hey I saw you mention in the comments on the Toby Fox post that you have a further analysis of how to make money as a creative worker in the absence of copyright that relates to the idea of bourgeois class interests, would you mind elaborating on that? I’m also a copyright abolitionist and that’s one of the things I struggle with the most on that position, so I’m curious what you have to say about it 
obviously this raises questions about how i'm supposed to make money as a game dev, if i'm also pro-piracy, pro-"people doing whatever they want with my game", and all that! my answer here ties into the concept of "bourgeois class interests" and i can elaborate further if you'd like.
how can we be creative workers and oppose copyright?
we distinguish goods (food, phones, houses, diamonds) and means of production (land, factories). owning goods as private property is one thing, but owning means of production as private property lets you use money as capital. capital is money used to buy something, then make a profit off it; specifically, you're buying people's ability to create goods using your means of production, and selling these goods at a profit.
the people who do this are capitalists, also called bourgeois, and they are part of the bourgeoisie - the ruling class in a capitalist society.
private property law is essentially the ruling class making promises that it will allow fellow members of the ruling class to continue owning private property. these promises are backed by databases of who owns what, judicial procedures for clarifying and confirming ownership, judicial system to follows those procedures, and ultimately cops to drag people into courtrooms and enforce any resulting punishment.
copyright law, more generally intellectual property law, is not special! it's just a type of private property law, specially focused on intellectual goods and intellectual means of production. "copyright" reserves me the exclusive "right" to make "copies", among other rights (the famous "all rights reserved"). this reveals that capitalism actually creates scarcity when there was none, and invites state violence to maintain it.
copyright law establishes my right to sell access to my video game, just as real estate law establishes my right to sell access to a scenic view, at least if i have ownership of the game and the land, respectively. landlords charging rent are in a similar position. the truth is, opposing copyright law makes sense, but the logical conclusion is to oppose all other private property law too: culture should be freely accessible to all society. land and housing should be freely accessible to all society, too.
my game code, scenic spot or apartment are similar to factories: they can produce goods, and i privately own them. i have bourgeois class interests in the sense that it would benefit me to continue privately owning my property (instead of it being owned by society as a whole), use my money as capital (money that serves to accumulate money), engage in rent-seeking behavior, wield the coercive legal-judicial power of the capitalist state (defending my property using prosecutors and cops). and generally, to maintain, endorse and strengthen all of that.
but interests isn't the same as my actual class. maybe i'm doing this stuff as a bourgeois (meaning i'm not a worker, i hire people to work using the stuff i own) or as a petit bourgeois (i'm the one working with the stuff i own, i have conflicting interests: a worker's, and an owner's).
around two thirds of artists worldwide are neither. they are proletariat: wage workers, hired to labor using means of production owned by their employer. this is arguably the one type of creative work where your class interests are working-class, not bourgeois, because copyright law usually serves to transfer ownership of your creations to your employer.
working artists aren't using copyright law anyway
if you're a proletarian artist, it's in your interests to destroy private property law, like all proletariat- to seize the means of production so they are owned by workers, by all of society. and that's the truth. most artists aren't self-employed. they can give up copyright law because they genuinely just don't benefit from it.
the remaining one third of artists worldwide who are self-employed are... also not using copyright law or benefitting from it. they're already at the whims of the market, spending long stretches of time either looking for clients (e.g. offering art commissions) or creating a product and hoping it will sell (e.g. video game). meanwhile your savings are draining and you're praying you'll at minimum make that money back.
is copyright really helping you pull that off? no. piracy happens to successful products, the ones that already sell. in fact, we have evidence it actually contributes to your product's popularity and sales. all releasing your work under permissive licenses or even public domain (CC-BY, CC0) would do is draw the attention of "asset flip" types that will sell your work and take in the profits, but that's not happening unless your work is already going to be popular. odds are that releasing under CC-BY and CC0 would really just draw positive attention to you.
just speculating, but a world where undertale (or god forbid, deltarune) was released under CC-BY-SA would be a very different world, maybe one where toby fox isn't a millionaire but where he certainly still makes a living, and very likely a world where this move launched the career of hundreds of future artists, who got their start selling their fangame.
in any case, the real problem is that you're submitting yourself to the whims of the market and copyright law supposedly helps you... if you find an audience, in which case it helps you recoup sales and make a profit. supposedly. or, your game is a flop and you make $0 and starve.
no amount of copyright law, infinite or zero, can actually change that.
is wage work the solution, then?
so we might as well become proletarian workers as mentioned above, right? but in that case, while we don't even pretend we can wield copyright law, we're still subjected to it. okay, maybe we can join a capitalist studio, unionize, and force concessions out of the employer. joining a workplace to unionize it is a known tactic (called "salting").
but... but we don't have to be paid a wage by capitalists, society can provide for us, right? work on free open source software, get ordinary people to pay you wages via patreon, release the software. easy!
well, close, but not really. workers who rely on the patreon models are forced to face the reality of patreon-like platforms, which are privately owned. they control what you're allowed to do, and take a cut even though you're doing all the work. sure, you own the means of production, but you rely on their private means of production too.
but why? why do we need patreon, can't we make our own?
patreon exists because workers must interface with the payment processor monopoly. transactions in the west are processed by private entities, who love to forbid you from paying for any kind of goods that doesn't meet their christian USA-centric capitalist standards. like porn. patreon is just their lapdog. they know how to navigate their bullshit.
we can't have a state-funded equivalent of patreon in states ruled by the capitalist class. a nonprofit version would need a source of funding and social momentum, or risk getting demolished by payment processors, and by other private entities.
like non-proletarian workers, creators using this system would still be fighting each other for their share of the world's attention, and obeying the whims of the market- can't get paid a wage for free software that's not in demand. so, even if we made the funding infrastructure publicly-owned (yippee!), we haven't changed the other steps of art production!
making a living ethically isn't the goal
so even if we succeed on paying the bills with creative work without relying on copyright law, that's not helping us destroy copyright law.
all we've done is make life easier for workers under capitalism. that isn't the goal, in fact it could even make us complacent with the system! our goal is to destroy capitalism and private property ownership as a whole.
any desire to help workers (creative or others) make a living, and fight to abolish private property law (copyright or otherwise), must exist as part of a pointed, deliberate, organized effort by workers to overthrow the capitalist class - a revolutionary effort, in short.
as long as you participate in that effort, and stand with workers against bourgeois interests, it doesn't matter much how you earn a living. you can even be bourgeois and betray the bourgeoisie by lobbying against copyright law. like realistically you won't be, but that's the general idea.
in the meantime, releasing art under CC-BY isn't #praxis, but it's cool.
