It's pedantic to say it, but copyright is not directly intended to help creators; its purpose is to enrich the public by inspiring creators to produce more. Helping creators profit/benefit from their work is a means to an end.<p>Creative work benefits the public in at least two ways: primarily, by being itself. People like reading the original Harry Potter books. Copyright encourages that by allowing creators to sell their work: Rowling is rich.<p>Secondarily, by inspiring other works. Fifty Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fan fiction. Art inspires more art. Copyright hinders this process.<p>Based on the above, copyright should now be much shorter: on the order of a few years.<p>In the past it took time to extract value from a work. Successful books had dozens of printings. Shipping books around the world was slow. Discovery of material to adapt into film took time. Note, this wasn't universally true: the Gone With the Wind film adaptation happened only three years after the book was published.<p>But take for example the Lord of the Rings books. They were published in the UK in 1954 and 1955, but some sort of copyright issue/loophole caused them to be widely available in the U.S. in the 1960s, before authorized editions came out. When they did become available, authorized editions then had a note that included a phrase something along the lines of, "Those having a courtesy for living authors (at least), will purchase this edition (of the book) and no other."<p>In any case, now with the internet and digital media, the majority of the value for most publications should be available within just a few years of release. As such, the balance between the time allotted for initial value production and the value as material to inspire other works should shift forward substantially.<p>If I were setting copyright law, I'd probably make it something like 5 years automatically, with extensions available yearly after that by filing inexpensive paperwork, up to a maximum of 10(?) years.