Comment by gwd
It's basically a compromise. Many people hate the current situation (90 years for works-for-hire, life + 70 for people), and would love to return it to something like 14+14. But is that realistic? The money behind not doing that is massive, and I think most of the population have been conditioned by forever copyright to a degree that there will never be populist support for it.
But there might be populist support for releasing old stuff that nobody's using. More people would agree, for instance, that it's preposterous that some game from the 80's can't be sold because nobody knows who owns it (but those who think they might own some part of it threaten to sue).
And who knows, once people get used to the idea that copyrights aren't naturally forever, they'll be more amenable to the idea that they should be something more reasonable.
I don't think the problem is most people being against shorter copyright terms but simply them not caring. I don't think a compromise with the devil will change anything about that.