I would not argue that crowdfunding – or to give it its formal name “assurance contracts” – is a substitute for patents (patents deserve a more socialist perspective for reasons out of scope here), but I would argue that assurance contracts are a substitute for copyright.

The fact that folk who make lots of money on, say, Kickstarter for creative projects without giving up the copyright on those projects says nothing about the potential of those projects to make that exact same money upon the promise of them being released into the public domain. It just says creators don’t like giving up copyrights – nothing more and nothing less.

If Amanda Palmer made a promise to release the music into the public domain, she still would have got the $1.2 million – because she has every right to insist that she be paid before she works, and she could very well have stuck to that by demanding the payment everyone would have had to cough up. The fact that she gets BMI cheques says nothing to discredit this.

Demanding you get paid for your work before you work can work on such a platform without the assumption of copyright. If the new Batman was planned, with the promise of it being public domain after, there’s nothing wrong with DC saying “but we need $50 million for it to happen – so that we can make the movie, get paid, and even make a profit which we believe would be rightfully ours”. And they would most certainly get it, considering how people know that if they don’t pay it won’t happen.

And bear in mind that if internet corporations want the traffic that comes from this public domain Batman, they’d have to contribute to the crowdfunding pot too. Depending on the potential that could tally several hundreds of thousands of dollars a corporation (if they want the profit from the traffic) – in other words, you can hold to account those who might have otherwise used the uselessness of copyright to screw you over instead.

What’s clever about assurance contracts is that they solve the so-called “free-rider” problem in a very direct and head-on way. The claim by copyright advocates is that if you don’t prevent the copying of a movie, 3 people will have only paid $10 in total to the artist while the artist should have got $30. But assurance contracts does not need to stop the unauthorised coping: it just means the artist says “all 3 of you pay $10 each totalling $30, or nobody gets any movie”. And there the artist can secure the $30 that was rightfully his. I can’t think of a more effective paywall than that.

And as we can tell from those who buy pre-owned DVDs only to give the artist nothing at all – something that copyright law does nothing to stop – there will always be those who don’t pay but yet there is still a standing movie industry, so there’s no “game theory” issue to worry about crowdfunding either. In other words, if everybody waited for someone else to pay for the brand new DVDs straight from the artist, the industry would collapse, but that doesn’t happen. Therefore, it wont happen with crowdfunding substituting copyright either.

And also, others DO know the value of paying artists directly and not via pre-owned art. Copyright law doesn’t really deserve credit for the funding of artists (and I’d especially say that more so in a world where people can “steal” on the internet without getting caught, but regardless there are others who still pay – again, no credit to copyright law for those who do the right thing without having to be told by a law).

Simultaneous payments are not that hard to set up. When ISPs take monthly payments from millions of subscribers, that’s a multi-million dollar simultaneous payment for a server – and de facto assurance contract – every month. Same with tickets for gigs. Same with subscriptions. Same with pre-orders. Same with betting agencies for live sports events. There is plenty of evidence that it works, and that copyright is not necessary for payment. And there’s no reason why it can’t extend to Google, ISPs etc to make them pay their share simultaneously with other interested parties to the creative project.

Copyright is at the end of the day a system that is worse than the Ron Paul vision of replacing the US state dollar with a private currency, and even someone as stupid and crazy as him wouldn’t dare advocate such a private currency should be in digital JPEG form. And why shouldn’t I make this comparison? Isn’t a private currency, made up of JPEG images, something you would forbid other people from infringing by making unauthorised copies for their own unjustified value? Shouldn’t such a private JPEG money system work according to the logic of copyright? We all know everybody would cheat such a crazy set up of money and companies would end up having more confidence in the Zimbabwean Dollar.

There is a reason why politicians make jibes about how their opponents take on policies with the worth of “Monopoly money”, though what is not as known as it could be is that Monopoly money, from the board game, is copyrighted, and therefore in theory should be a valuable, tradable, de facto private currency according to those who believe in artificial scarcity. I would seriously like to hear a good reply as to why this should not be the case, considering everything copyright advocates believe in about the notion of “utilitarian” policies and the like.