Yes, I would like someone here to provide an answer to this question.
For example: We're just wrapping up a new release of one of our products that I've been working on since August of 2017. It has over 1400 hours of work dedicated to it (single developer - myself). There's no way that we could possibly dedicate that amount of time to a software project without knowing that we could recoup the costs.
The trick is almost all creatives are already paid in the model most fitting the production of information - people that want the fruits of their labor pay them to make it. Very few software engineers, for example, are living off copyrighted sold copies of the software they wrote. The company they work for might, or some other knob in the chain, but for 99% of us we are not directly using copyright as our source of income - someone else is.
And that is the trick. People want software. We threw this extra, pointless step in the middle between "people C want X software" and "pay people D to make X" in the form of "have publishers / corporations P pay people D to make X to sell to C".
Every conservation on this always functionally boils down to "but that is so different from the way thing are now!" which of course it is. Its the same reason why the market for prohibited drugs is so much more convoluted, dangerous, and disconnected from regular commerce - you make things more complicated, like criminalizing posesssion of the good, or enabling the profiteering off information, and the market will warp to both meet demand and maximize profit using the framework the government provides to do so.
Its really no different from how you are told to get started in music or art or even how to get a job programming. You make stuff for free to start out to get a portfolio of work proving you know what you are doing. Once you can prove your ability you ask for money to make more, be it words, art, designs, code... its how the world has worked for all time. It is only in the last two hundred years this model of "make stuff and ask for money later with the backing power of the state" perverted commerce. And all of us commoners never even got to benefit. We still work in classical employment. We still need to do the work for free to prove we can make more information in the future. We still get paid for our time, not the fruits of our labor. Which is fine - its how the whole rest of the economy works!
There is only one scarce thing in the creation of new ideas and that is your time. You should be charging for it. Its all thats worth anything in the equation of creativity. Most people do charge for it with salaries. The world still predominantly runs in tandem with reality. Its only a very few people who get to throw a state backed wrench into economics to rent seek already made ideas.
So, how is getting paid for one's time any different from being paid for the value of one's labor ? Do you think that economic theory doesn't apply in that case, and that, somehow, a person isn't going to just simply demand a huge salary that results in the same compensation ?
And how to you prevent someone from just creating a piece of software, keeping it to themselves, and then charging others if they want a private copy of it ? Are you going to demand that software developers release their code to the public, and enforce that through the state ?
What about live performances ? Are you going to mandate that performers invoice each person in attendance for their time ?
