The NWU position is that copyright violation begins when someone starts making money from someone else's intellectual property without the owner's consent. Commercial versus non-commercial use is the dividing line. Reading should not be a crime, nor should the non-commercial sharing of information be prohibited regardless of the method. The public has always been free to share books with others, make personal copies of cartoons, and fax news clippings. Those same freedoms should apply to electronic media.
Freelancers are by definition, independent.
Without them, everything you read would be written by corporate, institutional, or government employees. The new information age is radically altering the economics of information. Without a fair share of electronic revenue, it will soon be impossible for freelance creators to professionally survive. When independent authors and artists cannot eke out a living from their craft, their voices are effectively muted, reduced to what little work they can produce in time spared from their day jobs.