producer, the content producer can just license the rights to whoever he likes and be in the identical position as there would be with no copyright. So eliminating copyright wouldn't create any benefit for the content producer that they can't already obtain (ignoring for a moment that content producers are often simultaneously content consumers, e.g. when they produce derivative works). But that explains the lack of examples of content producers adopting non-copyright business models: They're the ones under copyright who decide whether to authorize alternative business models, but they aren't the ones who derive the bulk of the benefit from them. The argument is instead that the non-derivative content producers fail to experience a harm sufficient to outweigh the harm that copyright causes to the producers of derivative works and to consumers.
> But a big piece of the trouble is that if you take any given business model, chances are the artist can make at least trivially more money by exercising some of the control the copyright monopoly provides over the work. And if copyright exists, why not do that? The consequence is that most business models are seen to involve copyright, even if they would work very nearly as well without it.
In addition to that, there's the fact that a lot of the benefit to creators of a lack of copyright monopolies is the increased richness of source material to draw on for inspiration of new works. Don't make the mistake of thinking that I'm talking about "ripping off" existing material to make a fast buck, either. I'm talking about the fact that every creator is inspired to some extent by the works he or she consumes, but many works are not as easily accessible to the potential creators of the future, so that the inspirations that might arise after a creative person experiences a given existing work that is, unfortunately, never actually experienced by that person due to lack of legal distribution, simply never come to pass.
Then, of course, there's the fact that people have been so heavily indoctrinated by the propaganda of the copyright economy that people who have not yet made a name for themselves as creators of marketable works are convinced without any evidence apart from that indoctrination that their major problem in life is figuring out how to make money off of copyright, which to them by default involves appealing to a major distributor to publish their work. The truth of the matter, of course, is quite the opposite: the major problem in life for such a creator of marketable works is getting it into as many hands as possible. The biggest enemy of the common creative person is obscurity, not "free riders", "pirates", or whatever else people imagine would destroy their lives if not for the protectionist monopoly power of copyrights.
My experience, as a writer and programmer of mixed success, is that when people notice my work I have a difficult time stopping them from giving me money or otherwise offering me incentives to continue; when they don't notice my work, I can't get people to accept it for free. There is no hyperbole in hits. I have literally put together websites where I attempt to distribute materials for free, just because I think it's good and should be seen by more people. The result is that nobody notices for long periods of time, but then eventually people might start taking notice -- and when that happens, well, to use one recent example, someone actually tracked down one of my email addresses via intensive web searching then used PayPal to contribute money to me because they couldn't find any other way to pay me for work I had already given away to the world for free, using a license that generally mimics the conditions of a world without copyright, on a site where I specifically stated that circumstances made it legally inadvisable for me at that time to solicit any contributions for my work.
Honestly, I think the concession that people might make a little more money with copyright than without it is not only negligible, not only overcome by the unrelated benefits of a lack of restrictive copyright monopoly, but actually the opposite of how it would work in general.
In short . . .
> The argument is instead that the non-derivative content producers fail to experience a harm sufficient to outweigh the harm that copyright causes to the producers of derivative works and to consumers.
I think -- based not only on a more comprehensive overview of the economic effects of copyright than most people ever imagine, and not only on observation of what happens when people start working with business models that do not strictly rely on copyright (e.g. Radiohead, Humble Bundle, Kickstarter, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Fucking Palmer, Google, EnterpriseDB, and so on), but also on personal experience many times over -- that even just considering the direct effects on published, financially successful creators themselves the benefits outweigh the detriments, and when you add in those who are not yet so successful those benefits only increase.
Then, as you say, there's the matter of people other than the creators themselves. Except for push-marketing middlemen and lawyers, everyone gains. The real reason we don't see as many examples of this in action as we'd like is because the people whose propaganda makes up the majority of the argument are the push-marketing middlemen.
Also, your complaint about them being 'strawmen' is true, but makes no sense. They are common 'myths, which is to say exaggerations of things people claim everyday. You yourself make several of his 'myths' in your post.
