Ok. What do you propose, how should we pay for digital content?
To that question my answer would be a combination of basic income and crowdfunding.
Copyright doesn't encourage content production, it actively discourages it. It doesn't allow anyone to do anything they couldn't have done without copyright, but forbids you to do a whole bunch of things you otherwise could. And even what's constituted "fair use" is often practically impossible because the various draconian enforcement schemes (e.g. Youtubes ContentID) don't understand the concept.
Copyright doesn't give anyone any rights. It takes rights away from everyone other than the "rights holder". It doesn't protect, it punishes.
Beware of the newspeak.
Copyright also has effects that discourage certain types of creation, but that doesn't erase the encouragement it provides as well.
Now extrapolate from "Game of Thrones" to "Most entertainment experiences on the scale of Game of Thrones," and you quickly realize that neither crowdfunding nor basic income are adequate for pretty much any large-scale production. Hence, payment. You can rationalize not paying, but it doesn't change the fact that the experiences you enjoy wouldn't exist without people who do pay for them.
And, assuming you are an advocate for copyright since you haven't proposed anything else, have you ever considered what we're missing out on because of it? Copyright excludes a metric ton of content production by definition. It doesn't allow you to do anything that would otherwise not be possible, but forbids a lot that otherwise would be possible. Of course it's somewhat harder to point to examples that cannot even exist under the current regime, but use your imagination. There's a huge advantage in cost and effort in being able to build on what came before, compared to making everything from scratch every single time.
Open Source software and Wikipedia are perhaps the closest examples to what would be possible, but they're still very much hindered by copyright.
Beyond that, it's telling that you set up a strawman belief system and then bashed it without asking whether I actually hold those beliefs.
How do connections relate to paid content? Do they somehow come at a massive cost?
I did point out that I might be constructing a strawman, but seeing as you have yet to propose any alternative and copyright is in fact the status quo, it seemed like a reasonable assumption. Perhaps I should have added a question mark for emphasis, but feel free to clarify your position at any time.
I'd rather not subject my personal belief system to public analysis, because the average public opinion on beliefs is an average belief system, and the average belief system in any era has almost always been crazy.
People have been forking up $3-4 million for very niche adventure and old-school rpg games. Star Citizen is closing in on $60 million. This is with crowdfunding still in its infancy and projects that have orders of magnitude less interest than Game of Thrones. If people, both producers and consumers, don't care enough about Game of Thrones to make it happen, then so be it. But I don't believe that would be the case.
If the money would just be printed, it would of course cause inflation, but that's not redistribution, it's just distribution.
It still doesn't make sense to me that basic income will reduce costs in other sectors, but I'm probably just not smart enough to understand how.
I'm from Norway, where we already have a big welfare system funded by a progressive tax system. And which would already be able to fund most of a basic income. So obviously the idea of redistribution isn't that big of an issue around these parts. As a result, I'm perhaps too quick to assume funding would be done through taxation.
Not sure what you mean by "other sectors". Other relative to which sector(s)?
I misspoke earlier. I meant "I don't understand how basic income could reduce the costs you mentioned earlier, like production costs." But I'd like to. Do you have some time to explain why this works?
I assumed it would be something like: People are given money in order to cover basic costs of living. But because everyone is given the same amount of money, that will increase all costs throughout the economy, because if people have this basic amount of money, people are free to charge even more for their products and services, since they know people will be able to afford it.
That logic is admittedly a little convoluted and probably incorrect, because I haven't spent much time thinking about this.
So first of all, a basic income would be a lot more transformative to society than it would seem at first glance. It's not just about people getting more money to spend. Crime would go down, peoples health would improve and we would trust each other much more since there's much less reason to lie and cheat just to get by (which is considered a major factor in the success of the Scandinavian model.) We'd need less police, less health care, and insurance costs would go down. And of course the entire means-testing bureaucracy would be unnecessary.
Then there's the labour market. Not being required to hold a job, and the increased bargaining power that entails, could lead to a number of different outcomes that are sometimes hard to predict. Shitty jobs would either become less shitty, pay better (which of course makes it more expensive for the employer), or get automated if it's cost-effective. As would jobs individually considered harmful, meaningless or counter-productive, like the military, weapons manufacturing, telemarkting and advertising, to name a few. People would likely get a lot more educated, and the education system would hopefully transform from being a production line of worker drones to actually encouraging curiosity and learning. Innovation would flourish, since anyone could just go out and do their own thing without risking homelessness. Cooperatives would be much more prevalent. "Good" jobs might pay less, since there would be a lot more well-educated labour available.
But here's the kicker: when having a job is no longer essential, there's no reason to artificially create jobs. We could stop encouraging consumerism and infinite growth, and institute policies that are untouchable today because they remove jobs or hinder job creation. Which would cause people to spend more time and energy on what they really want to do, things that actually matter, rather than hoarding stuff. Many would work less, others more, because they're able to do work they enjoy and don't have to do it primarily for material gains. Those with small children or elderly parents could spend more time taking care of them themselves, instead of shipping them off to some institution or other.
A lot of work that's good but difficult or impossible to monetize, that currently need to be supported by advertising or considered charity, could actually be done full-time without having to spend your time fundraising or degrading your work with advertisements. It could be done part-time alongside a part-time job for some extra spending money, or on a break from your ordinary job. I think we'd see a huge increase in political activism, journalism, and a transformation in how democracy would work in general. Finally, if we got rid of copyright, the production of creative works would be included in this category, and while not very likely, it would be possible to produce something like Game of Thrones without a single cent of funding.
If all that waste and abuse could be eliminated, or significantly reduced, it would reduce cost at every step of the production chain. Profit margins, and therefore prices, would be kept down unless for some reason competition decreases. Prices might even be lowered further if there's less manipulative marketing creating artificial demand. Skilled labour might be cheaper because there's more of it available, and if it's something people really want to work on I believe they'd care less about the paycheck and more about doing what the want to do.
I'm not particularly creative, so I'm sure a creative person could come up with a better list.