Do you know of any coders who survive off of signing things at trade shows and doing interviews? I, for one, want there to continue being art, so I want some copyright protection. I think the US got it right at the start: 14 years was about right.
Remember, there will be no data if people can't make some money off of it.
Of course there will be data even if people cannot make money with it. Just less data, and sometimes of lower quality. There are plenty of examples of people writing novels in their free time. Or people writing free software as a hobby, while working in a company developing internal software for which copyright is irrelevant.
But anyway copyright is just one way of monetizing one's creation. People will pay to see their favorite bands, or to have the original of a painting or sculpture even if copies can be freely made. There are free ad-supported newspapers. Many artists get public funding. Many projects are supported by donations, and so are some individual programmers[1].
I'm all for deprecating copyright-dependent business models and encouraging the development of alternatives. Kickstarter has some good examples of what can be done through donations, and I can see similar models replacing much of the copyright-based economy.
Almost all of software work is done on products that aren't sold to consumers and for which copyright is irrelevant - for every developer working on products like MS Office or Angry Birds there are 9 developers working on company internal, custom, business-specific software. The products that consumers know and buy are just an insignificant tip of the iceberg. B2B giants such as Oracle or SAP can easily extend their licencing&support contracts to be watertight even w/o copyright laws. Even the large consumer companies such as Google and Facebook don't particularly need copyright protection to distribute their products.
Eliminating copyright wouldn't destroy the software creators jobs, only the industry of consumer retail software products would need to change (i.e, a rapid move to SaaS), and that is just a minor (although very visible) part of the industry. Almost all other industry would be ok and workers can make their money.
Remember, there will be no data if people can't make some money off of it.