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Message: <blockquote data-quote="occam" data-source="post: 4038632" data-attributes="member: 39815">I'm responding to the part of your post that addresses my question: How does a creator make a living? Arguments about the inevitability of free information and the like are side issues, IMHO, to what I think is most pressing: How do you prevent the destruction of a vibrant culture of widely available artistic works in an era where duplicates of such work are distributed freely?Self-funded or patron-funded art will never be enough to replace what we have now; there simply isn't the money or the will. Let's discuss the other option, some sort of taxpayer funding for creative works.You'll still need staff. You'll still need marketers, people looking at finances, lots of IT support, etc. Perhaps not as much if you have essentially single-payer entertainment in the form of a government, but then you have government itself discovering and promoting artists, negotiating with them, making decisions as to what is and isn't worth funding: an Orwellian scenario if I've ever heard of one.Alternatively, you can have government functioning as an intermediary with corporate representatives of artists, which is pretty much like what we have now, except that instead of being compensated directly (more or less) by consumers, these representatives' revenues come indirectly from government. You still have the possibility of government having a greater hand in deciding what's worthy of funding, but more immediately, you've removed most of the incentive the artistic representatives have to find and produce quality creative works. Either the representatives are funded by sheer volume of the works they produce with only minimal quality controls, or you have government directly assessing the quality of creative works. If you think the market is swamped with pablum now, just wait until the era of government-funded entertainment.I still don't see how any of these options work without a dramatic loss in the variety and/or amount of creative products we enjoy today.</blockquote>

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