> The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it.
Translation:
> Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create.
> The economic argument is also very simple: the people making those works need to put food on the table. Despite all the rhetoric, nothing is stopping them from doing that in other ways right now, yet relatively few people actually are.
Translation:
> Myth: With free sharing, nobody will spend money on entertainment.
They aren't supposed to be perfect quoted arguments from real live people; just push back on common rhetoric.
> The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it.
Translation:
> Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create.
That isn't even close to the same thing, and neither was your second example. Like Falkvinge, you have turned a relative position (without copyright, less of X would be made) into an absolute (without copyright, none of X would be made). I have never seen anyone, not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that.
More importantly, I have certainly never seen anyone genuinely interested in changing copyright law for the better promoting such a position. There are alternatives to the mess that is today's implementation of copyright that don't involve killing the entire principle.
I have. I see it all the time, mostly in online discussion. No, I don't maintain a database of every such discussion in which I've participated, tagged with metadata about the fallacies employed in various discussions.
> not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that.
That's because they generally prefer to avoid speaking in absolutes except in specific, rare cases. The implications are obvious, even when their phrasing allows for what they think constitutes plausible deniability.
> More importantly, I have certainly never seen anyone genuinely interested in changing copyright law for the better promoting such a position.
It's not the people who want to change copyright law for the better that I'm most worried about. It's the people who want to maintain the status quo, plus add more restrictions, that are the biggest problem. Maybe you haven't said such things, and maybe you're interested in improving things in your own misguided way, but (for instance) Chris Dodd is only interested in improving the position of the MPAA -- and I'm pretty sure he has a hell of a lot more sway with Congress than you.
> There are alternatives to the mess that is today's implementation of copyright that don't involve killing the entire principle.
Yep -- and they're great stepping stones on the way to eliminating prior restraint of the free act of creation.
Maybe you haven't said such things, and maybe you're interested in improving things in your own misguided way
Well, since you appear to be quite happy putting words under my fingertips, perhaps you'd like to tell me what I think on this subject? I'll give you a free clue to start with: at no point in this discussion have I come anywhere within a hundred miles of defending the likes of Chris Dodd and the xxAA style Big Media lobbying groups, whose attitudes I have opposed consistently up to and including contacting my elected government formally on several occasions. (I'm not in the US, but we have some similarly aggressive copyright advocates here in Europe who are just as dangerous.)
My problem with a lot of the more recent comments in this discussion is that it's suddenly turned from talking about the original article to talking about some strawman at the opposite extreme as if those of us who don't agree with Falkvinge are somehow supporting the status quo. The original article takes an IMHO foolish absolute position of completely revoking copyright without proposing any alternative model to promote creation and distribution of new works. However, the alternative of breaking the social bargain the other way is no more palatable to me, with its effectively unending copyright via the Mickey Mouse Protection Act and similar legislation, ever more absurd penalties for hypothetical and often purely economic damages, and so on.
There is a middle ground, and what I would have hoped would be a common sense viewpoint: legislative policy on this kind of issue should be driven by clear moral and/or economic principles, and it should be made based on empirical evidence wherever possible. As far as I'm concerned, neither of the sides taking extreme views on copyright is even close to having a decent case based on real data so far.
Yep -- and they're great stepping stones on the way to eliminating prior restraint of the free act of creation.
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue there, but it looks like it's somewhere between a slippery slope fallacy and an attempt to undermine the existence of any legal system.
Please don't mistake the fact that I didn't bother debunking each individual point from the article here on Hacker News for either ignorance or apathy with regard to IP laws. I'm well aware of the opposing point of view and the common arguments made in its favour. I just haven't yet seen any real evidence that supports the kind of absurdly generic claim made by Falkvinge in this article.
And to be frank, I'm unlikely to be swayed by the kinds of pages you linked to indirectly in your reply, either, because they appear to repeat the same poorly thought out arguments as everyone else.
