I bet you were looking for this:
I could rant about copyright, but I’d read the link given in the esteemed pastor’s post first, as he’s likely said everything I could, but better and 10 years earlier.
I don’t see that he addressed funding models, so I may add something there: Copyright didn’t exist until the early 1700s. The closest was a proto-copyright regime of censorship established in the mid 1600s. Yet we still had books–an entire Reformation fueled by printed books–without copyright. We still had beautiful music. Some of the greatest artistic achievements of all human history were accomplished before copyright.
Instead of the government-backed, debt-financing model that is a modern copyright regime, there were other ways artists, musicians, and “content-creators”, to use the current parlance, were compensated. (1) They were commissioned to create new art, made-to-order. (2) They were maintained by patrons, producing art as a service. They were paid per performance, either (3) command performance or (4) revenue sharing with the venue, which is another way of saying they were commissioned or paid as service-workers. In this way, the artist was fully compensated for the work by the time it was completed.
The patronage model has continued for most media up to the present day. The proportion of people who have paid for most of their content is even smaller. Radio, newspapers, magazines, and network television have all acquired most of their income through advertisement, which is patronage by wealthy businesses.
I’d be curious to know what kind of funding model Clearnote goes with. We can see at least part in that there are a few Warhorn-related Patreon funds. This is (5) a distributed version of the patronage model. Some of it, I’m sure, is (6) volunteer work, that is to say, self-funded.
The key is to see that content is not a commodity worked from the ground nor the tangible product of manufacturing. Content-creation is a service industry. In medicine, you don’t buy a surgery, you pay for the services of someone who knows where to cut. In art, it is a fiction to think you can create an image that won’t be copied–it will at least be copied in the mind of every viewer. Rather the artist should be paid for knowing the where to put the next brush-stroke. In my own line of work, any monkey could bang on a keyboard for hours, but I get paid to know which key to press next.