Yeah, this is what I was expecting. I have no love for Disney et al but I think that this is dire (aside from UBI, which would be great but is fictional without a large-scale shift in American culture).
"Everybody else gets paid for the work they do; you get paid for things around the work you do, if you're lucky" is a way to expect creatives to live that, to put a point on it, always ends up being "for thee, but not for me". It's bad enough today--I think you described something worse.
The current model is "most people get paid for the work they do, but you get paid for people copying work you've already done", which already seems asymmetric. This would change the model to "people get paid for the work they do, and not paid again for copying work they've already done".
We converged on a system that protects the commercialization of copies because, in practice, "the first copy costs $X0,000" is not a viable way to pay your rent.
If we want art to be the province of the willfully destitute or the idle rich (and I do mean rich, the destruction of a functional middle class has compacted the available free time of huge swaths of society!), this is a good way to do it. I would rather other voices be included.
We converged on a system that makes copying illegal because that system was invented in an era when the only people who could copy were those with specialized equipment (e.g. printing presses). In that world, those who might do the copying were often larger than those whose works were being copied, and copyright had more potential to be "protective".
That system hasn't been updated for a world in which everyone can make perfect-fidelity copies or modifications at the touch of a key; on the contrary, it's been made stricter. And worse, per the story we're commenting on here, the much larger players who are mass-copying works largely by individuals or smaller entities have become effectively exempt from copyright, while copyright continues to restrict individuals and smaller entities, and the systems designed by those large players and trained on all those copied works are crowding individuals out of art and other creative endeavors.
I don't think the current system deserves valorizing, nor can it be credited as being intentionally designed to bring about most of the effects it currently serves.
I'm not suggesting that deleting copyright overnight will produce a perfect system, nor am I suggesting that it has zero positive effects. I'm suggesting that it's doing substantial harm and needs a massive overhaul, not minor tweaks.
Many of the funding models Josh listed are directpayment for creative work being done. If anything, in the current model creative work is often not paid directly (unless done as work for hire where the creative doesn't get to own their creation) but instead is a gamble that you can later on profit from the "intellectual property".
"Everybody else gets paid for the work they do; you get paid for things around the work you do, if you're lucky" is a way to expect creatives to live that, to put a point on it, always ends up being "for thee, but not for me". It's bad enough today--I think you described something worse.