The hardest part is choosing a cool acronym...
- Libertarian Intellectual Business Model Actualization Network?
- Voluntaryist Alliance to Generate Income for Needy Authors?
- Web Entrepreneurs for Ending Destructive Predatory Intellectual Property Enforcement?
Now seriously... I've frequently written about IP-based business models being possible in a free society through emerging incentives to enter into contractual obligations with other businesses
(ex). Perhaps some libertarians / voluntaryists / AnCaps would be willing to enter into such an alliance already, for the purpose of supporting like-minded individuals, and perhaps getting some money back yourself on the basis of intellectual merit. The old idea of intellectual property -- buy and don't copy or I'll sue -- seems kind of outdated in the online world, even if we can establish a rational contractual basis for such a lawsuit, but I'm sure plenty of new ideas for monetizing authorship can be discovered.
One possibility is to have this network / alliance / organization collect membership fees, and then divvy up the sum to pay the top member IP producers a share of the pie on the basis of readership (Web-site hits, podcast downloads, software usage statistics, etc) and/or quality rankings. Obviously that economic model wouldn't work if it's just authors paying authors - it would require a less famous bottom ~97% of the pyramid to have some incentive to join and pay membership fees that benefit others. Possible membership benefits would include: using authors' ad-space for the member's benefit (i.e. a centralized system of rotating ads across many authors' sites), bragging rights, exclusive merchandise with certificates of authenticity, access to members-only content (ex. software betas, support forums, feature requests) and IRL events (ex. at porcfest), etc... and of course being a member is a prerequisite to becoming a paid author yourself if you're good enough someday.
Probably a better idea is not to have this network handle any money at all, but merely act as an authoritative transaction history database - member X donated Y dollars to member Z on this date. This would avoid the problem of centralized management - people will always disagree on which formula to use for divvying up the pie, and fragmentation into multiple such alliances would weaken the economic base. This would also allow members to use any possible means of value transfer (ex.
bitcoin, gold, beans, bullets, whatever), although establishing a fair value of barter items for comparative purposes could complicate things quite a bit. Members would then be ranked by class (ex. platinum, gold, silver, bronze, etc) both as authors and as supporters based on how much money they give / receive. This would allow many of the same incentives mentioned in the previous paragraph, like only allowing access to something for "silver" donors or higher.
People who are not members of such an alliance (or "tin"-level members who've registered but haven't donated much) will be assumed to be infectious subhuman waste of matter until they start injecting money into the noösphere of libertarian ideas.
None of those ideas are anywhere close to being even 1/10th baked, but ya gotta start somewhere...