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I have to say that copyrights have gotten so far from their original intent as to annoy me. At least in the United States, their purpose was to provide a period of protection for intellectual property to encourage people to publish so that ultimately the work would end up in the public domain for all to benefit (including authors who wanted to develop derivative works from it).
Now, ultimately, copyright law seems designed to protect Big corporations who own the copyrights on software, movies, TV and much of the music produced today. Length of copyright on software ensures that the software will still be under copyright long after anyone could possibly benefit from the software, and I suspect that when we get close to the limits of the copyrights of many intellectual properties again, that it might well be extended again.
Now, I could keep going with respect to the broader spectrum, but lets bring it back to ebooks. I bet if we look at the realities of the published word, most books probably make 90-95% of their sales in the first two years of of their first being published (I don't know this for sure, but it seems like a reasonable assumption). And I suspect that most of these books are out of print within 10 years of their being published. There are a small percentage of authors whose works remain in print for years, but eventually, the vast majority of works will go out of print and most will never be printed again. Such works will only be available in libraries, used book shops, yard sales etc.
Now lets assume that an author writes for something besides simply money (and I suspect, that is true of many authors). I grant that they want to make money, but once they have effectively made as much money as they will ever make on a book, do they want to see it go out of print? I suspect, that many, many authors would love to see their works available in almost any form that would make them available for new fans.
Certainly, I know this is true in Science Fiction. The New England Science Fiction Association (I think that is right) has for years approached authors or the estates thereof to secure the rights to their works to publish them in collections. The books I believe are published pretty much at cost (and generally are fairly small print runs) and the authors or their estates receive little or no royalties. Ultimately the authors simply want to make sure that their works will still be around even when they aren't.
Ok, I will admit, I am ranting and amazingly off topic here (since most of Forrester's books are in fact in print), but I think ultimately copyright now is far more likely to harm an author's interests than it is to help them (J. K. Rowling, Stephen King and their ilk excepted). Sure it benefits the 10% whose books are always in print, but it really hurts the rest of them. I suspect that a more reasonable copyright scheme where works go out of copyright 10 years after they cease being published would be a far better approach than the one we use now.
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Bill
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