This is a really good topic, I’m glad people are having this discussion. There are clearly a lot of pros and cons here. I wrote about the topic a year ago, too.
The way I see it is this. The SAFE network already introduces something very innovative: a way for developers to make money by simply creating something useful that other people use, without having to rely on advertising, monthly subscriptions, etc. This is a major shift in the economic model already. It is clear to me that the same needs to be implemented for ALL content creators. People should know that they will be compensated for their creative work, and they should not worry about being paid–a total paradigm shift. Yes, this will mean more things will cost money by default, but for everything that is consumed for free, someone is working for nothing, and that’s not good. Morally and ethically speaking, if you receive value, you should compensate for it. You have consumed someone else’s hard work. Thus GETs would have a charge, too.
I think that most people will agree with the above premise. What we don’t agree on is its implementation, and that’s perfectly ok. If people see a problem, or idea that should exist, they can work together to formulate a solution.
As for my opinion on the method of implementation, a couple thoughts come to mind. Neo’s bullet list is pretty spot on. Compensating based on file size is probably not a good idea, as it does not in any way indicate the creativity and time put behind it. A painters’s 5MB upload is worth much much more than a 5 minute, 5gb 1080P cat video, but the size might make you think otherwise. There should be some other mechanism that decides the worth, such as built-in voting on files or files belonging to certain user ids, thus crowdsourcing the value. Or, having a predefined list of creative categories, and letting users vote on which category an upload belongs to. The category would carry with it a value.
Crowdsourcing could also be used to determine if a file is an original or a blatant copy. Allow users to tag a file as original = true or false.
Any voting mechanisms on the SAFE network, whether they be for the above purposes, or for polls, governance, etc, would need additional core functionality from the network itself though. A built-in web-of-trust would prevent people mass creating duplicate accounts in order to vote-spam–pretty important to prevent in a decentralized system.
However, all of the above is a pretty massive undertaking, and so definitely not in the scope of the network in the foreseeable future. I’m sure that as time goes on, people will come up with great solutions.