It bugs me that we haven't moved past "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations" in these discussions. It's an extreme strawman. No one -- not Graham, not Richard Stallman, not Julian Assange -- is interested in making it impossible to make money from creating stuff.
Copyright is simply one means of accomplishing the end goal of paying creators, and certainly not the only one. I'd like to hear an argument in favor of copyright-exactly-as-it-is that doesn't involve this logical fallacy.
Copyright has on its side reams of academic literature and centuries of apparently successful implementation. Some alternate systems, like patronage, have been tried at relatively limited scales, but there are in general strong theoretical or evidentiary reasons to believe that none of those would produce as much media as we have today.
That doesn't mean that there isn't some better system out there, but I think the burden is on the copyright-dissenters to develop a theoretically sound alternative and implementation plan. Stallman's work in this area is incredible and inspiring, but there isn't, so far, nearly as much theory or evidence on that side (despite the work of Benkler et al.).
Meanwhile, low protectionists--like most people here, myself included--are frequently going to assume a version of the current system stays in place, while proposing tweaking some of the knobs (types of content covered, expiration, penalties, enforcement mechanisms, etc.).
It bothers me as well. Perhaps OP should change his question to "What would happen if creators couldn't police the area outside of the music festival to make sure that nobody benefits from the sound that happens to escape the fences?"
Copyright is simply one means of accomplishing the end goal of paying creators, and certainly not the only one. I'd like to hear an argument in favor of copyright-exactly-as-it-is that doesn't involve this logical fallacy.