Did you forget Clerks vs. Pirate's of the Caribbean 3 already? A movie made on a shoestring budget has a higher audience rating than the most expensive movie ever made. Clerks could have easily made that money back without copyrights and without copyrights it would have spread far and wide even faster than it did.

The problem is that you keep equating all movies with $100+ million dollar movies. I don't think that's very fair.