The benefit is to provide incentive for designers to create original products. Essentially in exchange for bearing the costs and risks of creating something ori

The benefit is to provide incentive for designers to create original products. Essentially in exchange for bearing the costs and risks of creating something original they are rewarded with a small monopoly. But extending copyright to ridiculous terms like 70 years past creators' death does little to achieve that goal. Also, as the article points out, extending the terms retroactively is just egregious - you cannot incentivize anyone in the past. I personally feel that copyright and patents are useful but the terms should be much shorter than they are now (and they have a tendency to become longer with time).