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Comment by s73v3r | Hacker News Reader

People like to eat food and pay rent. Not everyone can afford to give away their hard work for free.

That's one way of putting it. Another way of putting it would be: people that make a living wage, with enough time off, have the resources to donate to the creative commons.

If you frame it that way, the problem isn't how can people charge for their passion, but how can we get people decent working conditions so that they can have a meaningful and rich life outside of work?

What if their hard work is determined by the marketplace to have no value?

Then people won't use it.

But knowing the internet, people will claim up and down that it doesn't have any value, while still using it. And then call the person greedy for wanting to feed their family.

Something can have a value to me at free, and if the price were to rise at all, I would shift my consumption elsewhere.

Like Taylor Swift on Spotify.

You're paying for Spotify with ads.

Just barely. I hit mute when they come on. I'd rather miss the next song than listen to an ad.

Then pay for Spotify.

Like I said above:

> Something can have a value to me at free, and if the price were to rise at all, I would shift my consumption elsewhere.

I don't consider those things to be work, though. I make things because I like to, and because making public domain work available improves the world.

I like to make those things too. I also like getting paid for doing something I like.

And like I said, not everyone is lucky enough to where they can give away a lot of their labor.

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