Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't resist. I'm a freetard and here is my proposal: * Artists(haha, really? is Spears and "artist"?) perform live to earn income I know... it's earth shattering. If people don't think it's worth the trouble of recording, then they shouldn't do it. See how many people come to your live performance without the free advertising that recordings provide. Oh, maybe they won't make hundreds of millions of dollars. Shoul…
How about authors? How much money have you spent, lifetime, to hear an author read his books to you?
At this point the author (or the publisher) is seeing NO money. Is there a real reason why I can't just take a copy of the book, put it to PDF and distribute it for free? The people that were involved in the production of the book have essentially abandoned it, but they will definitely jump out of the woodwork to try and cash in on it if someone were to 'make it profitable again' (which includes suing a person for distributing it).
I see these as the moral equivalent of submarine patents. (Patents where you wait until something becomes popular, and then pop out of the woodwork to sue the biggest companies that you can find for millions or billions of dollars)