From a European point of view, the current copyright situation is just a wealth transfer from European companies who have the copyrights, to American advertising companies.
If anything they will make more money, not less.
Not to mention the absurdity of the link tax, I'm thinking that could be the last nail on the coffin of traditional media.
If every submission had to be pre-moderated, and royalty paid for every substantial quotation, this site would be very different, and definitely less vibrant and free.
«Article 13; which seeks to shift liability for platform users’ copyright infringements onto the platforms themselves — and which critics contend will therefore push them towards creating upload filters to monitor all content before it’s posted»
Emphasis mine.
Which costs $69 million per year to operate, has 300+ employees and requires six million donations. Your example also isn't free.
> Most user content is probably on Facebook or Medium
Medium is less than 1% the size of Wordpress, both in terms of traffic and amount of content. The majority of all content on Wordpress sites is ad free.
The consumer is paying for all of it in one manner or another. If it's a donation, it's coming out of your pocket. If it's an ad, it's data about you being monetized. There is no such thing as free if you're talking about something the size of Wikipedia or similar services.
Fire is useful, so everyone who uses fire should pay a company some money? No, that's clearly mad. No matter how useful it is if it's poorly optimised or over costly then we should do better, not settle because it's already a great RoI.
It’s a bit ridiculous that something so important to so many people relies on donations from individuals.
Perhaps a large endowment, like private universities, could work? Enough money to let them invest in a diversified portfolio and run their sites off of the profits.
If anything Wikipedia is an example of the opposite problem - a charity that is too successful. Do you really think 300 people are needed to maintain the Wikipedia servers and software? No, of course not, the Wikimedia organisation has grown massively over time and almost all of those staff are working on things the average Wikipedia donator wouldn't even recognise.
I stopped donating to Wikipedia a long time ago, because it was clear that their fund-raising drives had stopped being connected to what the organisation actually needed to perform its mission and simply become a way to channel people's love for the work they had themselves produced together into a giant and very expensive party for a self-important management class.