> Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator.

It's important to recognize why this is the case - a lot of the hubbub around posthumous copyright comes from the fact that a large amount of classic literature often went unrecognized during an author's lifetime (a classic example is Moby Dick, which sold and reviewed poorly - Melville only made 1260$ from the book in total and his wife only made ~800$ from it in the remaining 8 years it remained under copyright after Melville died, even though it's hard to not imagine it on a literature list these days). Long copyright terms existed to ensure that the family of an author didn't lose out on any potential sales that would come much later. Even more recent works, like Lord of the Rings also heavily benefitted from posthumous copyright, as it allowed Tolkien's son to actually make the books into the modern classics they are today, through carefully curating the rereleases and additions to the work (the map of Middle Earth for instance was drawn by Tolkien's son.)

It's mostly a historic example though; Copyright pretty blatantly just isn't designed with the internet in mind. Personally I think an unconditional 50 years is the right timeline for copyright to end. No "life+50"; just 50.

50 years of copyright should be more than enough to get as much mileage out of a work as possible, without running into the current insanity where all of the modern worlds cultural touchstones are in the hands of a few megacorporations. For reference, 50 years means that everything before 1975 would no longer be under copyright today, which seems like a much fairer length to me. It also means that if you create something popular, you have roughly the entire duration of a person's working life (starting at 18-23, ending at 65-70) to make money from it.

Long copyright also means that the estate can control the work- like how Tolkien's son guarded lord of the rings like a hawk.

And I also understand Disney's point of view. Imagine you invested a lot of money into a franchise and the original author suddenly goes crazy and makes Roger the Rabbit a Klansman.

Although personally I would put the protection at 10 years.

In the modern world, some sort of reasonable fixed duration seems to make a lot of sense. An elderly author cranking out a work partly for the benefit of a soon-to-be widow/widower isn't insane. You can argue about exact timeframes and details but some sort of duration after creation (maybe not less than life of creator) probably works pretty well.