One of the supposed justifications for the intellectual monopoly called copyright is that it drives creativity and culture. In the last few weeks alone we have had multiple demonstrations of why the opposite is true: copyright destroys culture, and not by accident, but wilfully. For example, the MTVNews.com site, along with its sister site CMT.com, …
If you are already sharing something for free in order to gain publicity, what is the downside of others repackaging them and spreading them further? That is exactly the kind of publicity you’re trying to gain.
But you’re not profiting off of it. The corporation is. They have no incentive to give you credit, every incentive to claim that they made it which they would of course be allowed to do. They could even start making their own derivative pieces or continuations. The artist has gained nothing from this hypothetical.
Eliminating copyright doesn’t mean they’d be allowed to lie about who wrote what they were publishing. Anything an artist creates blowing up and gaining wide appreciation is very good for that artist’s future prospects. An artist who is spreading their work for free anyway is much better off in the scenario where there’s no copyright and everyone understands the need to tip / patronize their favorite artists.
That is literally what Copyright is. Removing it means exactly that.
No copyright is about the “right” to “copy” the work in question, not the attribution. Works that are in the public domain still list the author.