I keep telling you there's no right to make money none, never has been. You have the right to try. You think without permanent control people won't create, I think with such control they won't create, if you write $greatamericannovel hit the literary lottery why bother to create anything, you're set and as a bonus you stop others from building on $greatamericannovel and making something new and just as worthy of attention. If you don't get the public domain then you don't get copyright the purpose is to offer a chance at money in exchange for getting more things created that will end up in the public domain. If you can't make money off of something for the rest of your life you won't create? Fine, don't. That didn't stop Walt Disney even though the disney corporation won't let his work fall into the public domain, when he created it copyright was a fixed term everything before 1976 in the US was for a fixed term and I don't see a shortage of books written before then. But you're probably right all those people with a novel inside them just ready to burst out decided that it wasn't worth writing before then.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, okay not to your taste, I haven't read it personally but come on the title is funny, the idea is creative it's an excellent example of why we need a public domain, so is west side story so is forbidden planet, Larry Niven's Inferno and any vampire story where vampires are in any way like Dracula. You may not personally like any of that, I know I don't care for some of it but it is creative it does add to the shared culture and hey you should appreciate this, it makes money for the people who did the remixing. Side note, Walt Disney was quite the pirate, aside form his pillage of the public domain steamboat willy is a ripoff of a Buster Keaton movee that was popular at the time and was still under copyright.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Bill_Jr.
I think it's a disgusting example of greed to think the only purpose of creativity is to milk every dollar and every bit of control out of something in perpetuity. Money Money Money Money is that all you care for? Does a child with paper and crayons think about selling their work? The great Renaissance masters were payed but they didn't keep control over their work and there was nothing at all done to prevent copies, it was expected encouraged, the way to teach painters was to make them sit and make copies.
Short copyright encourages creative people to get off their ass and create more, it also gives them more to work with. It gives to society as a whole in the form of older works to cherish and in the form of newer works based in varying amounts on the older ones since creativity doesn't happen in a vacuum it comes out of the surrounding culture. Long copyrights are tools of greed and control, a way to hold things away from the people who were kind enough to allow copyright laws as all, who payed for enforcement of those laws with no direct benefit to themselves until the copyright finally expires, people who put up with monopoly pricing, people who put up limited available formats (though kudos or the except to the law that allows copies to accommodate people with vision problems weather the authors like it or not.