Also: with absolutely no exception every single artist, musician, film maker, writer, and otherwise creative person I've ever met does it because that's what they do. For every creative person who turns a profit on their work there are thousands who do it just because. Even if copyright law was changed to put everything into public domain the second it's created art wouldn't die out in any form. I'm not saying this should be the case (I've said a few times the orginal 28 + 28 years is what I'd prefer), I'm just saying that people will always create. If any sort of creative endevour was outlawed tommorow on pain of death, people would still draw, sing, write, etc.
Perhaps, but having more money available makes more things possible. Back in the olden days, artists had rich patrons who would essentially give them free money for the noble goal of making more art. Now, we have giant corporations who sell art for insane profits, and reinvest the money into more art. Having shittons of money isn't an absolute requirement, people can do stuff while maintaining day jobs, but high-budget productions can afford to be higher quality. Music and paintings are reasonably cheap to produce at home, and unless you want them printed for some reason, books cost nothing but time, but once you get to movies, the costs start climbing. Sculptures and such would probably fare pretty well, since they're harder to reproduce.
And this is just speculation, but the starving artist types might care more about people perverting their vision.
Anyway, if you're doing it for the art, you have the option to just ignore the law and release your Great Work illegally, under an assumed name, via seedy file sharing sites. As a bonus point, you'll feel like some kind of badass computer terrorist. You can wear weird cyberpunk goggles while waiting for it to upload, and pretend you're leaking secret CIA identity lists or something. I guess it might be construed that there is something wrong with the law if people regularly need to break it, but having a copyright law constructed mainly for people looking to make money from their works sounds fairly reasonable to me.
And I'm still not quite convinced about fanfiction being culturally significant. Maybe I haven't read enough of it.
Also, you do realize that the "original 28+28 years" system never existed in Europe, right?