Copyright laws protect small creators too. I'm not sure how they could expect to make a living if their work could just be copied and sold or given away by anyone.
Blatantly false. The majority of these small creators are Twitch Streamers, Tik-tockers, Youtubers these days. All of them give their work away for free effectively.
In particular, the value in the Twitch-stream is from interacting with the chat realtime. Its effectively a live performance tied to a chatroom in some niche subject matter that the audience is interested in.
All of those can probably be released public-domain and free to copy, and they won't lose a single subscriber.
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Others are paid primarily through their Patreon account or other forms of merchandise (dolls, plushies, etc. etc.). Or direct advertisements inside of the content (see Oversimplified and VPN). You can't "skip" the ad because the Ad is part of the video itself and worked into the script.