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 ultimate purpose of copyright is to protect creators from the rapacious publishing industry. Now, it doesn't do a good job of it, in large part because the publishers have twisted it to mostly be a tool for publishers attacking publishers rather than creators to retain their rights.

But how much better would it be for creators if you gave those rapacious publishers the unconditional right to screw them over if they just wait 5 years (given production lead times)? You're taking away essentially the only lever creators have over some of the greediest capitalists imaginable, and it boggles my mind that anyone thinks that's going to improve the lives of creators.

> Should a person have the unilateral and unlimited right to a piece of work for all eternity

Funny that you think I think this. No, I think the ideal copyright term is somewhere around 50 years. When you make it too short, you end up incentivizing publishers to screw over their creators as the copyright term will mostly be eaten up by the time it takes to produce something in the first place.

In a world of print media and books, 20 year copyright makes sense; it gives the media time to disperse through the population, saturate, have whatever impact it will on the culture, and throughout that time, the originator can profit.

In a world where distribution of a novel the size of War and Peace takes less than a one second download, there's no value beyond gatekeeping and exclusivity that publishers and platforms can provide, and those are arbitrary and artificially imposed, and entirely unnecessary.

Copyright is fundamentally a ceding of power by a society to individuals, granting them permission to claim sole ownership of their writings for a period of time, preventing other people and institutions from plagiarizing the work. We, society, cede the right to freely exchange information in deference to the creators of different media so they have the opportunity to profit from it.

The value of media is independent from the commercial activity which copyright protects. Someone attempting to claim authorship of public domain works might do it better, or maybe they make it worse.

There's no other purpose to copyright when the internet exists. We've seen nearly 4 decades of what this sort of system does; it allows those with lots of resources and lawyers to extort and exploit those without on technicalities and gotchas. It enriches and rewards middlemen assholes without concurrent return of value to society. It results in brainless reshashes and remakes and protected IP franchises into milquetoast formulaic omnislop. Any sort of actual creativity and variety gets suppressed or outcompeted or even legally squashed, even on the off chance that it might negatively impact sales. Books and films get destroyed as tax writeoffs. Artists get their music and writing and entire life work hoarded away by some massive multibillion dollar corporation, and sometimes even left to rot and fade away to dust, never to appear again.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Your idea of a copyright system has been tried, and it has failed. It's time to update to a system which works in the world which is.