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@Enlil S Enki - good post.
Another thing that most of us are forgetting, because we are children of our times, is that, like so many other things which we think are eternal because we have known them all our lives, like telephones, CDs, computers, people living from writing books is a relatively new phenomenon, and is a lot younger than the invention of the printing press which made it possible. I would go so far as to say that it is largely a 20th century phenomenon.
And even today there are far more people who write even though they don't get paid for it than there are those who do it for a living. Almost every indie publisher is such a person. I am one myself. Sure, we might have a dream that our latest product will catch on, sell a jillion copies, get filmed for another jillion and we'll achieve economic independence, like a Britney Spears movie, but most people write because they enjoy it and want to share a story or a point of view.
Copyright is primarily defended to protect a publisher's income, not a writer's, although if you ask any writer who has managed to make it big, they may well have a different point of view.
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