Maybe it would have encouraged him to write the last books and thus have an ending

First of all, your timeline is off: A Game of Thrones was published in 1996, and the Game of Thrones series premiered in 2011.

Second of all, even if you were correct, that would only apply to the first book, not the subsequent ones, which were spread out across 1999-2011 (indeed, A Dance with Dragons came out the same year as the TV series premiered).

So perhaps you'd like to pick a different copyright maximalist strawman?

This is a pretty braindead take by an American who is fundamentally incapable of imagining any value system that does not include a price tag.

Believe it or not, many things in life have great value for everyone else without involving money. Money is not the one and only thing you should concern yourself with.

To answer your question: yes, everyone plays by the same rules. If you don't finish your book series before copyright expires and someone makes a show out of it, you've missed your chance. That's capitalism for you.

What's more logical here? Should a person have the unilateral and unlimited right to a piece of work for all eternity or is it perhaps a better business bet to allow short copyright to protect the immediate rights of the creator and then allow more businesses to make more products based on the work? Do you want more capitalism or none? You can't have it both ways.

The first copyright law granted 14 years to everything and 21 years for works already in production.

The first copyright law in the US granted 14 years + a renewable 14 years.

This is what I want copyright and patents to be. I could see a case for the initial patent period to go up to 10 years, but more or less operate identically.

Make it apply retroactively. Clean, simple, no exceptions, grandfathered special interests, or variations for special industries.

This nukes all the exploitative actors in the industry, like the textbook publishing industry, patent trolls, IP hoarders like Sony, Disney, etc. It turbocharges culture - gives everyone an even playing field, right when we need it most.

It makes AI use cases clean, but might be worth formalizing - $150 or %15 of revenue relative to the total percentage of a creator's fair-use content in the training data, whichever is greater, and the per item minimum gets decided each year by the office of the copyright, adjusted for inflation, etc.

No more technical gotcha game bullshit making lawyers and giant corporations insanely rich, just in time for the AI revolution, and best of all, it makes vast swathes of data legal for open source and small businesses, with no barrier to entry.

Groups like Anna's Archive and SciHub can come to understandings with publishers, transitioning from pirates to first-class archivists on the internet, letting them engage in legitimate commercial activities without threat of legal peril.

No more soccer moms getting slapped with nonsense million dollar fines by MAFIAA lawyers.

The entire industry of rent seeking copyright grifters gets nuked from orbit, and nobody gets hurt. The old paradigm of middlemen and studios and platforms justifying all the apparatus and exploitation through providing "legal services" and exposure and access to IP goes kaput.