Dan Bricklin addresses the central question underlying the copyright wars: how does the artist get paid:

The USA was found upon the principles of the right of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For the artist, that would be by letting them create their art and be able to reasonably make a living. The pursuit of happiness for all of us, in many respects, depends upon the artists being able to share their works with the rest of us, and us being able to use those works in ways that bring us happiness. The best benefit to society is when the most appreciated art is available for use by as much of society as possible. For the artists themselves, the best benefit is when they meet their personal goals of expression, practice, having an audience, appreciation, and material wealth. Since many forms of art and styles of practicing that art involve using the artistic works of others, the more that art can be used by others the better, too. To help the artists make their living, though, certain deals were struck with the public, such as the public allowing limited monopolies like copyrights.

....The means to getting paid

As I see it, there are a few common ways that artists get paid for doing their work:

Performance: The artist gets paid by someone to have access (perhaps exclusive access, in the case of physical art like sculpture) to the art whose content the artist has chosen.

Patronage: Someone provides money to meet the artist's needs without restriction on the content of the work they create.

Commission: The artist does specific work using their skills at the request of another in return for payment.

Let's look at these a bit closer.

Performance has many variations. In the case of the work of a painter, the result of paying could be owning a particular painting and hanging it on the wall of one's home. In the case of a singer, it could be attending a concert and hearing the singer perform. In these cases, the physical nature of the art provides exclusivity — the painting can only hang on one wall, and only those in the limited space of the music hall can hear and see the singer live.

Through laws, we have added additional, non-physical exclusivities to provide additional opportunities for performance payment, providing additional means to earn a living for a wider range of artists. For example, copyright laws let song writers have a way to get paid for performance during a limited (but sufficiently long to have economic meaning) time. Basically, you, as a singer, must not perform that song writer's work and receive performance payment yourself without also paying the song writer. This is a means for writers to get paid as one of the results of some of their work. (It's not turning their work into property. It is just a simple technique for monetizing one aspect of the result of their work in a way that society finds acceptable.)

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