(1) I believe creators should maintain control over their creations, including earning money for them (if they choose).
I don't think that logically follows. Creators do maintain control over their creations, and people do earn money from their creations, even though piracy occurs. It's a stretch to say, "The person who wrote this is entitled to payment because I made a copy." It isn't necessarily the creator who gets paid, anyway, in this era of work-for-hire.
Copyrights and royalties are not natural rights; they are specific privileges enshrined in our laws for a specific purpose. Just as an example, copyrights do not exist in traditional hunter-gatherer societies. Yet a person cannot complain they have been "stolen" from if a song they invent gets sung by others in the group and transmits to other groups.
Copyrights, also, expire... is it unethical to download something the day before the expiration, but ethical the next day? The only thing that makes it unethical the day before is the existence of a law. Copyrights are ultimately as much of an ethical issue as stop signs. Is it generally unethical to run a stop sign? Yes, because you might contribute to an accident by not following the cultural norm. But is it evil to pass by a red octagon in a moving vehicle without stopping? Are the British evil because they drive on the "wrong" side of the road?
Unfortunately, we are stuck with a 20th century system for dealing with a 21st century economic question. The sacredness of property is a ridiculous myth. Property laws are useful, but from time to time, they must be ammended. You can no longer indebt your grandchildren, in the USA it is illegal to actually buy and sell people (and this thankfully occurs rarely today), and Microsoft is not allowed to update your EULA to state that they may read any files they please on your computer.
In this case, yes, by all means, pay for your PDFs. But I feel no guilt about pirating material I cannot obtain legally. With regards to the law, the punishment for making a single infringing copy should be something reasonable... that's in the Constitution. Fining someone thousands of dollars and throwing them in Federal prison for making, say, a copy of a page from a school workbook, is just ridiculous. Obviously, creators deserve to be compensated for their labors, but making a federal case out of teenagers downloading MP3s is not what I call justice, either.
Making electronic copies of information is just
too easy for anyone to expect it won't be done under reasonable circumstances.
How is this all supposed to work? I wish I knew. But trying to put the genie back in the bottle is just not going to work.