Copyright

What's the incentive? And here's you supposedly running a company. Come on dskoll, if you're not lying about your business experience then you already know lesson #1 it's not about the money. No matter how much they pay, boring firms don't attract superstar programmers, it's not about the money. Wasn't before copyright, won't be afterwards. No, the incentive isn't money, the monetary compensation just keeps body and soul together.

The way it actually works for the vast majority of actual professional photographers is that they get compensated (or least the deal is made) up front, and the amazing photo comes afterwards. The most notable exception are the paparazzi, but (a) are you really putting paps in the list of good things about copyright? most of them hate the job, and they're the ones doing it (b) even with copyright the paps get ripped off all the time by newspapers and magazines. They might actually be better off without it (c) there are a lot of failed paps. It's back to the gambling I mentioned already.

And then there's musicians. Once again, it's not about the money. Very few people "make it big" and those who do will usually still end up penniless because copyright doesn't protect them, it protects the guy with the lawyers whose contract they had to sign to "make it big". The KLF wrote a book about how to have a hit single. You're thinking "free money" right? Wrong. The book explicitly warns you that having a hit single will lose you money. I know a dozen or more people who've been in a "real band" and they all had day jobs, because it doesn't pay. If you're /really/ good and you make it into a real job, where you get up and write songs, and practice and then go play songs live for an audience, then you can make a good living. But then you're not affected by copyright - bands that do this make most of their income from live performance. Typical professional musicians though aren't in a band. They get paid as work-for-hire, and so once again, copyright doesn't apply. Similarly, most composers aren't writing music in the hope that hundreds of people will buy the score and pay $50 each, they're writing it under contract "Intro to radio quiz show, upbeat and quirky".

You seem very confident that the monopoly has helped in some meaningful way. Actual studies are much less certain. Looking at the US for example, the US used to be a "pirate nation", it didn't observe copyright so that its citizens could get rich printing books written by Englishmen without paying royalties. Proponents of copyright said, as you are saying, that it would power an explosive increase in creativity because of the new incentive. They got their way but we don't really see the promised new creativity in the historical record. Quickly this argument was waved aside, in favour of the argument that the term of copyright needed to be increased in order to ensure the incentive was retained. And that's the same argument still being made today with copyright already essentially perpetual. "Longer terms, we must have longer terms" say the publishers. The creators are of course long dead.