Nobody has a right to have an economic value for what they sell. That is a special privilege, not a right, and harms everyone for the enrichment of the privileged
Nobody has a right to have an economic value for what they sell.
This is true. (It's true in every other industry as well.)
But the opposite side of that coin is that if you want people to spend the considerable amounts of time and money required to create new works that are actually any good then you need to have some viable model for compensating them that makes it worthwhile for them to do that. Whatever else you can say for it - copyright has been far more effective than any other model ever tried at the scale of human society in achieving that.
Copyright has generally been extremely effective at giving money to trillion-dollar companies while giving artists almost nothing. This incentivises companies to hire artists and churn out slop. It doesn't incentivise artists to make art. For that, something other than copyright is needed.
This is demonstrably untrue. Today we have more access to far more works in more media on more subjects both entertainment and educational than ever in the history of the world. And almost all of them were ultimately built on the back of copyright and the economic models it supports.
It's true that copyright makes a few people very rich. Some of those people certainly are artists. The "almost nothing" that Beyoncé has made from her music career reportedly paid for the private jet she bought Jay-Z as a gift a few years ago for example. Taylor Swift is reportedly now a multibillionaire. There's a reasonable argument that big name musicians have often worked on very successful concert tours and so not all of their income has necessarily required copyright. That argument doesn't really work when you look at bestselling authors or A-list TV and movie stars whose copyright-backed residuals and royalties keep them very well funded though.
Of course many of the other parties who make a lot of money from copyright are intermediaries like book publishers and record labels. The value of their contributions is increasingly questionable in the modern world and the measures they have taken to protect their revenue streams have sometimes been similarly questionable. I won't be sympathetic if copyright reforms render their business models obsolete and shift power back into the hands of the people doing the actual creative work with those providing services like distribution and advertising becoming subservient rather than the other way around as has often been the case historically.
Nobody has any right/privilege at all, except what a system of rights/privileges spells out.
Behind a system of rights there is always a philosophy, which either postulates rights, or certain primary rights, as being somehow inherent or "inalienable", or else somehow justifies the establishment of rights without circular reasoning ("we need these rights so we can have nice things").
