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If copyright had been eternal in the past, we would have been robbed of Shakespeare, his wasn't the first telling of Romeo and Juliet.
With physical property, law merely gives you a mechanism to help you defend your property beyond the limits of your own power to do so, law doesn't create property.
If I own a house, even without law, I have at least some degree of power to protect my house. But a house isn't analogous to intellectual property, if I take your house, you no longer have it, but if I take a copy of intellectual property, you still have it.
Intellectual property is like me seeing your house and making one like it. You're not out anything. Without law, short of building a dome around your house to prevent me from seeing it, there's nothing you could do to prevent this.
We might well decide that we really want to encourage houses, so we could tell people they can't make a house just like yours without your permission. We would then give you that right, but only for a limited time, in exchange for people being able to use that design after the limited time has expired.
If patents did not exist, there would be little incentive to create. But if patents were eternal, creation would come to a halt. If patents had been eternal, we probably wouldn't even have the light bulb, because no one could stand on the shoulders of giants. If I were forced to choose, I would choose no patents over eternal patents. It is the same thing with copyright. I favor copyright, but oppose eternal copyright.
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