No, assuming the author pays taxes, the author is not a free rider on the law enforcement infrastructure. The act of publishing the book has positive externali

No, assuming the author pays taxes, the author is not a free rider on the law enforcement infrastructure. The act of publishing the book has positive externalities (people derive benefit from reading it). Copyright is an attempt to allow creators to capture some of those positive externalities to promote more production of books. Your position that the creator should not have a mechanism to capture any of those benefits is rather extreme, as is the position of the copyright maximalists that assert they should capture all of the benefits.