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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

Who do you think is going to create all the content you want to read? The number of people willing to put the amount of time and effort required into writing a book without a profit motive is very low. The outcome is going to be the same. Except instead of having your access to copyrighted material restricted, it simply won’t exist.

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> The number of people willing to put the amount of time and effort required into writing a book without a profit motive is very low.

I wonder how did you arrive at that.

It's sort of common knowledge that only 1-2% of books written will net any sort of profit, so one might just as well write for free. As many, many people do, and outperform the for-profit writers too, on quality.

Aspiring writers aspire to make a living off their work. It might be an entirely misguided career path, but they’re not aspiring to be destitute their entire life. Remove ownership of their own work, and the illusion that they’ll ever be able to earn a living from it disappears.

The only way to get to the point where you earn a living as a writer, or actor, or film maker, or painter... is to start off by doing it without getting paid. The fact that most people ultimately fail isn’t evidence that they’re not interested in succeeding.

> Aspiring writers aspire to make a living off their work.

Aspiring writers can aspire for fame, an audience, enthusiastic reviews, a platform, or loyal fans. Do those necessarily put food on the table? No, but many people happily write, perform, paint, etc. knowing that it won't pay the bills. The idea that everyone is in it for the money is a blanket statement that I'm not sure is even true for most creatives.

You can make a separate claim about whether artists should be able to financially support so that they can make art full time, but that's quite a different claim.

> The number of people willing to put the amount of time and effort required into writing a book without a profit motive is very low.

Citation needed. Writing a book, on average, makes people very little money. Some of the funniest or most entertaining content I've read has been on sites with user-generated content, such as Reddit, where there's no (direct) profit motive for good writing.

Profit motive or not, people will continue to write. Homer and Shakespeare lived in a time with no copyright laws and produced some of the greatest works of literature.

I'm not advocating for zero copyright laws, but I call bullshit on this assertion that creative works exist only due to their protection.

Homer was not one person. It's probably an archetype representing several (or many) ancient Greek bards singing heroic epics from village to village for several centuries, until it was written down. The interesting part about the writing down is was that it was a well paid, large scale, effort sponsored by the city state of Athens. A sort of highly important, and well funded, state propaganda of the time. So, if it were for people working for the sole motive of good writing, we wouldn't even know that these epics existed, since they would have been long forgotten, just as many other oral folk epics around the world.

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