Tycho, your strident arguments about copyright are all well and good, but they assume one major thing that isn't really true about the Shadowrun universe.
Strong enforcement.
Copyright only really works if there is a strong enforcing agency to make sure people don't abuse or violate it. In a world where most governments are largely puppets of corporations, it makes perfect sense that copyright would be equally warped and twisted into whatever the corporations want it to be.
I also don't find it THAT unbelievable that Rodriguez would try to get larger coverage by piggybacking her work onto other more well known works. As to why she went with illegal distributors rather than legal ones, well, people do that kinda thing all the time even today. It's not always optimal, sure, but people do silly things all the time.
-k