There were around $15.8 billion in sales in "premium content" in 2010. No economist would consider this industry economically significant, but we have intellectual monopolists shrieking that piracy is shutting down the economy.
But stifling natural markets is destroying the economy: the intellectual monopolists demand control over all copies (of a piece of music, movie, article, etc). This limits your ability to sell or give away the copy you purchased. The downstream control of all copies of a copyrighted work is completely unlike physical property, so the analogy between intellectual property and physical property breaks down.
The phrase "linking is publishing" is misleading. Copyright protects specific forms of expression; unless the link occurs within the copyrighted page (and even in that case), it is a new form of expression. A link is a citation. The claim that citations violate the intellectual property of the owner of some cited work is worse than copyright violation: it is plagiarism. In this case, the intellectual monopolist is claiming that a work he did not produce, the citation, is his own. This is plagiarism, which involves identity theft--a social evil.
If "linking is publishing" then "citation is publishing" and we are all guilty by transitivity.
It is because intellectual monopolists like the music and movie industry want to make their plagiarism your copyright problem that I avoid listening to their music and watching their movies. Thanks to their efforts to limit competition, it's rubbish anyway.