Copyrights: Who do they Protect?

Over the past 20 years a new term has come up in relation to music and movies: pirating. It is espoused that when people "pirate" a song or a movie by copying it and distributing it, they are stealing money from the author of the work. However, Orson Scott Card, in MP3s Are Not the Devil, states that most of the money goes to the distributor, much more than they need to make a profit, instead of the author. The author hardly makes anything form the sale of a CD. They couldn't care less if you actually bought the CD, in fact some encourage people to share their music with their friends. Its the big corporations that make money with sales and lose it when something is pirated. Copyrights and anti-pirating acts benefit the record company and not the author. This is wrong, if I were to invent something using a sheet of paper I borrow from my roommate the profit should not go to him. I should pay him for the paper and maybe a little more because of the added benefit I got from it, but not most of what i would make. In essence, that's what these record companies are doing. They rent our the use of their facilities and people, foot the bill to burn a CD and then demand most of the profit, amounts well above production costs, just because they can manipulate the copyright laws to their own advantage.