But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.
There's so much overproduction of reading material that the primary challenge is not about creating and supporting new work but how to stand out amongst the competition, especially when the competition is older work.
The older works are perfectly fine, they just needs to be resurfaced so that people don't go working on materials that other people already written. That means these materials should be widely available, such as being in the public domain.
To go a step further, no one is entitled to make a living through their own preferred means.
You want be an astronaut? You have to work your way through the program, competing with all the other candidates.
More people want to be authors than astronauts. The competition is fierce. The market is what it is, and piracy is part of it. If you can’t deal with that (financially, emotionally, whatever), then you probably should not be an author. Being an author does not entitle someone to make a living as an author.
Intellectual property laws are regulatory capture of published works. As we know, they don’t work particularly well, but people still want to make their living using that leverage. At the cost of everyone else in society.
My advice to those wishing to publish anything: do not expect anything in return.
> no one is entitled to make a living through their own preferred means.
Are they not entitled to try? You seem to use this to justify not allowing them a chance. Why are we entitled to their effort?
Hum... Society is entitled healthy and well-supplied markets.
AFAIK, in our current situation that demands weaker copyrights (and patents too), but "the market is what it is" is a really bad framing. What, are you against any kind of change?
> To go a step further, no one is entitled to make a living through their own preferred means.
People are entitled to sell their works under protections afforded by the law.
You are not entitled to take their work for free because you disagree with the laws.
I think intellectual property rights work astoundingly well. We have an incredibly rich, varied culture of published materials supporting vast legions of authors, artists, film makers, software developers, designers, publishers, playwrigts, actors, musicians, journalists, manufacturers, and on, and on.
Scholars aren't supported by sales of their published work, but by teaching/research salaries, much of the money for which comes from the public via government grants.
Musicians by and large aren't supported by record sales, especially in the streaming era, but by concert tickets, merch, etc., or often by other income sources like paid lessons, session work, one-off commissions for specific customers, etc.
Very few fiction authors make a living at it, and most of those who do are barely scraping by.
Journalism is in a very sorry state in the 2020s; its long-time essential income source – classified ads – collapsed a couple decades ago under pressure from free or cheap online substitutes and the industry still hasn't figured out a viable alternative at scale. There has been a 75% drop in local journalists since 2000, most important local news now goes unreported (in many places there is no local reporting whatsoever) and regional/national scale journalism has been increasingly co-opted by the super-wealthy and turned to propaganda. Independent industry leaders with integrity are, over time, replaced by shills and the ethics of industry culture is degenerating.
Big budget TV/movies is probably closest to matching your argument, since these require large-scale coordination by hundreds of people to produce, but here too there are significant complications.
In all of these industries, the people making most of the profit are businesspeople rather than creators, though a trivial number of celebrity creators make good money.
Much of the published culture you mention is done entirely as a hobby, and our current copyright regime actually stands in the way of creation as much as supports it.
I think "intellectual property" is a false term that millions of people have convinced themselves (and others) that it is real.
The correct terms are "copyright", "trademark", "patent", and "trade secret". All of which are completely unconnected in terms of legal statute.
If there's so much overproduction, just go read some other stuff instead.