I'm not sure mandatory payment could have worked when the internet brought down the cost of publishing, which has only continued to drop. Not to mention the in

I'm not sure mandatory payment could have worked when the internet brought down the cost of publishing, which has only continued to drop. Not to mention the incentives to create a way to distribute (cough pirate) paid content to people who do not want to pay. That would have broken the system from the start. Some software nerd somewhere would've figure that out.