Although there are some good reasons why people and entities have wanted to extend
copyright terms copyright is not supposed to last forever,
and there are some consequences from those kinds of expansion of terms.
Most recently, the Copyright Terms Extension Act of 1998 gave
an additional 20 years onto the copyright term.
In a lawsuit that followed the enactment of that statute.
The Supreme Court said that Congress had the ability to lengthen terms,
as long as they were for a limited time,
even if that time was a long time, as, as long as it was still limited.
However, in many ways the lengthened copyright terms are unwieldy.
Copyright terms extend quite a bit beyond a creator's life at this point, and
so it's often true that in the later part of a copyright term,
it's hard to tell if a work is still in copyright.
It's hard to tell who the creator was, and
it's hard to find the creator or his or her heirs.