Actually no. The original copyright laws were created in part because of the realities of needed profit motive to have high value writing done, time consuming compilation work done. It was even titled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning". The thousands of years writing you are talking about was often funded by patrons, who kept the output in their private libraries to show off (and maybe lend out) for prestige. It was a horrible limitation of knowledge and ideas. Much worse than the profit motive, copyright based system that came after that spawned a new age of knowledge in which everyone had cheap access, and those that didn't had access to the (no longer just private) libraries.
I'm sure the billionaire class would love a return to patronage based libraries, NDAs on authors of books, and the elitism they would feel with a return to private libraries locking away all kinds of knowledge that would happen if patronage become the only way authors could make money (such as with AI just regurgitating their works, or if the stupid 'do away with copyright' people got their way).
It's not copyright that caused cheap access. The printing machine allowed for cheaper publications, that's what spawned the new age of knowledge. The raw materials and the duplication of knowledge was the bottleneck. With digital systems this cost is minuscule, but still there.
Actually it grew out of censorship and monopolies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne#Background
Cheap access came from the invention of cheap printing . The laws were passed to restrict it.