Copyright is hideously broken, but in theory: the owners only own it because they compensate the authors, which they only do out of an expectation of future profit (on average).

That theory's a fantasy, because extractive systems involving gatekeepers get established, but in this specific case, enforcing copyright would make things fairer for authors. There's no extractive copyright-taking gatekeeper for websites: scrapers don't get copyright, so can't re-license the material they've scraped (unless it's permissively-licensed or something).