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Authors get the right to control copying and some use of their works, unlike cabinetmakers and potters, because society has a vested interest in getting authors' works widely available. Without the incentive of the weird monopoly that is copyright, there's no reason to distribute widely--just sell copies to as many people as the author can directly reach. Without copyright, the incentive runs to private galleries and pay-per-view approaches to all sorts of arts and creative works.
I *like* books being widely available by the thousands. I don't want authors to decide the only way to make money at their craft is to self-publish (really self publish, with their own printers) and host paid readings of their works which aren't allowed to leave their house, or have their words arranged as streaming video on paid-membership websites.
It's not that people who make shelves are less creative than authors and artists--a lot of precision work can go into a well-made basic shelf, and some artistic flair. But for the most part, society is not damaged by the gain or lack of any particular shelf, nor are we going to run out of shelves if someone stops making them because of lack of financial incentive. Books are much less fungible; we need a large variety of them to function, so we need a system that encourages *all* authors to distribute their works.
Copyright working after death encourages late-in-life works; without it, there's (1) no incentive to publish that final volume in the series if the author knows he'll be dying soon, and (2) substantial incentive to *lie* about the author of that final volume... if the author is dying of cancer, he can just allow his son--or his teenage granddaughter--to register the copyright. (He can do this now, too. But with copyright lasting some time after death, he doesn't have to choose between an accurate legacy and feeding his family.)
I'd love to see copyright return to a fixed time after publication; I'm not at all sure that's compatible with Berne. (I'd love to see Berne reworked and overturned, but that's even less likely.) However, I'd settle for the US sticking to the Berne *minimum,* and retroactively applying that--so that all movies and corporate creations from before 1961 jumped into the public domain, and other works were shifted to Life+50.
Open the floodgates of the public domain and find out how much creative and scientific work we can get done on the internet if everything before the 60's were freely available as source materials.
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