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You are being too idealistic. I think that creative efforts would not be encouraged, but rather a repackaging of existing works instead of developing new ideas. Super cheap merchandising of Disney icons by everybody and his dog would make it all worthless. And no value will be created for society anymore. As it is in here in Asia already --- in most Asian countries nobody cares about copyrights! Which means that people only trust foreign brands and very exclusive stores. For everything else prices are always rock bottom, which means that factories have to keep wages and benefits for their workers to a minimum and produce products of inferior quality or they lose money. It is not good for general living standards.
Creativity means new ideas, not just slight variations on existing themes. You would just be encouraging people to rehash existing ideas over and over again. And if Disney characters were not copyrighted in the US it really would make no sense for Americans -- any new job creation as a result of freeing up the designs wouldn't happen there. Yes, I know all the manufacturing is done in China at the moment already, but the major part of the value created is still in the US. Manufacturing costs are peanuts for such items.
The only thing I can fully agree on is the education part -- but I am sure that corporations like Disney like to have their characters used in educational materials.
Now as for books, that is quite a different story, there is no great advantage to keeping those under copyright for too long.
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