Copyright is a monopoly granted by the government on what's essentially numbers. It's a lot like democracy: utterly terrible, yet somehow the least bad way to accomplish some goal, in this case compensating creators for their labor.

In its current form, it is absolutely rent seeking. We will be dead and buried long before our culture enters the public domain. The so called "stakeholders" have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights.

Limit copyright duration to at most 20 years and it will still be a disgusting monopoly on numbers, but at least it won't be intolerable. We might actually forget that we can use technology to trivially copy stuff at negligible costs.