I like your opening, beginning with the case of the Harvard professor draws your reader in. Your introduction does a great job of setting up the circumstances of Creative Commons so that the paper is accessible to any reader. I like that your writing style is a mix of academic and blog-like.

I have heard a lot of buzz about Welcome to Night Vale recently, but I had no idea the extent to which this story has reached (tours, etc.). I think the power of the audience is key to the success here. The serial nature of the podcast and the audience it has developed is a great case study for what is possible in the industry. The potential for others to duplicate the Night Vale model is really promising, especially for indie authors. Did you know that a Night Vale book was recently published by HarperCollins as one of their biggest books of the season?

The Natural Math software example is really interesting. This 'pay what you want' model reminds me of honour code fruit stands in rural areas, where people leave the money the retailer suggests. I like that you bring up that profitability is not always necessary with online publishing. Sometimes, software is developed with the purpose of improving what's available, without any expectation of profit. This is usually to the benefit of public knowledge or general open access. It reminds me of the app Duolingo, a language-learning software that teaches by having users translate the internet. The app and service is free, but the benefit is that the internet is translated, for free, by users.

You used two really great examples here, and I feel like you could have lengthened your essay by expanding on both of these. You could have shown other ways the same models are used for other products or services, to compare and contrast how the same models are molded to different circumstances. I would have liked to see how the Night Vale model has played out in other situations to see how other audiences react to this model.

In your conclusion, you touch briefly on the effect on readers/users, but I think you could have dedicated a whole paragraph to this. The ability for fans to remix content and have the peace of mind that they won't run into legal issues is something that has dramatically changed fan interaction online, and I'm guessing you could have found some great examples from Night Vale of fans remixing content that would have added to your argument.

I really liked your writing style, you express your ideas clearly and in a way that makes it easy for me to keep reading. Writing without distracting your reader is a skill, so great job!