Not really. I think if a young musician or author creates an incredible work at 18 that touches the lives of millions they should be able to own and sell that work at the ages of 28 and 38 when they are trying to make a living and raise a family.
As a society we do this policy selfishly, because we’d like people to be encouraged and incentivized to create original works that touch peoples lives.
If you touched the lives of millions at 18 you probably already made significant profit. Not only that but you can likely publish more work and all of these people will be happy to pay for it.
I agree that the purpose of copyright should be to encourage production of work and culture. I don't think encouraging people to coast on one great artwork for their entire lives does that. At this point you are extracting value from society without adding anything new back.
Of course this starts interacting with other policy decisions in interesting ways. I don't think you should struggle to live because you don't want to become a slave to making more, I think you could pair this with some sort of Universal Basic Income so that you will be assured basic comforts no matter what. However you are still encouraged to work more if you want more luxuries.
It's incredibly common for creative careers to only catch fire after years of slogging away.
What if you created the work at 18 but only after 15 years did anyone notice it? No dice? We'd prefer that all the profits from people reading on their kindles should go Amazon and some publishing service that aggregates out of copyright works instead of the guy who wrote it?
We're better off as a society if the returns to the massive part of the Spotify library that is over 10 years old, that enriches the lives of hundreds of millions of people every day, just goes to Daniel Ek instead?
Spotify would have to compete with other websites that can share these works so the price would be driven down so they won't be profiting much if any more. Instead people would have easier access to all of the works created years before.
>What if you created the work at 18 but only after 15 years did anyone notice it? No dice?
What do you mean no dice? In this scenario, you'd still have the last ten years of work still under copyright and a big platform for pushing subsequent works.
As a society we do this policy selfishly, because we’d like people to be encouraged and incentivized to create original works that touch peoples lives.