A couple of points on copyright...
1) Copyright is an artificial concept that has been abused to allow people to make money for no work. To clarify this: Current copyright law protects a work for life of the author + 70 years. Now, if an author creates a work when they are 20, they live until 90, that means this work is in copyright for 140 years after its creation. If the work sells well, that means the author never has to do another day's work in his life. Nor do his kids, his grandkids, or his great-grandkids - none of them will ever have to do any honest work, simply because their grandaddy wrote a book or a song 50 years ago. That's parasitic greed and laziness at its finest.
Now if the concept of copyright law was equally applied to all fields of human labour, then if I build you a computer, you have to pay me for it. So does EVERYONE else who ever uses that computer, for the rest of my life, my kids' lives, their kid's lives, and their kids' lives. 70 years hence, if you begin using that computer, you must pay my children for the computer I made 70 years ago. If as the author of that computer, I choose to sell my work on a pay-per-use model, you and everyone else who uses that computer must pay me, my kids and their kids EVERY TIME YOU USE IT. But that wouldn't be acceptable to you copyright-lovers, is it? No, I didn't think so. So guess what? The word HYPOCRITE applies here.
2) There is no such thing as original work. Every creator draws upon the work of others to create their own, without paying those others for it. Miami Mike, above, who talks about selling his technical manuals: Assuming these are computer manuals, have you paid Dennis Ritchie for his work on C, which is used in every computer OS? Have you paid Alan Turing for his work on algorithms, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla for their work on electricity, or Michael Faraday for his discovery of electricity? No. You just used their work in your own, without paying for it. Likewise musicians, who hear other people's music, use a melody or chord progression from someone else's work in their own, even subconsciously - with neither acknowlegement or payment.
Now, with these points in mind, I believe a fair recompense for any creator is exactly the same as it is for everyone else; you get paid only for the time and effort you spend in creating it. If it takes you 3 months to write a book, you are entitled to 3 months pay in the writers'/literary wage bracket. No more, no less. After that, the work goes into the public domain. If you want more money, do more bloody work like the rest of us!
Call me a communist freetard if you will, but the capitalist system has clearly shown it results in greed-driven police states exactly as the old communist autocracies did. So what's the difference? Well, I'd much rather live in a society where everyone gets an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, instead of all this artificial bullshit enabling FREETARD "creators" to profit for decades for a few months' work!
And yes, I AM a creator, yes I have published artistic works in my life, yes they have been "pirated", yes I still profited from them, and yes I still create artistic works. No, I don't make a living out of it. But I create art for the love of art as it should be. That's REAL art, the expression of an emotion or an idea, the creation of beauty. Not profit. That's not art. That's just opportunistic exploitation of emotion controlled by an artificial intellectual concept.