> The number of people willing to put the amount of time and effort required into writing a book without a profit motive is very low.

Citation needed. Writing a book, on average, makes people very little money. Some of the funniest or most entertaining content I've read has been on sites with user-generated content, such as Reddit, where there's no (direct) profit motive for good writing.

Profit motive or not, people will continue to write. Homer and Shakespeare lived in a time with no copyright laws and produced some of the greatest works of literature.

I'm not advocating for zero copyright laws, but I call bullshit on this assertion that creative works exist only due to their protection.