" I run Anna’s Archive, the world’s largest open-source non-profit search engine for shadow libraries, like Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, and Z-Library. Our goal is to make knowledge and culture readily accessible, and ultimately to build a community of people who together archive and preserve all the books in the world … In this article I’ll show how we run this website, and the unique challenges that come with operating a website with questionable legal status, since there is no “AWS for shadow charities”."
The equation is very simple for all forms of creation. The act of creation has real value and should be compensated for (in our society this means money, but this isn’t a rule). Once created, easily replicable items are only worth their cost to replicate and all other value is artificially induced. We compensate the act of creation fairly by any of the means i mentioned before and then all other costs are material and labor. This is fairest to creators although you will see less ultra wealthy artists, this will leave more wealth potential for artists with smaller starting resources.
Also, Art and knowledge are inseparable and this is obvious when you see how a scientist crafts their knowledge into stories and artists weild their medium as engineers.
But what encourages creators to create something that many people instead of only a few will enjoy or something enduring and actually useful / of high value (in terms of benefits for other people)? Should creators not be incentivized externally to work on things people actually need and perform this work well?
As i explained before, there are already examples of creators doing this. I’ll also point you to FOSS like the Linux Kernel which runs all of the worlds super computers and most of the internet. Also we are communicating currently through examples of this.