"I guess a few would." The wider issue isn't over whether authors—or anyone for that matter—should or not be paid for work done (of course they should). Rather

"I guess a few would." The wider issue isn't over whether authors—or anyone for that matter—should or not be paid for work done (of course they should). Rather, it's over the unfair and inequitable nature of copyright law and how sleazeball publishers take undue advantage of it. We need to keep in mind how these unreasonable copyright laws came into existence. They were framed in the 1880s by Victor Hugo and cohorts at a time when the average citizen would have had no concept of what copyright actually was let alone have had any notion of violating it. Aurhors such as Hugo and cohorts were principally targeting unscrupulous publishers (usually printers) in other countries who stole works holus-bolus and published them without paying any royalties whatsoever. They were not obliged to pay as what they were doing in their own countries was perfectly legal (they weren't violating their own weak copyright laws and no local citizen's copyright had been violated). So when the Berne Copyright Convention Treaty of 1886 came into force it was essentially unknown to the average citizen, and even for the few who knew of its existence, it was essentially irrelevant. You don't have to be Einstein to figure out what wrong here, that is, at least as far as the public was concerned (of course, authors and publishers loved it and they made a killing). The lobbying for and creation of the Treaty was completely one-sided and essentially without opposition, the authors/publishers got everything they had wished for. Even by the standards of the day what publishers ended up with would have been deemed unacceptable if the then citizens had known about and understood the Treaty's wide-ranging ramifications. That the 1886 Berne Copyright Treaty started from such a high one-sided base with a small group of authors and publishers in complete control and ruling the roost has made it almost impossible to achieve meaningful copyright reform. With this small, powerful and well-funded group in control it meant that copyright was locked up and untouchable for the next one hundred years—that is until about the mid 1980s when the first 'challenges' to its rule came about with electronic data (actually, the first was a decade or so earlier when the Xerox copier became widely available). What so affonts publishers so much is that they've ruled supreme and without challenge (except for spats amongst themselves) for a century. They're not used to being challenged as with other businesses so they've never had to conduct themselves in a proper ethnical and buisness-like way (they've behaved so badly for so long they don't realize how bad their behavior is). Hence, it's little wonder they're now behaving as even bigger asholes than before electronic publishing and the internet. You also need to consider that publishers have not only been screwing the public with high prices through use of monopolistic practices but also they've screwed authors and content creators from the outset. Correct, these sleazeballs have been screwing those most rightfully deserving of royaltes for years.