[michaelmrose]

The amount of money someone is paid usually has zero correlation with what they are paid. See Cigarette execs vs school teachers.

Some of us see the virtue in authors getting incentivized in theory but think copyright at least as practiced is a net negative for society because it stops the free spread of information that would otherwise better enlighten the world. This way of thinking actually dates back to some of the founding fathers.

Nobody "deserves" to be paid because someone has arranged a pattern of bits in a way that they "own". Different laws have different up sides and down sides and we ought to pick the set of rules that results in the highest benefit/lowest cost to society. This unlike ownership of imaginary property has moral force. By choosing to treat the current rules as given good you have missed out on the opportunity to make a useful argument about the relative utility of different strategies.

Arguably the current dynamic where piracy is technically easy but practically discouraged might be far more optimum than one in which copyright was actually maximally enforced because the people who have plenty of money value convenience and pay out at a substantive portion of what they would pay in a maximum enforcement scenario whereas those who would otherwise go without are able to.

On net you end up with multiple times the positive effect of a maximum enforcement scenario while still funding authors having a decent life.

For myself I think artificial scarcity of any variety is an attempt to preserve a business model based on actual scarcity that doesn't make much sense in modern context. Ultimately it wasn't the VCR inventors job to justify to the copyright industry that home video industry made sense. The logical step towards phasing out copyright would be limiting it to a sane time frame like 7 years wherein most of the money is actually made in the first place.