It’s always been curios to me that the author or inventor or artist doesn’t own the rights to their work for all time. Why do these things expire?
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One of the goals of intellectual property laws is to balance the interests of creators and inventors (and companies that employ creators and inventors) against the interests of the general public. Creators and inventors want to make money off of their ideas. The general public would benefit from those ideas being available to the public so everyone can use those ideas and potentially expand on them.
Copyrights and patents both grant the creator a temporary monopoly on their creation, giving them an opportunity to make monet off of it before it enters the public domain. Once the patent or copyright expires the idea is now available for everyone to use.
The duration for copyrights is much longer than the duration for patents. This is partly because letting patents last too long stifles innovation and allows businesses to keep prices very high, but the other reason is because Disney has aggressively lobbied congress to extend the length of copyright every time Mickey Mouse was about to enter the public domain.
So, because of lobbying from Disney, for a long time very little has entered the public domain, at least in the States. This has given people the impression that copyright protection is something that lasts forever. It’s not. Normally copyrighted materials should be regularly entering the public domain. This lets artists make their own adaptations of existing works of fiction. It also makes it easier for archivists to preserve things like old movies or video games, which might not be profitable enough to be worth preserving and selling.
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