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Originally Posted by NatCh
It goes back to the primary purpose of copyright law -- protecting the interests of the person who wrote the stuff in the first place. I think the general thing was 75 years after the death of the original copyright holder (to protect the rights of the holder's family too). They only really protect the public interest indirectly in that they ecourage folks to generate intellectual property and sell it.
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Actually, I think you've got that backwards. The *primary* purpose of copyright is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts"[1]. It tries to accomplish this by providing a temporary monopoly for content creators. The idea is that society and culture grows as a whole when people contribute to it (patents especially - one big problem prior to IP laws was inventors and artisans keeping their methods secret, so that they couldn't be copied. This meant that some very useful processes and creations died with the creator). Anyway, the *goal* is to expand the public domain, the *means* is monopoly.
Lately, much legislation has been passed that gets this backwards. In fact, I think that's the problem with the way we look at copyright today: most people see its purpose as rewarding copyright holders, rather than enhancing the public good. Retroactive copyright extension is a good example - it obviously doesn't encourage creators to create new works. In fact, it robs the public domain, so it almost directly works *against* the purpose of copyright. I think Congress possibly violated the Constitution by abusing their power in that manner, even.
I'm not really jumping on you, Natch, I just can't let a good opportunity to rant about copyright get by ;-)
[1] "The Congress shall have power to ... promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" - US Constitution, Article I, section 8