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I'd love to have this poll split down by (published?) authors and non-authors. I think that might surprise us -- I wonder if there is anyone from the Society of Authors (or the non-UK equivalents) hereabouts.
Like most, each month I have to pay a fair amount for the house I live in (bear with me here, please!). Now it is possible that the builder/architect/... is/are dead. Does that mean I don't have to pay for the house? Does the house become public domain? So some artefacts maintain value after the creator dies, and we see no problem with this. If we invest all the value solely in the physical instance, and nothing in its creation, then we have no motivation of innovation, creation, science, technology, ...
I know some authors (likes of Rowling, Rankin, McCall Smith, Banks, ...) earn a reasonable living from their writing; I suspect a lot earn sums that are not so much below the minimum wage as possibly measured in the range 10 cents/hour/year of copyright. The only way they can extract a decent living is by being able to gain revenues from their work for a long time, and hoping that as they build up a portfolio of books, they "cross-sell" themselves. And this means they need a very long copyright -- at the least until their death.
Pragmatically, the publishers also have an interest in keeping the rights (as mentioned earlier by pilotbob, and probably others). And I don't think it is unreasonable to expect some certainity for them. This argument is many hundreds of years old, and I think the arguments for a reasonable copyright are as strong as they ever where. Just because some people might be abusing copyright, doesn't make it wrong.
And as I understand it, there is nothing preventing someone waving copyright (Creative Commons?) or making their content freely available (i.e. still copyrighted, but no-one need pay for it).
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