I found this transcript of rms' Copyright and Globalization talk (in 2001):
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.html
Someone raised your question and rms seems to think that granting the freedom
to commercially redistribute functional works does usually does not harm the
author (hence the incentive to produce more works remains intact), whereas it
does not seem to always be the case for the other two types of works:
QUESTION: With regard to the functional works, how do you, in your own
thinking, balance out the need for abolishing the copyright with the need for
economic incentives in order to have these functional works developed?
STALLMAN: Well, what we see is, first of all, that this economic incentive is
a lot less necessary than people have been supposing. Look at the free
software movement where we have over 100,000 part-time volunteers developing
free software. We also see that there are other ways to raise money for this
which are not based on stopping the public from copying and modifying these
works. That's the interesting lesson of the free software movement. Aside
from the fact that it gives you a way you can use a computer and keep your
freedom to share and cooperate with other people, it also shows us that this
negative assumption that people would never do these things unless they are
given special powers to force people to pay them is simply wrong. A lot of
people will do these things. Then if you look at, say, the writing of
monographs which serve as textbooks in many fields of science except for the
ones that are very basic, the authors are not making money out of that. We
now have a free encyclopedia project which is, in fact, a commercial-free
encyclopedia project, and it's making progress. We had a project for a GNU
encyclopedia but we merged it into the commercial project when they adopted
our license. In January, they switched to the GNU Free Documentation License
for all the articles in their encyclopedia. So we said, “Well, let's join
forces with them and urge people to contribute to them.” It's called
“Nupedia,” and you can find a link to it, if you look at
http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia. So here we've extended the community
development of a free base of useful knowledge from software to encyclopedia.
I'm pretty confident now that in all these areas of functional work, we don't
need that economic incentive to the point where we have to mess up the use of
these works.
THORBURN: Well, what about the other two categories?
STALLMAN: For the other two classes of work, I don't know. I don't know
whether people will write some day novels without worrying about whether they
make money from it. In a post-scarcity society, I guess they would. Maybe
what we need to do in order to reach the post-scarcity society is to get rid
of the corporate control over the economy and the laws. So, in effect, it's a
chicken-or-the-egg problem, you know. Which do we do first? How do we get the
world where people don't have to desperately get money except by removing the
control by business? And how can we remove the control by business except —
Anyway, I don't know, but that's why I'm trying to propose first a compromise
copyright system and, second, the voluntary payment supported by a compromise
copyright system as a way to provide a revenue stream to the people who write
those works.
If someone here (you?) has time to watch a more recent of this talk, the
argument may now be better.
