There are plenty of articles and blogs about the 'rights' (real or supposed) of the various parties to a Copyright work.  But there seems to be little comparative analysis of the 'rights' of each party against the others.

Copyright is an artificial economic right created by nation states to allow the creators of works that have been defined as capable of Copyright (please remember, for instance, that a mathematical expression is not capable of being Copyrighted, regardless of what you would like or think makes sense) to gain some economic reward for their efforts.

Creators do not have to Copyright their work, and even if they do, do not have to impose license terms or royalty charges upon others for the use of their work.  It is all a matter of economic choice.  And some creators choose to make their work freely available, whilst others, perhaps because creation is their way of earning a living, do.  (Consider, copyright did not exist at the time of Shakespeare's plays, so he had to make his money out of theatre performances, but copying his work to rip him off was non-trivial.)

Publishers, rather than creators, may spend money on hyping (or do I mean advertising) the work that they have bought rights to, to interest a big audience in wanting to either go to an event or purchase a copy, or both.  It would seem reasonable for them to expect to get something back for the investment they make.  We can debate what might be a reasonable return, but generally business aims to make a profit because going bust doesn't pay very well (see Enron maybe?)

Customers also have rights.  They undoubtedly have the right to make the appropriate use of what they have paid good money for.  For instance, if you go to see a play, or listen to a symphony concert or a rock band, you have no expectation that you can video it and show the video to your friends and family.  Try it and the management will explain to you very politely that you had better buy them tickets for the show.  However, it's fine to make handwritten notes during the show of the show and take them home with you.  But if you buy a book, you may have a different expectation.  There it might be that you expect to be able to let anyone else read that copy of the book.  But you don't reasonably expect to be able to copy the book and give it to anyone you please.  Not even for backup.  If you lost the book or it got burned or soaked you would just have to go out and buy another.  Music tracks are more interesting.  Of course you can play them to all your friends, not just yourself (you can inflict them on other people in the subway also, for free) but back in the days of vinyl it meant giving them the actual record, so you could not then play it.  And if it got scratched, or worse, dropped, that was that.

But move any of these onto digital, and something seems to happen with the expectation.  Arguments appear that say that because the medium the work is held on has changed, then somehow the expectations, and therefore the overarching rules, have changed, with new rights being created.  Perhaps some of the new rights are appropriate - backing up a computer hard drive is a right and a necessity, as is maintaining a backup library of application program install discs.  But are those rights distribution rights - you get to distribute material obtained for your own use to anyone and everyone you choose, not just friends and family - or are they use rights to allow you to make proper personal use of what you acquired.

It is important to say that there are no absolute positions in all of this.  I don't go drawing any specific conclusion.  Copyright is a politically granted economic right in trade.  It was granted so that some trade markets would operate.  Without it, book authors would likely go do something else because why bother if you aren't going to get paid?  But those markets may no longer operate effectively and efficiently for all the players.  Copyright was balanced by fair dealing / fair use.  But is that being respected by Copyright holders today, on the one hand, and consumers using Copyright works only and solely within the strict rights granted by fair dealing / fair use?

At the moment we seem to have the battle lines drawn betwee the (so called) DRM fetishists and the free for all user community.  A reasonable and reasoned debate might help legislators and regulators choose paths that avoid bloodshed.