Re: This all ignores the elephant in the room
Exactly - I don't thnk anyone but a small minority disagree totally with some idea of copyright. But the time period is everything. These days, 5 years is a long time - I don't know the figures, but the majority of the revenue from a work must be earned in a short time after release.
Also there's a lot of rubbish that only makes money because of large sums invested in marketing - in that case who's the real creative? The guy who made the crap film or record, or the guy who wrote the ad that turned it into shit that made money?
A lot of stuff from pro-status-quo journos seems to presuppose some creative nirvana where money made is proportional to the artists ability, & the artist receives a large share of the profits.
So many have been ripped off over the years - e.g. a significant number of US pop artists from the 50's & 60's were simply robbed of their rights to multi-million sellers at the point of a gun by members of the Mafia, but of course, the normal tools used are contracts & lawyers.
The only way to ever combat file-sharing is to reform the system so that its fairer for all, so that it becomes a small minority thing. Northern Ireland is a good analogy I think - at the moment its still the metaphorical late 70's as far as the MPAA et al ar concerned