I hear you and I'm fully in support of intellectual property and just compensation!

Do you think the people who think that creative works should be free are in the majority or are they just the loudest? I seem to get the impression that most people want artists to get paid. If anything they don't want a bunch of middle-men making all the profits.

Of course some middle-men are important to the ecosystem. A publisher willing to speculate and give an advance in exchange for a future percentage of sales seems like the right kind of incentive structure to have for the industry.