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If you make a unique chair....you trade mark it or patent it. Nobody else gets to make YOUR kind of chair. One could, of course, sell the rights to the patent or trademark.
Patents expire like copyright. Trademarks do not...if they are kept active by the holder. It is this latter model that is most appropriate for fiction.
Someone invents a Lay-z-Boy chair and patents the mechanism and trademarks the name and perhaps even the looks. Seeing the design, somebody else invents a “reclining chair” using a different mechanism. They patent their method as well. But there are only going to be so many ways to design a reclining chair and thus time limited patents make sense.
But even when the patent for the original Lay-Z-Boy chair expires...you can’t violate the Trademark. You can make a recliner using the mechanism, but you can’t make and sell Lay-Z-Boys.
There is no limit to fiction. Copyrights for fiction should therefore be more like Trademarks.
If you make a chair it is your chair. It doesn’t time out. If you sell the chair....the new owner gets it. And his ownership never times out. The money he paid you for the chair is yours forever...it doesn’t time out.
A copyright for fiction shouldn’t time out either.
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