People who hold copyrights for profit tend create corporations to hold the copyrights, then just pass on shares in the company to their heirs.

These shares are valued the same as any other shares for an opaque, non-public company, with a single owner, whose assets have very ambiguous and widely disparate values, and which has the ability to cease operations for long periods of time and still remain profitable.

In other words, they’re worth whatever the owner wants them to be worth.

This is just my cynical interpretation. But if you think valuing real estate is hard, try valuing copyrights.

Income is taxed, obviously.

Copyright is taken away, originally after 14 years, now 70(?) years. After the death of the creator

It is amazing that modern medicine has extended authors’ afterlife by 56 years!

Originally it was 14 years plus another 14 years of the author survived that long. Copyright in the afterlife was not a thing

It was interesting from 2010 to 2015 when all of the people who died in WWII and Holocaust lost their copyrights.

It started with Freud, and ended when Adolph Hitler and Anne Frank lost copyright protection on the same day.

its necessary to make sure dead authors have an incentive to keep on writing great books

The usual steelman I hear is that Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs on his deathbed because he knew the royalties after he died would take care of his family. I grant that's a marginal case but I don't know that the CBA there actually works on long copyright's side.

Taking copyright away on death is a bad method, and that's a reasonable argument against it.

It should be a fixed term that isn't very long. And if that term ends before death and they want more money then great, write something new.

I think most people objecting to copyright lasting after death are really reacting to how long it all is, and the average amount of time that is. Some of them really don't want it to go past death, but I think most of those objectors would be fine with copyright that lasts exactly 25 years no matter what.

you dont need copyright for that. by the time he died the family could have kept the memoirs and sold the exploitation rights to whoever wanted them. contracts are a thing.

Exactly where do "exploitation rights" come from if not copyright? Anyone who is going to enter a contract for these "exploitation rights" is going to want exclusive rights so others can't just share, republish, copy, etc. This is what copyright affords those who want to sell "exploitation rights"

lets say a publisher secures the manuscript after buying it and the copyright is gone at the author's death. As a first mover they will make most of the money during the first publishing round. By the time copycats end up on the market most of the market for the book was captured by the first mover.

That's more of an argument for making the duration fixed and not dependent on the authors life at all. Having both lifelong copyrights PLUS a fixed duration is just double dipping.

What if the author/copyright holder is a corporation?