(The following was inspired by a question asked in response to The Mythology of Intellectual Property.)

There are innumerable ways to make money without copyright — and, in many cases, people are already doing so and may not even realize it.

For instance, for the most part signed bands use record sales solely to pay off debt incurred as part of their record deals for purposes of getting initial record publishing and distribution done; they get their actual living wages (on the rare occasion when they can make a living from music) by playing live gigs and selling merchandise. They may not actually realize it in many cases, but for most professional musicians the real financial benefit they get from record sales — the one part of the profession that requires copyright — is advertising. The record labels get profits directly from record sales, while the musicians just get well enough known to be able to make money at their live shows. News flash; it’s a lot cheaper to distribute yourself over the Internet, and let people burn your CDs if they want to, than to pay out the nose to have some suited schmucks at Sony/BMG make money off you and only advertise for you incidentally.

For other examples of how people can make money without jealously guarding their intellectual monopolies, look at Cory Doctorow (he keeps making his books and short stories available for free online); Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and Harvey Danger (made more net profits off records they basically gave away than on albums distributed through the usual channels); and Websites that use movies and other video productions to drive traffic to them so they can make money through secondary effects (such as on-site advertising, merchandising, and so on).

There are also services such as fundable that provide an easy framework for getting people to pledge money toward the eventual free release of something. You create something, ask for a particular target value in contributions and, once you get the money, release it to the world; voila, you’ve been paid. A number of writers have used this to finance authorship of books, and a number of musicians have done the same for production of album-length collections of music.

I make money by writing (both articles in English and software source code), in fact — far more than the piddly quantities I get from advertising on this obscure site — and I would love for copyright to go away. It’s not like I’m working in manufacturing and advocating for someone else’s industry to change all its rules. I’m talking about what I want to happen with the very fields of endeavor where I make money. This is why, every time I can reasonably do so, I attach a copyfree license to everything I create — usually the Open Works License.

The real answer to the question, though, is much simpler than all of the above:

It’s not my fault your business model sucks.

I’ve said it before (more than once in fact) and, given half a chance, I’ll say it again.