The purpose of copyright law isn’t to “incent creation of new work”. The purpose is to protect the author’s right to profit from his work.

This is 100% factually wrong.

Don’t believe me? Ask Congress:

The enactment of copyright legislation by Congress under the terms of the Constitution is not based on any natural right that the author has in his writings… but on the grounds that the welfare of the public will be served and progress of science and useful arts will be promoted… Not primarily for the benefit of the author, but primarily for the benefit of the public such rights are given.

…Or the Supreme court:

It may seem unfair that much of the fruit of the compiler’s labor may be used by others without compensation. As Justice Brennan has correctly observed, however, this is not “some unforeseen byproduct of a statutory scheme.”… It is, rather, “the essence of copyright,” … and a constitutional requirement. The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

…Or Thomas Jefferson, the founding father (and patent worker) who helped write that clause:

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.

It is pretty much the same in Britain (which is where the U.S. got the idea for copyright in the first place).

However, it is different in the European Union. The harmonizing of copyright law is the Berne Convention – which is utterly silent on the ultimate purpose of copyright law, but does include sections akin to Fair Use laws here in the States.

A couple of the member states have “moral rights,” or droit d’auteur. Created in France, these are considered inalienable; they could not be transferred to others, e.g. publishers, even if the authors wanted to. They are limited to what we would call CC-BY: right of attribution. (That’s why CC0 isn’t a legal option worldwide; artists simply are not allowed by law to put their own works into the public domain.) They are also granted the right to object to derogatory treatment of their works; in the U.S., this is covered by libel and defamation laws, and are unrelated to copyright.

Economic rights – the rights granted to publishers – are separate rights, which are not “moral rights,” and those are the ones that were extended.

And even in France, home of droit d’auteur, economic rights were enacted for the same purpose as U.S. and British copyrights. To quote Peter K. Yu:

However… the author’s right was also conditioned on the deposit of copies with the Bibliotheque Nationale, and nineteenth-century commentators characterized the 1793 law as utilitarian and “a charitable grant from society,” rather than a full recognition of the perpetual right of an author’s heirs to the fruits of his labor.

So, you’re pretty much wrong no matter how you look at it.