Cutting back the power of creators dramatically increases the power of distributors. Do we really want the vast majority of economic benefit for human creativity to flow to middlemen?
And strengthening copyright causes the distributors to assign themselves the new copyrights in take-it-or-leave-it contracts. Making author's rights non-transferable (as in, e.g., Germany) goes some way to preventing this.
Look how much power lies in the hands of people who lie between petroleum in the ground and its combustion. It's a whole waterfall and the majority of the "wealth" in society seems to consist of people who're spinning their wheels from siphoning from it. And now they're terrified it'll go away.
The AI "gold rush" really has this feeling. "How can I get my finger in the pie somewhere here?"
I would say that copyright empowers distributors more than creators, especially in the age of the internet where distribution is otherwise cheap and commoditized. The creator has the ability to make more but a finite capability to create, the distributor only has the copyright that they own, but an almost unbounded ability to accumulate more.
Right now, distributors have to compete with each other in terms of the content they provide — if your competitor offers Taylor Swift or AP News stories or Marvel movies but you don't, your consumers care and may flee.
Take away copyright and distributors no longer compete with each other on the basis of their catalogs — all of them have access to all works, and they're left to compete on network effects, verticals, and locking consumers in to specific distribution channels. Creators have no role in that economy because they have nothing they can leverage.
