No One Is in Charge at the US Copyright Office

Attract an audience and ask for patronage or get a job writing on behalf of an employer.

So basically instead of doing real work (positive sum games - producing value), everyone has to either:

a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion, advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)

or

b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?

Leads to a class system where those who actually create for society are parasitically leeched on by a class whose wealth only exists because of another government enforced monopoly.

> those who actually create for society

If someone's unable to find anyone willing to pay them in advance for their work or purchase a subscription, is their work really creating much value to society?

Why would someone that is somewhat constrained w.r.t. spending pay for something they would get for free?

> a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion, advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)

How is advertising a book you've written and are selling different than advertising your writing or skills to potential patrons and clients with regard to being negative-sum?

b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?

Who said anything about the relative wealth or patrons and authors? People seem totally willing to subscribe to people whose creative output they value. Sometimes such patronage is barely enough to live, sometimes it's an impressive total sum.

In fact, if _just taking_ someone else's material possessions (rather than intellectual work) was legal, why would anyone build anything they can't physically protect themselves?

A lot of the people bashing on copyright seem to have no concept of the second order effects abolishing copyright would have and no intention to game it out.

Copyright has issues. For example it protects corporations instead of individual creators and workers. But not having it means rich people who own brands and have access to massive advertising can just take someone's work and make money from it while contributing nothing of value by themselves.

We had a few very violent revolutions and civil wars to get out of feudalism and patronage, and I can't believe how many techies want to take us back.

It's called feudalism. The lords have a monopoly not just on the means of production, they own the full stack of society and economy in their domain.

re a) For starters, the difference is you already have a product which people can judge vs you claim you're gonna produce something great. Anybody can lie, some people can lie very well. Even ruling out malice (which many people underestimate), people just end up not keeping their promises. Would you pay GRRM for the finished Winds of winter? Would you fall for him asking for money to write it a few years ago?

re b) An employer ("user") is generally richer than the person they're employing ("using"). The reason they can employ people and people are willing to be employed is because they have access to tools such as trademarks, patents, other employees or advertising budgets the employee ("person used") does not. It's a relationship where power is fundamentally imbalanced.

I wonder how many people see themselves as just temporarily embarrassed millionaires so they sympathize with the upper class where they feel like they should belong.

Or they just have no mental model of how incentives work. All this talk about abolishing copyright coming from people whose job literally consists of creating intellectual property. I have never seen one of them try to think it through and come up with the new equilibrium a world without copyright would settle into.

Saying the quiet part out loud usually doesn't play well on HN, evidently

What class are you talking about here, and what monopoly?

Other than authors, the people I can think of that make money off novels are book printers and occasionally media studios? But those also depend on copyright, and other than copyright nothing makes them a monopoly.

The OP is proposing a patronage system. The world has had a long history with that.

I think we can look back on history and see what kind of class system dominated when creators had to rely on patronage to eat.

That has the causality backwards. Patronage does not lead to unequal wealth, it's the unequal wealth that leads to patronage being the only way to fund art. Getting rid of copyright would not give the wealthy more money via government enforced monopoly.

Also they're using the term "patronage" more loosely when they say to attract an audience. There's no horrible class inequality when a bunch of people are paying $1-100 a month.