> What motivation does a company have to invest into expensive R&D if their competitor will copy it next iteration?

What does that have to do with copyright? R&D isn't copyrightable. In the absence of patents or secrets-keeping, competitors can copy it anyway. But to answer your question, it gives them an advantage this iteration.

> Obviously not enough [people donate] to fund the making of [..] major pieces of software.

Tell that to Apache, FreeBSD, GIMP, GNOME, GNU, KDE, Linux, MediaWiki, Mozilla, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSSH, Perl, Python, Ruby, Vorbis, and X, just to name a few.

"Promising" open source projects are a dime a dozen, most of them vaporware started by someone who can't code. Someone who doesn't donate to a vaporware developer is a realist -- not a heartless bystander. When it works and is good, then the donations start coming in.

> >Only that they still claim control over what I do with my copy.
> Why shouldn't they?

Do you have the attention span of a goldfish? The point is that this shows your "It's like contracting them to develop it, but with greater spread" argument to be invalid. The contractee would get rights to the result.

> The one on the internet can be copied ad infinitum.

What will you say when foldable displays hit the market and it's a standard feature of all books that they can be copied? It'll only make sense then for libraries to offer downloadable copies of books -- saves money and makes knowledge available more effectively. Or are libraries evil in your opinion?

> In case you hadn't noticed, photocopying sections of that book is illegal too.

Funny. There's a photocopier right up at the front of my library, and nobody has ever called me a pirate for using it.