That's a very shallow understanding of reading, especially coming from an author.
No, reading is not just about getting the idea from the author. It's an experience in and of itself, and the lack of something makes the experience just as much as the presence of something.
It's almost like saying a comic and an animation are the same thing, or that an animation is better, since it has more possibilities.
There's this tendency to treat things as if they're the same, otherwise one is inferior. But that's just not the case. Two things can be both different and valuable in their own way.
We still do that, though, within our own little tribes inside civilization. Most people still love their grandparents, even though they're old. That just doesn't necessarily extend to all of civilization.
We don't need to have every human care about every single other human to thrive as a species. If anything, if we did, we wouldn't be able to thrive at all.
The issues you mentioned are, in the vast majority of cases, caused by the lack of peaceful coexistence to begin with, because as long as me and everyone else is coexisting peacefully, getting more for myself isn't taking anything away from those in the situations you mentioned. Resources might be scarce, but that doesn't mean they're zero sum.
> Humans, by virtue of being living, thinking beings deserve lives of fulfillment, dignity, and security.
You wanting people to have that doesn't mean that people deserve to have that. Fundamentally, no one deserves anything. We, as a species, lived for a hundred thousand years with absolutely nothing except what we could carve off the world by ourselves or with the help of small groups that chose to work with us. Everything else since then is a bonus (or sometimes a malus, but on average a bonus).
Also, as much as it sounds nice to declare such things as goals, deserved or not, it is indeed impossible, and probably not desirable, since, for starters, you can't even define what those things would be like. Those aren't actionable, they're at most occasional consequences of a system that is working to alleviate scarcity of resources.
Unfortunately, we're nowhere near that replicator.
> The person who did the work deserved credit and compensation.
That's the part of the argument in favor of copyright that is inherently flawed.
Doing some amount of work doesn't entitle you to anything besides whatever you've agreed to get for that work, or possession of the output, in case you did it for yourself. But that's all you're entitled to get.
Work itself doesn't have any intrinsic value, only output does. The scarcity of output is what dictates what is actually valuable.
Creative work has the characteristic of its marginal cost being very high for the first copy, but nearly zero for additional copies. That's true simply because of the nature of such work, it isn't something that is unfairly imposed upon creative workers. Whenever you choose to engage in creative work, you know that, or at least you should. And if you choose to give away the first copy for free, or very cheap, that's your prerrogative, but it doesn't inherently entitle you to anything else besides the value of that first copy.
Yes, there are laws such as copyright laws that exist to artificially inflate the value of additional copies, but they go against how things work naturally, so you shouldn't rely on them, and you certainly shouldn't base your moral compass on them.
Now, I do still prefer copyleft licenses over permissive ones for the work I choose to give away for free, but only to stop corporations from taking that work and then using copyright laws to keep it exclusive to them. Once copyright is no longer an issue, they won't be necessary anymore.
No, reading is not just about getting the idea from the author. It's an experience in and of itself, and the lack of something makes the experience just as much as the presence of something.
It's almost like saying a comic and an animation are the same thing, or that an animation is better, since it has more possibilities.
There's this tendency to treat things as if they're the same, otherwise one is inferior. But that's just not the case. Two things can be both different and valuable in their own way.