You know, writers and other IP creators are basically the only people who have the ability to create something that will still bring in new money for their descendants after they die. A furniture builder can't make any more chairs or tables after he dies. An auto mechanic can't fix cars from beyond the grave. These people have to save up money they earned in life if they want to be able to pass it on to the next generation. What if said auto mechanic gets hit by a bus and killed? Better hope he had life insurance...
But someone who writes a book creates a thing that can still be sold and earn money long after they pass on, for people who didn't have anything to do with them being created or may not even have known the writer himself when he was alive. It just doesn't seem fair somehow.
The average hourly wage for an auto mechanic in the U.S. is currently around $19 per hour (based on a quick online search). Let's round that to $20 for easy figuring. The auto mechanic shows up to work five days a week, eight hours a day. At the end of a week, he gets a check for $800 (well, less than that because of taxes and other fees). (Or maybe he gets $1600 every two weeks if he gets paid every other week.) But, he's got money in hand.
If an author works on his or her novel for forty hours a week, at the end of the week he or she gets a check for, um, nothing. The following week, after another forty hours, he or she gets a check for, um, nothing. And so on. Unless the author has gotten an advance from a publisher, all that work being done is going unpaid. Even once the book is finished and published doesn't even guarantee the author will end up making even minimum wage for their work. They often have to work other jobs in order to make ends meet.
So, the furniture maker or the auto mechanic or whoever is making money and getting paid after putting in their hours of work. That's money they have in hand at the end of the week or every other week. That's money they can almost immediately use to buy food, pay bills and maybe even invest into savings for the future.
The author (or other artist) does not have that same luxury. Those hours spent toiling away producing a creative work often do not pay off right away. It might be years if they pay off, if ever. So, how do you compensate those creative people? You could say, oh well, tough luck if your stuff doesn't sell; you should have been an auto mechanic, and then discourage people from writing, painting and other creative endeavors. Or you could recognize the risk they are taking by spending their time trying to produce creative works and look at the creative arts as an investment that may not pay dividends for many years. So, yes, a longer copyright term is fine with me. Ninety-five years after death isn't bad either considering how underpaid the typical creative person tends to be. For every Stephen King, there are probably hundreds of other authors barely scraping by.
So, while it may not seem fair someone can profit from their work even after they are dead, those salaried and hourly wage workers getting paid on a regular basis get a more immediate benefit to their hard work and they have the freedom to invest some of that money into buying a house, setting aside money for their children or grandchildren's college expenses, and so on. The author doesn't necessarily have that luxury.
So the longer copyright terms is like society saying we value creativity, we value the benefits creative works can provide and we recognize that creative works often do not generate an immediate income, but if you want to take the risk of producing creative works, if you want to spend hours and hours working on something that may never produce a good return on time investment in your lifetime, we're willing to help you a little bit by giving you and your family an extended number of years for it to pay off, so even if you don't benefit in your lifetime, even if you can't set aside money to invest to build something for your family, you will still have an opportunity to help your family financially long after you're gone. Or, in some cases, where the author has no family, they can provide for charities or other beneficiaries they maybe couldn't afford to help as much as they could while alive.
Sure, some corporations may take advantage of that and it may lock up works for what some might consider to be "too long" but maybe that just means creative professionals need more training in contract negotiations and what their rights are and so on. I mean, I had plenty of art classes and a creative writing class in school and none of them taught us anything about copyright law. Especially in the creative writing class, which was an elective, there's a good chance people taking an elective course like that are interested in becoming writers so some instruction on copyright law and related contracts would be highly beneficial. We learned writing techniques and even how to submit to publishers, but if you actually land a contract, good luck with that, you know?
But, anyway, I digress. Plus, you know, creative people aren't always the best marketers. If they were, they could maybe become millionaires with their first work or something. LOL. Sometimes we're slow learners. So we need life plus another hundred years to figure it all out.