What you are saying is true, however for products for which supply exceeds demand and which can be easily copied, then charging for such products does not work so well.
For example, in the early days of our industry, many people buying licensed software were doing so because copying on floppy disks was error prone and packaged software was getting distributed on storage of higher quality. Licensed software also worked as expected, while software copied from friends had all sorts of "surprises". Plus it came with a useful manual, which was great prior to the Internet.
Our economy is based on scarcity. If scarcity is only artificial, then the model breaks down. You simply can't appeal to people's feelings, not after decades of teaching people to embrace individualism.
This isn't going to be popular on this board, but::
Your statement is why the writers of the US constitution mandated creative protection[0]. To prevent instances of piracy because users don't feel like they should pay for something made that could be duplicated.
Your argument goes back to mine-- by pirating works, you're making the decision for the owner/creator whether to release that work freely or to charge. That's not your right, no matter what economic model you believe.
I'm an author and I'd like to agree with you, however there's constitutional rights and then there's human nature.
If your constitution disallowed unlicensed sex, take a guess on which one would prevail - human nature or your constitution.
Also, read again why that clause is in the constitution - "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". They clearly didn't have Disney in mind or the ever expanding "limited Times" that makes the public domain a legally obsolete concept.
I respectfully suspect you are misunderstanding history. First, the Copyright Clause permits, but does not mandate, certain forms of creative protection for a limited time.
Second, the clause itself states its goal. It was to encourage more creation, "preventing piracy" was a means to an end, not an end in itself.
And finally, there is good reason to think that regarding copyright in particular the target was never meant to be users at all, but other commercial grade publishers and competing authors. (It was prohibitively difficult in that era for an end user to make a copy of any substantial creative work so it likely wasn't even considered. I suspect, given some of Jefferson's comments in particular, that many of the Framers would have been against trying to apply copyright laws to end users had they realized it would eventually be an issue).
For example, in the early days of our industry, many people buying licensed software were doing so because copying on floppy disks was error prone and packaged software was getting distributed on storage of higher quality. Licensed software also worked as expected, while software copied from friends had all sorts of "surprises". Plus it came with a useful manual, which was great prior to the Internet.
Our economy is based on scarcity. If scarcity is only artificial, then the model breaks down. You simply can't appeal to people's feelings, not after decades of teaching people to embrace individualism.