The question of artists having a property right in their creations is separate from the question of artists being paid for their work. It's easy to imagine a regime where there is no copyright but artists are paid by the state (as in the old USSR) or by wealthy patrons (as in the Renaissance era). It's even easier (alas) to imagine having a copyright that is indisputably your property but has no market value.
For most property rights that people deal with in their everyday life, the formal rules for "what's legal" are entangled with long-standing cultural norms of "what's fair". E.g., when rents go up precipitously and people feel that landlords are charging "too much", it can lead to the passage of rent-control laws. But between the late 18th century and the invention of the photocopier, the average person didn't have to think about copyright at all; rights were negotiated among artists, publishers, and broadcasters, the development of the law reflected the tug-of-war among these interests, and everyone else just paid retail. Now every individual can be a publisher, but the cultural norms of fairness that the average person has learned don't match the law of copyright that all of a sudden applies to them.
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For most property rights that people deal with in their everyday life, the formal rules for "what's legal" are entangled with long-standing cultural norms of "what's fair". E.g., when rents go up precipitously and people feel that landlords are charging "too much", it can lead to the passage of rent-control laws. But between the late 18th century and the invention of the photocopier, the average person didn't have to think about copyright at all; rights were negotiated among artists, publishers, and broadcasters, the development of the law reflected the tug-of-war among these interests, and everyone else just paid retail. Now every individual can be a publisher, but the cultural norms of fairness that the average person has learned don't match the law of copyright that all of a sudden applies to them.