If I died one month after starting a new programming job, my employer wouldn't pay a salary to my family for 15 years.
I'm not sure why society has to take care of the family of an author but not a programmer.
Death or 15 years seems fair to me.
IP is more about property than a job, I think.
Nice trick, that.
Hereditary transfer of IP is a bizarre anachronism.
General searching around turns up these numbers here and there as well. Assuming that is in fact true, _most_ people shouldn't be giving up anything in estate taxes.
Estate taxes in the US are 40% and the first ~$5 million in value is exempt. So its impossible to lose most of any estate to estate taxes in the US, and very few estates (0.14% [1]) are subject to any estate tax at all.