Interesting. My understanding is that I own the work I produce until I consider it finished it, at which point it gets released, and then it becomes public information. You mention that copyright only prevents people from republishing it themselves. I do think there should be an exception here to what I've said. Corporate entities, advertisers etc should still be required to pay royalties. This is practical to enforce however, stopping people from bitorrenting is not.
What is practical and moral in this age should serve as a pretty effective guide for what our behaviour should be. It is not practical to stop people trading basic knowledge before, so no one would call me a thief for signalling before I turn despite someone presumably have coming up with this as a concept.
Intellectual property being shared amongst family and friends is impossible to stop, so this is just acceptance of what is unpreventable. And, it is only different to sharing with strangers over a p2p network in a very trivial manner.
It is very much the case that copyrighted artistic works used to be produced on an expensive medium such as vinyl or CDs. Someone had to make these, quality control them and distribute them.
Now the internet takes care of all that for us. We all distribute the cost of having an internet amongst us.
The point is, if you don't like the idea that someone else can do with his intellectual property as he wishes, then you are a potential thief, if not one for real.
I don't mind what he does with his intellectual property, but it is not really his business what I do with it! It hurts when you teach someone how to make the perfect curry that you developed for 3 years only for them to put loads of ketchup in it when they make it. But maturity teaches you that there's nothing you can really do about this, and you should just get over it.
Also, artists do not need to be fucking millionaires. You make a tune everyone likes? A poem? Does that warrant millions?
IP is dying regardless of your stance on the validity of it. I shed no tears for it.
Preventing the transfer of some information on a network that treats all information as equal is how you ruin one of the greatest accomplishments our species has made. Do I even need to explain why this is such a bad idea? It is similar to the wonderful proposals people have that attempt to ruin bitcoin's fungiblilty.