Sure, performing musicians can make money playing live. Shame if you're a composer or lyricist or a technician in the recording studio, I guess.
Sure, people can make low budget computer games and sell them for a nominal amount to an audience of geeks sympathetic to their pricing model. Shame if you want to play a AAA grade game with realistic graphics, professional quality character designs, professional quality voice acting, professional quality orchestral score, well-balanced gameplay, non-repetitive level designs, and an AI smarter than a snail, I guess.
Sure, we can find plenty of pulp fiction quality self-published stories on-line for free. Shame if you need a well-structured, professionally edited textbook for your kid's math class complete with a full set of exercises, I guess.
The same pattern comes up time and again in the cheap shots against copyright. Usually, the argument is either some variation of "plenty of work gets made anyway" but looking only at quantity and not quality, or some variation of "the artists can earn money by {some other model}" but without taking into account all the people who genuinely contribute to producing good work but aren't the immediate performer.
And then someone comes along and points out the isolated exceptions: a handful of big name FOSS products (invariably in fields that are widely applicable and attractive to a lot of geeks, which is a tiny part of the overall software landscape, and invariably ignoring any role copyright played in the development model of those products), a couple of performers who've made money with a high profile online experiment (usually people who were already well known thanks to their earlier work funded by more traditional models), and so on.
One of these days, I'd like to start a page with all the eternally repeated examples in this context and try to figure out how many of them there really are and what proportion of their overall industries they actually represent. Alas, since no-one is going to pay me for that work, I had better go back to building my copyright-protected company where the revenues do go straight to the handful of people who are putting in huge amounts of hard work to do things no-one has ever done before, which apparently doesn't exist in Falkvinge's mind because we're all under 40.
I'd make a blanket response to your "Shame if you..." points as follows: Maybe those ships have sailed and society has no need of those things anymore. If society needs those things it will find a way to pay for them. If it can't, it doesn't need them.
An industry's failure to create a sustainable business model in the face of the reality that technology has created isn't a failing of the technology. It would be nice if business would just optimize for reality instead of trying (and repeatedly failing) to bend reality through legislation.
Clearly society wants AAA games and blockbuster movies, people spend huge amounts of money playing / watching them. Society has already found a way to pay for them, it's called copyright.
I would be interested in a survey of the public, which said we can dump copyright, in return for losing almost all high cost games, movies and TV. I would guess the majority of people would vote to keep copyright.
I don't know that the public realizes what they're giving up in "consideration" for what they're receiving. I think that arguing about absolute positions on copyright is silly. Throwing out copyright is a bad idea, but what we have in the US now-- de facto eternal copyright starving out the public domain-- is at least equally as bad.
If society needs those things it will find a way to pay for them. If it can't, it doesn't need them.
I don't accept your premise. The situation is too similar to a tragedy of the commons, with a large dose of ignorance mixed in: most people outside the creative industries have no idea how much hard work by how many different kinds of people ultimately contributes to that smash hit music recording or novel or computer game. They just think of it as the latest track from $singer or the latest book from $author/$publisher or the latest game from $studio.
Take a look at how long the credits are the next time you watch a blockbuster movie that you enjoy, and see how many of the job titles you even understand. Unless you work in the movies, it will probably be a small minority, yet without all the others you probably wouldn't have enjoyed the movie nearly so much, assuming it even existed.
The trouble is, a lot of people have got used to two conflicting views in recent years: we expect ever higher creative values in works (which come with a higher sunk cost to produce the work initially) and yet we see that we can redistribute them cheaply and quickly (which implies a marginal cost near zero). If you don't have copyright, or some other economic tool, to amortise the huge sunk cost over a similarly huge audience, then you can't afford to make the work in the first place and the fact that the marginal cost of physical reproduction/redistribution is now near zero doesn't help you.
