Creating art beyond a hobby level is hard if you aren't being paid to do it, because skill and mastery in any medium take time, and so does the practice that produces results.
Somewhat separate from that, the idea of somebody making life-changing sacrifices to pursue art in the gaps between their soul-crushing job only to have a BigCorp claim that art as their own and profit off it without the actual creator getting anything for it is what I'd call fundamentally unjust and broken.
In sum, if good artists can't make a living off their art then we will enjoy less good art as a result. A lot of great artists don't care about money, but they need it to live and keep making art, and it's naive to suggest they should be "above" that.
While this can certainly be true, copyright itself doesn't necessarily follow-
Problem: Artists need to make money!
Solution: We'll make unauthorized use of certain material illegal for a fixed period.
It's certainly one approach, and it does mesh with the intuitive sense of "hey, it's fucked up to take somebody else's work and call it your own"- but it's not the only, or, in my view, the best approach.
What is, in your view, the best approach? Please enlighten us.
edit: I guess I should also clarify that I believe artists are entitled to total control over something they've created until they say otherwise. If they want to license it as creative commons and go live in a wine cask, great. If they want to milk it for all (the money) it's worth, also great, at least for as long as we're living under the capitalist ethic that celebrates such exploitation of intellectual property and provides no safety net for those who are unwilling or unable to extract value from what they have available to them.
I have no idea whether or not it's the best approach, but it's certainly the best approach I've seen so far. Unless you have a better alternative to propose?
Somewhat separate from that, the idea of somebody making life-changing sacrifices to pursue art in the gaps between their soul-crushing job only to have a BigCorp claim that art as their own and profit off it without the actual creator getting anything for it is what I'd call fundamentally unjust and broken.
In sum, if good artists can't make a living off their art then we will enjoy less good art as a result. A lot of great artists don't care about money, but they need it to live and keep making art, and it's naive to suggest they should be "above" that.