Disagree on the stance of digital files. What you call "sharing" I call "theft".
Artists have a right to get a fair price for their work. I don't see how you
can call for universal rights for basic living necessities while undermining
the means to earn money... unless you just flat out admit being a communist,
in which case your view would at least be internally consistent.
Artists do not live in total isolation. They draw on the culture around them.
The short-fiction story
Melancholy Elephants explores the consequences of taking copyright to it's logical conclusion.
Artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create. In fact they do nothing of the sort. They discover. Inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system. For millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universeand telling ourselves that we `created' them. To create implies infinite possibility, to discover implies finite possibility. As a species I think we will react poorly to having our noses rubbed in the fact that we are discoverers and not creators.