OK, I'll bore you all with one more defence of the copyright principle as it applies here. Publishers are in the business of long-term planning, and arguably none more so than music publishers. Books published today can be enormously successful tomorrow, quite literally (Harry Potter, anyone?), but music scores do very often take years, many years, to fly (shuffle) off the shelves due to the much slower public uptake of new music. Even composers who were a success in their own lifetime were often an even bigger one afterwards (R. Strauss, for instance: Salome and Elektra took decades to get into the core repertoire) and many who came to be regarded as great had little success in their lifetime - look at Mahler, a stape of every concert season since the 1970s but a relative rarity before that. With the 70-year copyright rule, publishers are looking to pay for their experimental sign-ups today with the profits from the previous generations' compositions. If Universal is to get on with printing and promoting their latest young composers (they've got some new Wunderkind, I've forgotten his name already, born in 1978, on their home page right now) they really do need the proceeds from Strauss and Janacek - and bear in mind also that some of those proceeds are presumably also going to the Strauss and Janacek (or probably Max Brod in the latter case) estates.
All right, composers could put all their music on their own web site and cut out the middleman, and we'd have to download it (probably in very poor-quality typesetting), print it out, bind it.... and how would we find out about it in the first place? There's no question but that the Internet will play a part in all this, but it won't necessarily be for the better in all ways.
Where downloadable scores really come in is in the case of music that's long out of print. Even when the music is technically in copyright one could make a case for this being hardly a crime against humanity: some publishers do a decent enough 'print on demand' service for out-of-print stuff, but where they don't, or they've simply lost the originals or charge a completely extortionate price (I've been charged £1 a page for what was, when it arrived, a pretty shoddy photocopy, by one firm), a bit of up/downloading is easy enough to justify. But that's a major step away from distributing stuff that available in bricks-and-mortar shops, online retailers or even in legally downloadable form from the publisher's site.
Of course we all want everything to cost less than it does, but it makes no more sense to vilify publishers than it does shopkeepers, road-menders, accountants or anyone else who provides a living and charges a fee/wage for doing it.
Topic: IMSLP