A digital work is an infinite good, though. A JPEG can be copied over and over and over and over and over without any negligible cost. Compare that to a printed photograph, which requires multiple costly resources to create a single copy. And nowhere have I read Mike say “all digital works should be free, no matter what”. You seem to have confused his arguments about the idiocy of “artificial scarcity” vis-á-vis digital goods with explicit support for piracy.

The “right to control copies” did not, and still does not, account for how cheap and easy anyone can distribute digital works across the Internet. Authors can try to retain complete, iron-fisted control of distribution, sure—though once a single illicit copy makes its way onto the World Wide Web, that battle is lost. The ideal practice, in Mike’s theories about this subject, is to use those digital goods as a “loss leader”, so to speak, for something that cannot easily be pirated or duplicated. If a musician can give away an album for free, they can build up an audience who will pay to see that musician perform live—and while someone can always upload a bootleg of a concert, that does not replicate the experience of being at the concert in person.

Creating a work does not, and should not, guarantee even a “pittance” unless the work was made on commission. “Potential” income is not real income. And if some people do not want to pay that pittance, that is their problem and they, not Mike, must decide whether piracy is something they consider moral.

And by the by, artists and copyright holders should be searching for a better business model. Old models cannot last forever; nothing ever does. Hell, if you want to get down to brass tacks, the furry community has that shit on lockdown: In addition to straight-up commissions, lots of furry artists also do “Your Character Here” commissions (people pay to have their character inserted into a pre-posed image), “adoptables” (characters and character designs put up for “adoption” to the highest bidder), and other custom commission types. They also sell physical items such as con badges, enamel pins, stickers, shirts, artbooks, and even body pillow covers. And the overwhelming majority of furry artists do all of this while posting the bulk of their finished works for free to sites such as FurAffinity. They own their copyrights, they own their own “businesses”, and while most furries frown upon art theft (as in “someone put my art on a t-shirt without my permission”), the community has a somewhat less strict—but by no means universal—position on sharing art, even if it was paywalled. If any group embodies the notion of “find a better business model” in the age of infinite digital “goods”, furries do it better than anyone else. But now I have to wonder: How much do they “count” as “actual producers” in your eyes?