People who don't believe this are probably biased because they are Alice.
Don't be Alice.
When challenged, rationalizations might come out.
Circumstantial evidence of this is that we really don't see a lot of clear altruistic looking towards human progress... on other topics.
If we mostly only talk about principled stands when it happens to be very convenient in a selfish way, the selfish way seems a more likely explanation.
If there were a way to give two cents for each article I read, I'd do that, but there isn't.
I don't ever read one single thing, but I read an article or two from countless of services.
That modern society is structured around protecting Alice rather than protecting Bob and helping him free the 0s and 1s is simply a side effect of this, and an extremely unfortunate, progress-stalling one... the kind where you seriously contemplate going back in a time-machine to fix whatever went wrong to make us end up with.. this...
I agree, it's so weird that people who devote time, effort, and resources to the production of articles or books somehow think they're entitled to be compensated for the use of those products! What a bizarre belief! I mean, obviously they should just give them away for free. Not like they need money to survive or anything. They can just go on food stamps and live under a bridge or something.
As a creative person currently making an obscenely high amount of money doing rust development (north of $350k/yr), I'd happily throw all of that away to just be able to work on my open source projects in perpetuity if I could trust that society will take care of me, forever, in exchange. In fact, playing this whole capitalism game is a huge waste of my time and energy that I'd much rather spend making creative works without worrying about how I'll monetize them.
As someone who makes creative works, I don't _want_ to have to charge people to use/access/enjoy them.
We finally invent a thing (the Internet) that will let us share knowledge for free, and one of the first things that happens is a bunch of lawyers invent more work and job security for themselves by creating this fantasy notion that you can have Imaginary Property and they call it "Intellectual Property" so it's not immediately obvious how ridiculously selfish and society-retarding it is.
We live in a world of actual scarcity and they invented some artificial scarcity to benefit themselves exclusively, then immediately funded a bunch of bribery^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbying to make it illegal to share information for free.
>As someone who makes creative works, I don't _want_ to have to charge people to use/access/enjoy them.
Same here. I self published some stories on amazon and they won't let me charge less than a dollar for them, or I would. I'm infinitely more interested in people enjoying them than profiting from it. In fact, I found that they almost immediately ended up in some pirated torrent and was like, "How cool is that? Somebody thought it was worth pirating."
This notion that creative types won't create without financial incentive seems to come from lawyers, not creative types.
I think your narrative has gotten the relation between the invention of the internet and the creation of the subcategory of intangible personal property known as “intellectual property” very, very wrong.
Like, intellectual property is older than the USA and the internet is... not.
I happily pay for Youtube Premium so that I can listen to whatever music I want anytime. Spotify and other services are fungible with that. I sort of happily pay for Netflix, but their catalog is shrinking. I would happily pay a subscription for access to all or at least ~99% of newspapers.
Whatever music did right (ASCAP, BMI) isn't perfect but it's miles ahead of the trash subscription schemes anywhere else.
Yeah this is a super good idea. I would pay $5 a lot of the time to access these just so I don't have to deal. Would have to accept paypal and I'd do it.