Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your mistake is thinking about brands like Charles Dickens and Disney. Of course they make money, and of course they would continue producing work if copyright was only 20 years. What you have to think about is the author who is not famous, but who makes his living off of selling books. Not the millionaires, the ones with a regular salary. They often sell old stories to short-story collections, for example, for a few…
Do you really think it makes difference for a poor unknown author, whether he has exclusive rights for his book for 20 or 70 years? He can still sell his book after 20 years, after all. And regular people are not evil for the sake of it, if they want to buy a book, they would prefer to buy it from author, than from some opressive company. BTW new economy makes it easy to extract value from the long tail. How much doe…
The only two people I know personally who have published books make more money from the amazon affiliate link on their blog/website to their book than they get from the publisher. I think it's standard to get 10% of the net per book which works out to between 0% and 5% of final price depending on the publisher.