Yes, every creator has the right to protect his work. Thing is, that protection gets cracked sooner or later. Every time.
Protection is just for pleasing the corp managers so they can vomit their selling points to the shareholders which mostly
have no clue what's going on IRL.
Art gets to be known by sharing it. No one will care about the Magnum Opus if it rots away in the basement next to the laundry.
Every artist wants to let the world know what he/she has created. And here comes the trade off, share a little or share big.
The way patreon treats us NSFW creators, we don't have a choice to share our work and hope for the best in return.
I don't have many patrons myself but 90% of them decided to support me after it got released here. And from there on to other sites as well.
Expanding your reach can help. Remember the TV show Breaking Bad? Some of the production members decided to leak the 1st season because it wasn't clear if the show would get the green light by the bosses. After the show got downloadad and shared by millions of people, the production staff managed to convince the bosses to continue production.
There has never been a show, a movie studio, a musician or any artist in the world that went bankrupt because of piracy.
Remember the movie industry how they screamed like the apocalypse would come down on them when movies cost 80-100 million? A few years later, movies got 200-300 million budget and still rake in double and triple revenue.
Anyway, just my 2 cents.