The subject is copyright law. I’ve made no assertions regarding patent law. I’ve also not argued for less protection, but for more, where authors and artists have created something people are willing to pay for. If it is a marketable entity, then there is no reason the inventor or his legally assigned progeny should not benefit indefinitely as we see fit to prescribe. Free markets and freedom. The market will decide what is worthy of protection or not. Copyright law gives decent enough latitude to those who want to make use of material others have created. What’s your beef?
What’s your beef? You disagree with the Founders who specified authors and inventors, not authors, inventors, their estates in perpetuity and corporations to whom they alienated their rights (often for a mess of pottage), and who specified “for a limited term”.
The Founders plainly had some idea of the normal progress of science and culture in which ideas from the past are perpetually reused, and didn’t want to lock up ideas in government-granted monopolies in perpetuity, even as they recognized the utility of granting such monopolies for short periods as a spur to creativity.
Why exactly shouldn’t Sherlock Holmes, Gandalf the Grey, and Cthulhu at some point become like Robin Hood, Merlin and Polyphemus, legendary figures about whom anyone can write and sell stories? Why shouldn’t music that has become folkloric so that people sing it without remembering who wrote it eventually be free to reuse in snatches in new works of music? (I regard the Australian court decision that insisted Men at Work pay the estate of the composer of “Waltzing Matilda” royalties for the flute riff on the melody in their song “Down Under” as an affront to culture and a model for everything that’s wrong with copyright law world-wide at present.)
My beef is that I regard the way we mathematicians do things as good for mankind and a good model for the rest of the culture, the state of copyright law in 1790 as nearly optimal, the way Hollywood does things as bad for mankind and a horrible way of advancing culture, and the position you are advocating as even worse than the present state of copyright law.