Do you really think it makes difference for a poor unknown author, whether he has exclusive rights for his book for 20 or 70 years? He can still sell his book after 20 years, after all. And regular people are not evil for the sake of it, if they want to buy a book, they would prefer to buy it from author, than from some opressive company.

BTW new economy makes it easy to extract value from the long tail. How much does author earn on each book? 10 % of final price? Probably less.

With if he self-publish an e-book, he can earn 100% of the price. Think about price difference for customer. Would you be more eager to buy book that is 1/10 the price? Would you be more eager to buy 21 years old book from author, or from some huge distributor?

Cutting out the middle man is the way to support more content producers with the same amount of customers. Copyright protects distributors, not producers.

Is it better for you to sell 10000 e-books, and know that for each book sold 10 more were pirated, or to sell 1000 e-books, and know nobody pirates them? I'd prefer the former.