In reply to John_Hat:
> By the way, just to sling something else into the mix, does the remuneration strategy for musicians appear a little strange?
Not really, no.
> If you are an artist (painter), you paint a picture, you sell it. If you want more money you paint another picture.
AFAIK there is copyright on original art works, so if you paint a picture that someone likes and you can sell it to them, they can't then go on to sell prints of it to other people without some kind of license from you.
> If you are a circus performer, you perform, you get paid. If you want to get paid again you perform again.
If someone in the audience videos your performance, how would you feel about them then making a profit out of selling copies of that video of your work without your permission?
> If you are in my work, you go to a client, you write a report. You get paid. If you want more cash you write another report.
Depends how specific the report is to that client. Companies like Gartner make a decent wedge by writing generic reports which they then hawk around a number of clients/subscribers. They're protected by copyright, too.
> If you make widgets, you make a widget, you sell it, you get paid. If you want more money, you make another.
And if someone else makes a business out of selling identical widgets by copying your ideas, you lose out. That's what patents are for (reference Apple vs just about everyone else in the known universe, it seems).
> If, however, you write music, you write something once, and then sit back for the rest of your life getting paid for doing absolutely nothing else, and then after you are six feet under you continue to get paid for another 70 years.
The same is true of books, software and other creative work. The point is not so much that you get continue to get paid for it - after all, you can opt not to take any money - but that you retain ownership of the ideas in the song, book or whatever. So anyone else who wants to derive gain from reproducing your material has to give you a cut - or give it away for free while acknowledging your ownership of the copyright, if that's how you distributed in the first place.
It's called copyright because you have the right to control reproductions of your own original work. The fact that some works eg recorded music are easier to copy than others shouldn't make a difference to the principle. Similarly, neither should the fact that advances in technology have made some of these things easier to copy than they used to be.
The fundamental question is: if you created something original, then someone else made a business out of selling your work without your permission, how would you feel?