Why can't they do what the rest of us do? Earn and save money during your working life and leave _that_ for your heirs. Let copyright die with the author.
Work is often only recently published when an artist or author dies but has taken years of non-earning to create.
I know this them-and-us thinking is fashionable in the tech world but the reality is that the majority of creative people don’t earn much and never have, and copyright was developed not to give them extra power over the rest of us but to create a framework for creative work to earn them an income at all.
Sure, some number of years is reasonable - but what do you think that is? Because 70 is insane. A single bestseller should not be able to support an extended family over three generations; at some point the rent-seeking becomes excessive. If you publish a work, at some point it stops being yours. The fact that this takes a whole lifetime is already very generous.
I don't disagree; personally I think you could go with life plus 35 and cap the whole thing at 80 years from publication.
But I do think some potential post-mortem protection is essential for creative work to remain viable, and that means that any post-mortem buyer of an artist's estate has to be able to get value from recent work for a period of time.
This whole discussion is somewhat fantastical now anyway, because copyright is fucked.
But the intent was always to make working artists' lives possible; the various copyright extensions have always been for the benefit of corporate copyright holders, and it is unfair to vilify individual working artists for that.
Why can't they do what the rest of us do? Earn and save money during your working life and leave _that_ for your heirs. Let copyright die with the author.