I can't accept the premise that society simply wants "higher creative values". Just because the technology exists to make movies, for example, that feature photorealistic CGI robots throwing buildings at each other doesn't mean that such technology (and its requisite expense) _has_ to be incorporated into every movie. High production values exist, but that doesn't mean every creative product must have them. Consumers still purchase licenses for works with lower production values if the work is compelling. It may be that the factors supporting the finance of works with large creation expense are just an aberration and will disappear. I'm not arguing morality or a position on copyright-- I'm simply saying that if it becomes impossible to profit with works that cost a lot to make then nobody will make those works anymore. Technology has changed the landscape, and unless you're willing to live in a police state with strict regulations on general purpose computing and communications technology, that genie isn't getting back in the bottle.
Of course there are worthwhile works that don't have expensive production costs. I've never suggested otherwise, nor would I.
But huge numbers of people apparently value the works we do produce today that have those expensive production values, and in the case of works created for utility rather than entertainment, the usefulness of the work may drop off rapidly if it's not as well made.
Technology has changed the landscape, and unless you're willing to live in a police state with strict regulations on general purpose computing and communications technology, that genie isn't getting back in the bottle.
Technology has changed many landscapes, but just because we can do something, that doesn't mean we should. Most people recognise that certain acts are harmful to specific people or to society as a whole, and we legislate to make those acts illegal. We can certainly debate whether copying a knowledge work under various conditions is such an act, and if so, whether copyright is an appropriate response, but I don't think "This is the way the world is, deal with it" is a compelling argument. Anarchy would be very unpleasant for many members of society.
Perhaps it could, but clearly we produce vastly more new works under copyright than we ever did when we relied on patronage. That doesn't necessarily demonstrate a causal effect, but again, I come back to the argument that nothing today is stopping wealthy patrons from funding new projects, yet hardly anyone is. I don't know why we'd assume lots of multimillionaire philanthropists would, either individually or with a handful of similarly rich friends, suddenly start personally paying for things like say the Lord of the Rings films, just because copyright was abolished. Even if they did, it would take lots of very rich people giving up a lot of their wealth to get anywhere near funding just what today's movie industry costs, never mind literature, music, software, and the rest.
> clearly we produce vastly more new works under copyright than we ever did when we relied on patronage.
When patronage was en vogue, we didn't have as high a rate of literacy or access to digital editing tools. These facilitations of the process of creation, even ignoring things like cheap paper and disposable writing implements that last months and cost less than a bottle of water, dwarf any legal changes that might otherwise apply (notwithstanding France's dark period of outlawing the printing press altogether as a tool of sedition). If copyright has anything to do with the current rate of creation, it is primarily by impeding the spread of inspirational materials that might otherwise hasten creative people's efforts. Compare copyright-controlled England with mostly copyright-free Germany in the 1800s to see how the freedom to copy and resell lit a fire under the asses of both writers and publishers, and created a lot more writers by spreading knowledge far and wide and as rapidly as possible to create a (for the era) highly educated population.
> it would take lots of very rich people giving up a lot of their wealth to get anywhere near funding just what today's movie industry costs
I think it's pretty clear that there is little correlation between relative level of funding and relative quality in the movie industry. In any case, there are other ways to get funding without relying on copyright than purely status-related patronage.
Or, we could take lots and lots of not very rich people giving a little of their wealth. The last time that society relied on patronage for producing art, we didn't have around a platform that can potentially connect all humans to support the same artistic endeavor.
This is basically how blockbusters are financed nowadays, so it's a viable proposition. There's no evidence that changing from copyright to patronage would change that outcome.
Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another. I don't know anyone who supports copyright and believes it to be the only way for creative folks to make money.
The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it.
The economic argument is also very simple: the people making those works need to put food on the table. Despite all the rhetoric, nothing is stopping them from doing that in other ways right now, yet relatively few people actually are.
Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright. There's an entire world of creative industries and bazillions in cash going into those industries, so finding more than an occasional study and isolated success story shouldn't be that hard... if their position is actually correct.