So you believe that nobody in the world should be able to benefit from the work they do? Or just the people who do intellectual work?
The word "benefit" is the tricky one there. I think most people who support copyright do so because of financial reasons, and most people who would steal others' work (if copyright didn't exist) would do it because of financial incentives. In my opinion, an ideal world would be Star Trek-style, where poverty and starvation is eliminated and people have what they need and work for the good of the world. In a socialist world like that (not to be confused with communist), the money issue wouldn't exist. (Note also that things like crime, pollution, spam email, and a lot of other bad stuff occur largely for financial reasons.)
That'll probably happen around the time when somebody creates a replicator that can create an exact duplicate of anything, including itself. Suddenly, physical products will mean nothing. That'll be an interesting day.
So what that rambling boils down to is that I hope, someday in the future, that copyrights won't be necessary. So to answer your question, no, I don't believe people should benefit [financially] from what they do, but I do believe that people should benefit in other ways.
I'm sure there are people who can argue better than me who would be able to word this much better, but I hope you understand what I mean.
I should be able to copy your blog entries on Symantec verbatim, claim them as my own, and get credit?
If you really want to do that, then I wouldn't stop you (although Symantec legal might have something to say). There's a reason that I release almost everything I can (ie, that I'm not under legal obligation to keep) under a public domain license. If you want to copy anything I've written, anything I've built, or anything I've painted and sell it as your own, I'm not going to try and stop you.
