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But the government CAN take away your house---I forget the legal word for it, but there was a case of it here recently where they needed to build a subway exit in a certain spot to make it an accessible station, and they offered to buy the house at fair market value and the people living there said no. So there was a way they could force it to serve the public good. It doesn't happen often, but it CAN happen.
I am all for author's rights, but it does burn me a little that some authors seem so unwilling to acknowledge that they owe their predecessors too. They don't write in a vacuum. They borrow, however subconsciously it might be, from those who came before. And so, as part of that social contract, I do think they owe it to the public good to let their work return to that vast pool of human culture someday. We can argue on how far away that someday is---I do think life of the author plus a chunk is fair for them to have full copyright protection---but certainly, 50 years after an author has died, I don't think their heirs have any more moral claim on it than the rest of society does.
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