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As far as I can understand the original Macaulay speech, when a person writes a book, the property is the manuscript - but not the text. Text cannot be anyone's property, no idea can.
Copyright is a privilege given to the author of the book by the state, to have control over making copies of the text, which become the property of copies' owners, except for the right to copy them further. If they want to copy them further, they still have to have the permission of the original author, or break the state law.
Intellectual property is a misleading term, because it implies that author has some right to the text itself.
I don't know of any studies of the influence of the length of given copyright on the value of works created under it - I doubt it would be possible to extract any hard knowledge about such complicated process as creating books in a big area, across many years.
Personally I'm for copyright no longer than until author's death, because the society would not benefit at all from making it longer. Below that limit, if it's shorter, some authors might consider the returns not worth the effort, some others would create anyway until their death and for those the shorter copyright would mean less time until their ideas can be shared freely in the society, so I don't see a way to find an optimal period.
To stay on topic, I consider the matter of the state not gaining more control over peoples' affairs than it already has more important for the society than copyright law. Without copyright people would still, many works of art are already in existence - and I know the life under USSR well enough not to want to make any steps in that direction.
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