Creators do maintain control over their creations, and people do earn money from their creations, even though piracy occurs.
Yes, in spite of theft -- and copyright infringement
is theft -- people still make money. I don't understand your point.
It's a stretch to say, "The person who wrote this is entitled to payment because I made a copy."
How is it a stretch? You are benefiting from something created by someone else, in a society that has laws recognizing that creation as a form of property. If the creator wants payment for his property, and you take the property without paying, you've stolen from the creator.
(And in case there are people who don't understand this: The sectors of a hard disk on which an mp3 song resides -- before and/or after it's been pirated -- are not the property. The song is the property.)
It isn't necessarily the creator who gets paid, anyway, in this era of work-for-hire.
That's irrelevant. Part of having control over property is the right to give full or partial control over to someone else. Work-for-hire is simply an agreement that the control I would have, you'll have instead, usually in exchange for money.
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.
Nor, in many cases, does the concept of property
at all. I don't get your point.
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.
This I completely agree with. Modern realities needs different models, and corporations are just being idiotic by fighting that need rather than by finding a way to service it. More and more artists are recognizing that corporations aren't fighting for
them by doing this, and the artists themselves are finding new business models. (One of my favorite bands, Cowboy Junkies, we completely independent many years ago, and they're doing fine.)
Why are artists doing this? Because they believe that creators should have control over their creations, and if they desire should earn money for them.
You may be conflating this belief (that I share with many others) with support for the current IP regime (legal and corporate). Please don't, because -- as I've written in other threads -- I believe that law and corporate response to modern technology is lagging years behind, and is woefully misguided.