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What use is it to a person to hold copyright for decades after they're dead? Copyrights should be for a fixed term or the life of the author/creator, whichever is longer.
If a company / corporation goes out of business with none of their intellectual property rights purchased by anyone (it happens a lot) then all copyrights, trademarks, and patents filed by or owned by that entity should become null and void, public domain, non renewable, except in cases where there are contracts, deeds, or other documents returning or bequeathing remaining rights back to whom they were purchased from or to other persons or entities.
Same thing for individuals. If they do not bequeath in a will or otherwise explicitly transfer copyrights to other persons or entities for the remaining duration, then they should become non-revocable public domain.
The concept of "abandonware" for everything copyrightable needs to be established in law, mainly to get rid of the silly business of all the works still considered protected by copyright but with no valid living or existing claimants to that right so the works are stuck in limbo and unusable for a long time.
Copyrights should be only to allow the originator of a work to make an income from it, or designated assignees if the originator dies before the copyright expires. Aside from that, the originator should also be able to sell outright, rent, lease, or loan rights to the works to any other person or entity for any amount of time up to the expiration date of the copyright.
But there should always be a hard, non-extendable END to every copyright.
When Disney could no longer get the length of copyrights extended more on their earliest cartoons, they threw a wrench into anyone's plans to include them on DVDs of old public domain cartoons - by putting them on YouTube for free. If it's totally legal for others to make a dime off a Disney work without having to pay Disney, then Disney will forego that income if they can make it pointless for others to sell copies.
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