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Here's a different author's perspective. Copyright laws emerged to support a pay-per-copy model that had, in hindsight, a brief technological window. When printed books 1) can be manufactured and distributed, and 2) that manufacturing and distributing are costly, you need appropriate property rights for intellectual property to incent the creation, manufacturing and distribution of that content.
As long as we don't start hanging restrictions, limitations and regulations on the technology, the costs of producing and distributing a digital copy are negligible, and popular content will therefore tend to be copied and distributed widely. Pay-per-copy isn't likely to survive in that environment. That, of course, hasn't stopped producers from attempting to redefine ownership of a copy or to restrict the technology, but those efforts will always fail in a free society.
So then what of content creators? Well, we enjoy the fantastic opportunity of creating at a time when it's possible to produce and distribute our work at almost no cost, other than our own creative time and energy -- something we presumably enjoy exercising! There is almost no limit to the audience we can reach that we do not impose ourselves. If we create something that lots of people want, we can attract a vast audience. In that kind of world, creators ought to be able to figure out a way to get paid, if that's what they want.
And if not, think about this: Imagine you could go back in time and interview all the writers who labored prior to the technological window that briefly enabled pay-per-copy, and you could present them with this possibility. They would live in a world in which technological tools made the production of text amazingly simple, and where their creative work could be copied and distributed infinitely the world over at almost no cost. In return, they might have to work eight hours a day at a job that, by historical standards, is safe, physically undemanding and provides a standard of living that is inconceivable to them.
Do you think any of them -- from Aristotle to Dante to Chaucer -- would not take that deal?
Instead of obsessing about whether or not you can get paid for every single copy of your work that is distributed anywhere in the world, perhaps you should embrace the phenomenal opportunity in front of you to reach the largest audience possible for your work. If you do, I suspect good things will happen for you.
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