Serraphin,

actually, reading about copyright recently - apparently back in the 19th C. when British authors were not covereed by copyright laws, they still managed to turn a tidy profit (selling exclusive rights to first prints, tec.)

Originally, copyright was supposed to last only about 5 years, but that has been gradually increased by intellectual rentiers to our ludicrous 70 years after the author's death (Bernard Shaw plays from 1890 are still in copyright!)

The balance is between the incentive to write and publish and the benefits of information dissemination. There are other models than copyright.