The wages of all those people wiring up form fields to databases for cat sharing companies are propped up --- drastically propped up --- by scarcities engineered into the economy by copyright.

How do you figure? Nowadays, a very large majority of web devleopment primarily consists of taking some collection of open-source tools and other services in order to create a service. The entire justification for the existence of such a service is the idea that most people aren't inclined to do all this themselves.

This isn't a matter of scarcities at all (other than the time of the end user), let alone engineered/artificial ones. It's a matter of "I'm too lazy to setup my own web server to share my cat GIFs, so I'm gonna just use Imgur instead, since they've already done the hard part".