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And there’s a problem: that essentially means that some work will never become public domain in the lifetime of its contemporaries.”
The “public” didn’t create it, so why should out ever be in their domain?
Because if it never enters public domain
it can never become a [legally legitimate] part of the culture… things like Shadows Over Baker Street would be forever verboten.
“The “public” didn’t create it, so why should out ever be in their domain?”
Who then in your view should own the rights to “Hamlet?” Joe Shakespeare, the great-great-great-great-great-great-great etc. grandchild of William? Joe didn’t create it, either.
“The “public” didn’t create it, so why should out ever be in their domain?”
Why should the public pay to protect it for them?
Why? Because that is how science and the (useful) arts progress: people are free to build on the discoveries and previous artistic work of others. The Founders put a clause in the Constitution so that Congress could pass laws like the British copyright and patent laws we abandoned when we became independent, which the first Congress under the Constitution promptly did. They specified "to authors and inventors", and at the time that would have been understood to mean "not to publishers or manufacturers other than the author or inventor" because those were the abuses the British laws had corrected. Now most copyrights are held not by the actual author, but a publisher or estate, who, per your objection, didn't create the work either, because contrary to the plain meaning of the Constitutional provision for their creation, they have been reified as "property" that can be alienated from the author or inventor by the "transfer of copyright (or patent rights)."
The notion that an artistic creation should be locked up in the control of a publisher or artistic estate for decades after the death of the author, with control preventing not merely the reproduction of the work in question, but the creation of derivative works is an impediment to science and the arts, not a support -- the Constitutional purpose specified by the Founders was to promote science and art, not create a source of monopoly rents for commercial interests.
Why exactly should Robert Frost's (d. 1968) "Fire and Ice" (written 1928) be a source of monopoly rents for Henry Holt & Co., rather than something anyone can use as song lyrics or have a character in a novel quote in its entirety? Henry Holt & Co. didn't create it any more than the public did. But the public might use it to create new art. Henry Holt & Co. will only use it to harass artists into paying them royalites.