Stupid doesn't quite do it justice. Even Mark Twain who once argued for perpetual copyright compromised at the grandchildren: "let them take care of themselves". And yet here we are, watching an "estate" defend its state granted monopoly on the works of the dead for the benefit of grandchildren.
Macaulay is eerily prescient on the matter.
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
> even if I believed in a natural right of property, independent of utility and anterior to legislation, I should still deny that this right could survive the original proprietor
> even those who hold that there is a natural right of property must admit that rules prescribing the manner in which the effects of deceased persons shall be distributed are purely arbitrary, and originate altogether in the will of the legislature
> It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
> the evil effects of the monopoly are proportioned to the length of its duration. But the good effects for the sake of which we bear with the evil effects are by no means proportioned to the length of its duration.
> We all know how faintly we are affected by the prospect of very distant advantages, even when they are advantages which we may reasonably hope that we shall ourselves enjoy. But an advantage that is to be enjoyed more than half a century after we are dead, by somebody, we know not by whom, perhaps by somebody unborn, by somebody utterly unconnected with us, is really no motive at all to action.
> At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. [...] Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end.
> On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as “Robinson Crusoe” or the “Pilgrim’s Progress” shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller