Or the offering of goods through existing channels a “carrot”?

You chose a pointless either/or when the real problem is that numbers of consumers aren’t paying yet can enjoy the products.

@ “demanding rates that are sure to bankrupt them” — Simply means that consumers would rather have all for free. You can’t compete with free.

My views on this have evolved a bit: I don’t think the solution to piracy is to offer more legitimate service on demand. For one thing it’s a bit utopian to expect such services to always be ready at the whim for consumers (servers crash, need upgrading, traffic peaks etc), and if you have an audience that must have their demands met instantaneously, with no degree of patience whatsoever, it only takes the slightest thing to throw their patience off and go for a pirated option.

The issue of “solving piracy” in a copyright legal system is too shallow a debate for me. I want the more radical option of acknowledging that copyright is a stupid idea to begin with, and get rid of it altogether.

I have a couple of metaphors to best compare copyright with to show it’s unenforcability. The first one is that of a currency. Copyright is for all intents and purposes a currency (not backed by any standard like gold) because you are making copies of something of artificial value and forbidding anyone else from making a copy without your permission, with the intent of giving value to something originally not of material value through social conditioning.

The trouble is that we all know why a system of currency where “anything with a dollar sign on it counts as a dollar and only we, the US state, may make copies of that dollar” would not work as a system of money, while “anything with hard-to-copy special paper with special printed markings and authentication strips that can only be uniquely created by us the US state may be made with our permission, whilst anyone else attempting it will be caught rather easily, counts as a dollar” would work, as it evidently does. Try protecting your dollar forgeries through copyright legislation instead of fraudulent currency legislation, and change your definition of dollar to “a copyright of the dollar symbol” to see how far under that would get you the country.

Monopoly money is used as a tool of ridicule against a politician’s financial policies for precisely this reason: everybody knows that it would be horrendous to circulate Monopoly money as your attempt at a state currency. Yet, because Monopoly money is copyrighted, in theory this should work and should be enforceable as a tradable commodity. But we all know how easily we could cheat such a system. Not even Ron Paul would use such a system of evading state-controlled-and-inflated money.

The second metaphor to describe copyright’s uselessness is this: memes. Richard Dawkins coined the word to describe a cultural unit that replicates similar to genes on a Darwinian level, to show that Darwinian evolution happens in other areas. It is more than a metaphor, because all language, ideology, tradecraft and tradition can be described as things that have passed on down the generations.

Memes spread from person to person through copying. Let me reiterate: copying. What the copyright advocates claim is rather extraordinary. They believe not only that can control this replication process, but that they can forbid everyone else from doing so if they choose. So that Darwinian evolution only applies in this little bubble they’ve set themselves. As if they can predict the course of cultural evolution their art will take and know what steps will be needed to put a stop to it. As we all know, copyrighted material can manifest as viral form and not just digitally, and in doing so they take the form of memes. The Bible is one of the oldest memes/collection of memes in the world, but the Catholic Church could not stop the Reformation, which need I remind you all was pushed forward by unauthorised copying of the holy book that church wanted to forbid at all costs.

I don’t really need the internet to show why the attempt to restrict and/or control memes will not go the way you intend. You cannot stop folk passing on art to next-door neighbours/friends who haven’t paid for it for example. You can’t stop the art’s mutation into something else (stupidly called “recoding” in some copyright circles that want a put a stop to it, for unrelated reasons of artist “identity” as property), because nobody can claim to stop a genetic mutation let alone a memetic one.

I once heard someone say on forums/boards like this the following: “Intellectual property is all in the mind” and I thought it was very good at honing in on what I’m meaning here.

If you get past this mentality and see it for the doomed, incompetent policy that it is, you can look to the paywalls that work and guarantee the artist real property powers to set whatever price he/she wants for work. The assurance contract economies are the greatest functional alternatives precisely because it sees the value in the work done to do the art, not the intangible end-product which is de facto worth Monopoly money. “I will only do this work if I receive $100,000 in payment” interferes with no freedoms and does not have this contradiction of labour/property that copyright seems to have. Freedom of creativity and ability to protect property (strictly should be called worker’s rights) are all protected with this simple request, where the $100,000 must be met by the other end of the market who have an interest in seeing the art: the audience.

Which is why Kickstarter and Patreon are the real revolutionaries here, not Netflix, Spotify or iTunes. The latter have to push their costs to zero as much as they can to satisfy a crowd with no responsibilities to pay the artist under copyright. But with crowdfunding – specifically assurance contract economies – where the art is forbidden from being released at all until the artist is paid up, it makes piracy truly impossible and therefore it becomes the only way to really make piracy stop. This way the audience must pay in order to get any art at all, and at the whim set by the artist. And you have a functioning free market where the artist can set the prices, make the profits, and not deliver the art if the audience isn’t meeting their dues. Trading your physical work done for the collective payment of the audience functions as a market. Just look to tickets, subscriptions, pre-orders etc to see assurance contracts in action.

That to me is a far greater method of making creativity work that has some real force behind it. Not this silly game where you’re chasing everybody around the world for Monopoly money forgeries.