as you have completed the statue, all the surrounding trees are felled by a freak storm

Oh come on, you're displacing the moral agency for willful infringement of copyright via new technology onto nature - an elaboration of 'everyone else is doing it so why shouldn't I?' The freak storm in your metaphor is actually the aggregated behavior of individuals. You might as well ascribe it to destiny, divine will, the inexorable forward motion of the proletariat, etc. You're essentially invoking a religious entity as the external embodiment of your own consumer desire...

You should be doing something like selling them hot dogs. If that is not sufficient revenue, try something else, like taking up a collection for your next project. But suppose that none of the many possible methods for raising capital work; then, maybe the time of large statues is over, and you’ll have to do something else with your efforts; something for which there is an audience willing to pay.

...and then adopting a hectoring moral tone to berate the producers of statues - the people who make the very thing you like to stare at - as if not one, but all previously obscure statues had suddenly been exposed by this 'freak storm'. You want someone who has invested considerable time, skill, and material in creating a durable commodity to switch their efforts to also supplying you with a perishable one (which is a reflection of your consumer relationship with the film, as a temporary entertainment) in order to recoup their initial investment. Then you suggest they could try begging for money - which is workable in some contexts, but definitely not for anyone producing something new or for the first time; crowdfunding essentially surfs on someone else's prior marketing investment but that's hardly a viable strategy for the first time statue sculptor who's trying to raise revenue without any sort of functioning residual model.

Then you conclude by suggesting that maybe the era of large statues is over, and they have no value. this is obviously false, because your metaphor depends upon people voluntarily investing their time in looking at said statues. Given the opportunity cost of that time at minimum wage, it's clear that the aggregate value of the time spent on statue-gazing adds up to a significant sum; for each of the many viewers - and you're the one who posited a large crowd of them - the utility of gazing upon the artwork clearly exceeds the marginal utility of more economically productive activity for the gazer. So you're saying that producers of these highly attractive statues are entitled to the attention of the viewers (insofar as they are willing to spend time gazing upon the artwork) but not one cent of positive expenditure over and above that.

The very idea of intellectual “property” is extremely suspect in these days of zero-cost copying. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

But ideas are not copyrightable; expressions of them are. And by focusing on the extremely low marginal cost of copying, you are completely ignoring the enormous fixed cost of production. Films are a particular pain point because while they are quickly consumed (in the space of a few hours) they require enormous amount of time to produce (often measured in years) and a great deal of money.

So if we're talking about, say, The Matrix, we can share the idea cheaply enough: 'hey, have you ever considered that our actions, social roles, and our very identities are actually illusions fed to us by an inhuman mechanism which perpetuates itself by extraction of energy from our physical bodies? That our lives are actually no more meaningful than those of fish in an aquarium or battery hens in an egg farm, notwithstanding the apparent uniqueness of our subjective experience? Here, check out authors like Marx and Baudrillard and imagine what they would have made of the computer age.' Certainly, sharing of intellectual ideas has been a foundation of progress since ancient times.

But actual movie known as The Matrix took about 5 years and $60 million to produce. Now of course everyone who invested in the film has made their money back in that case, but that's not relevant unless you adhere to an economic philosophy of price control and a planned distribution of wealth. Why should the people who invested the substantial labor and capital required to create such an elaborate work not enjoy a property interest in it? If you do think it's because they have already recovered their investment and then some, doesn't that mean that Mark Zuckerberg and everyone else with a significant stake in Facebook should have their holdings liquidated up to some substantial cash amount, and the firm and its codebase should all be open-sourced.

And what of films that have not yet become profitable, notwithstanding their significant cultural quality? Just the other day we had a longish thread about The Shawshank Redemption, based on an article that observed it did quite poorly at release and only found an ensuring audience after it entered the secondary and tertiary distribution markets (home video and TV, in a nutshell). If that film were released today, it might still find an audience via file-sharing, but not the revenue to recoup its production and launch costs, meaning no residual income for the actors, director, or producers. Nor would it serve its ongoing function of cross-subsidizing other films of limited commercial success during their releases, some of which in turn may not yet have found their own audience.