You say this like it's related to the parent quote. We could absolutely compensate people and not charge for information. It's not that hard to imagine that we could feed, house, care for, and provide a small stipend to authors, artists, etc. and also make their work output free to everyone who wants it.

Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough!

How much money do you think the scientists who wrote the papers are getting from the access fees? (Hint: it’s the only number that stays the same when you multiply it by sometting.)

The scientists who wrote the papers that Swartz downloaded were compensated, with the public's tax dollars. That should mean that we the public should now have free access to what we paid for. Unfortunately the government prefers to let private companies keep those papers behind paywalls.