Comment by bustadjustme

You make a good point -- it's easy to knee-jerk react based on the "I like free things" vibe and decry long-copyright as nonsensical.

I think a reasonable argument against copyright being so long is that things I experienced as a child, and especially shared experiences with others, have become a part of me: they've become shared culture, even parts of our shared language. "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting..."; still under copyright in the US for another ~15 years) is just as much a part of Christmas to me as "Angels We Have Heard on High" (public domain). Maybe a good example of this is the "Happy Birthday" song: that song is synonymous with birthdays to me and those I associate with -- if you have a birthday that song is sung, if you hear that song sung it must be somebody's birthday. Yet for the longest time it was excluded from movies, TV, radio, establishments, because somebody was thought to own the copyright for it. It was part of our shared language and experience as much as aspirin or kleenex or thermos (genericized trademarks). Similarly, "hobbit" means the same thing as "halfling" to me, but don't use the word in a published work. Eventually copyrighted works seem to become pretty genericized, much quicker than ~100 years, yet their protection remains.

Disney's Snow White is about as old now as the Brothers Grimm version was when Disney's was made. I'm not allowed to make derivative works of Disney's version; should Disney have been disallowed from making it because elements of the story were "so recent"?

Obviously people should be able to profit from their own work, but I think the "shared culture/language" aspect is a decent argument that the public has an interest that counterbalances the interests of authors/creators.