It seems extremely likely that the human race may not exist long enough for current works to ever have their copyright expire.
Why would it? Giving a company the right to prevent interoperability does not necessarily mean they will invoke that right. It also might promote alternative APIs potentially fragmenting the market, but also inventivizing various approaches. It's not clear that this is the case, but it's not clear that it isn't either.
You may as well argue standards have lowered innovation.
> Giving a company the right to prevent interoperability does not necessarily mean they will invoke that right
I hope that whoever created int max(int a, int b) is benevolent because just about every programmer has reinvented that at some point. What about Response get(String url) which returns an HTTP GET response. We have probably all written that at some point and most HTTP libraries implement it.
FUD. You're using extreme arguments that traditional copyright law handles them well. API functions like "max" or "get" are so basic and general that they would not be protected by copyright law because they are not original "creative" works... a "max" function can only be written in a few ways that don't really rise to the level of creativity.
However, a massive amalgamation of functions and classes, could be protected. I don't see any theoretical reason why they shouldn't, just practical ones based on what the software industry has expected as standard behavior.
Given the choice between honest work and preying on our fellow human being its always easier to exploit. This is why despite being proposed as a means to inspire creation copyright theoretically expires 7O years after you die and realistically never. Once someone has conceived of a way to extract value out of their fellow human beings that extraction becomes a right regardless of how it effects civilization as a whole and most of this value doesn't even flow to creators it flows to soulless intermediaries who have inserted themselves between creator and consumer. Why given the opportunity to exploit more would they NOT?
Your argument is not really about intellectual property rights, and is more about property rights and capitalism generally. If you don't believe in property rights or investment, then sure, IP rights don't make sense either.