From my intro-college-course understanding... The problems they're solving are different. Patents exist to incentivize people to create new technology. If ther

From my intro-college-course understanding... The problems they're solving are different. Patents exist to incentivize people to create new technology. If there were no patents, it's hard to justify spending lots of time and energy on new technology -- it'll just get stolen. So, the deal is that if you invent something, you get solid industrial use out of it (20 years sounds look enough to build a career), and in return, you publish comprehensive documentation about it. Contributing your knowledge to society is part of the deal. Copyright is different. Copyrights are granted to unique, creative works -- art, that holds no value other than the value in the thing itself. There, there's nothing that would otherwise need to be hidden and protected to get use of the art. So, no need to publish docs, since you're exposing the whole thing when you disseminate anyway. But, it may be your life work, or something like that. So, you get protection from people ripping you off for your lifetime, plus long enough for people to forget about your person, leaving only the work. Long story short, they're different processes with different societal impacts, so they get fundamentally different protections.