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Copyright started as a means to reduce competition for publishers, the first to claim a manuscript in the local area(hopefully by buying it from the author) had dibs, which was attached to the author when it was realized that author's rights would gain more support then publisher's rights.
Or so I gathered from Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenburg to Gates
Now I do think that it's better for society that some authors no longer need an independent source of money or to be tied to patrons (plenty still are of course).
This said I'm not sure that I need or indeed should be able to profit off of my remote ancestors' work in such a direct fashion. I am not the one who put in the work and I would be only one of a large number of people who could claim ancestry (I come from large families on both sides).
[The previous assumes that I have an ancestor that a)produced something of lasting value that was b)not sold off, c) not diluted and rendered near valueless by the sheer numbers of heirs needing to agree or d)inherited by someone else in order to keep the property intact by not having too many heirs to make any decisions.]
And on society's side stories are important as being a large part of what makes one society distinct from another and being a large part of the inculturation of values. The monopoly of stories while good for publishers (and hopefully authors) does influence the spread of values and shapes society in a particular fashion. The way stories, such as The Little Mermaid, are retold both reflects and transforms their societal influence in ways that can be greatly influential. Simply by having the little mermaid's attempt to have a upper class stranger love and marry her succeed dramatically changes the original author's message for better or worse. The fact that both variants are around provides a clear basis for discussions on how our stories reflect both ourselves and our societies in a way that can be understood by even younger children. Just collecting different versions of the same Aesop's fables and the different morals that they give is useful in this area. Having the children retell these out of copyright tales in their own words is also a very useful teaching technique.
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