I was all set to expect my childhood to enter public domain during my adulthood. Fucking DMCA.
I'd love to watch a Star Wars movie with a budget under 10 million.
It's actually pretty great. For all the wrong reasons, but that doesn't detract from its greatness.
If we're we're inundated with low quality fan films, Cinemas simply wouldn't screen them. At the very least, we'd have a chance to see alternative interpretations and tellings of stories involving some of our favorite characters.
I'd rather see a passion project set in the Star Wars IP than any of the recent multi-million dollar films.
I generally agree, though I thought Rogue One was pretty good.
There are a few near-future scenarios that intersect in interesting ways:
The possibility of life extending interventions such that average life expectancy climbs first toward, and then perhaps past, the century mark (life-of-the-author plus anything starts to look ridiculous).
The possibility of uploading whether it is a true digitization/emulation or 'just' a simulation of a particular consciousness given enough data.
Cryogenic preservation and revivification.
Legal decisions on whether such events count as 'death' for purposes of copyright, debt, inheritance, etc.
Legal decisions on the personhood and potential emancipation of digitizations, simulations, emulations, etc.
Legal decisions on the criminal and civil culpability of such simulations etc. (if considered persons, or their owners if not) for their originals' acts (such as copyright infringement).
The copyright status of works created post-mortem by such entities, whether they are considered persons or not (such works might simply be considered or passed-off as 'unpublished', for example)
If nothing else, I'm pretty sure that there will be attempts to hack around any legal uncertainty with various permutations and combinations of corporate personhood, copyright assignment, work-for-hire agreements, and smart contracts to get to some desired result regardless of how the legal environment changes, but those still might fail in 'interesting' ways.
All of which is to say that we might very well get in to a situation where it is possible to provide incentives for the creation of new works by dead authors, legally speaking. At which point the public, and the public domain, will be well and truly screwed over.
Personally, I'm rather more concerned about the works that will be lost because they are owned.
BTW, would it surprise you to learn that Spider Robinson is a copyright maximalist?
I think this wrongful take on what capitalism should and shouldn't be allowed to take from the public domain, and why to detract from your comment. However, not as much as the incorrect take on history: Many people capitalized on works in the public domain before the Mickey Mouse taking laws. Please grace us with better research the future. This has been too typical.