A font has approximately 6000 kanji characters. You could operate with some fraction of these. But still any reasonable time spend on each can add up to significant amount of hours. And you probably want this from reasonably skilled person and then add some review effort on top.

What a wild take. Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made.

While it's possible to commission a custom font and many companies do eg. Apple, IBM, Airbnb, Bytedance, Vercel, Github, Mozilla etc. Some even make them open source. However it's not really a viable option for anyone other than the largest organisations as it's far more expensive and time-consuming than just getting a licence unless your scale is such that a commission would be cheaper.

> Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made.

Nothing wild about it. That's simply the reality of intellectual work. Only the first copy need ever be paid for. That is the true cost of creation. The cost of all subsequent copies is approximately $0 with 21st century computer technology.

All intellectual work is information. All information is bits. All sequences of bits are numbers. All numbers already exist in the abstract world of mathematics. We merely find them. A 20 kiB picture is just a number with 49,321 decimal digits. Creating that picture is just a process that somehow finds the right digits.

We humans are merely interesting number generators. We are anti-RNGs. Once the number has been generated, copying it is trivial.

Intellectual property exists to establish artificial scarcity. It's not real, it's completely made up and of questionable effectiveness.

Payment only ever makes sense before creation. People should be paid for their labor before they create, not for copies of the end result. Selling copies makes no economic sense.

Approximately no one would pay for the cost of any digital works in this model. A musician may take six months to compose a song. No one would pay 6 months salary for a song. This obviously leads to no one professionally creating anything.

One person might not be able to pay for the entire costs of creation, but groups of people certainly will. We have the technology for this. Platforms like Kickstarter, Patreon, GitHub Sponsors all enable this.

My history professor shocked the whole class when he revealed that there was no music, literature, nor paintings before copyright laws were invented.

So if I wanted to write some notes or edit a photo you’re saying I should pay a team of developers to write custom code for me up front?

Literally nothing works like that.

There’s a huge difference between creative work and intellectual property, and a huge difference between the cost of creation and the cost of distribution.

The cost of distribution approaches zero. Once it's made, it's not actually scarce anymore. Intellectual property laws are all about creating artificial scarcity in order to increase distribution costs so as to compensate for the creation costs. Sooner or later, reality will reassert itself: people will pirate your product whether the laws allow it or not, simply because they can.

The ideal intellectual economy would be based on patronage where large amounts of people liberally support the creators they like. That way creators get compensated for the labour of creation, not the final result. Historical opposition to patronage involves fear of suppression by rich elites but now we have crowdfunding technology that enables sufficient decentralization, mitigating that risk.

Information is the product of intellectual work (among other things); it is composed of bits but is not itself bits.

We aren't paying for the bits.

Information is bits and therefore numbers. To deny this is to create a covert channel for copyright infringement. Copying films is infringement but if I convert it to a number and pass it around suddenly it's not infringement anymore? They will never accept this, so information must be bits which must be numbers.

Why is it difficult?