Fourteen years from when? Date of creation? Date of first publication? If so, when was the work created? For indivdual authors, establishing just when they created the work can be difficult since they were the only ones there? And what about earlier drafts of the work? For something like a novel or piece of music that may take years to finish (witness the fifth Harry Potter novel), is the work “created” when it is finished in exactly the form in which it is published, or when all the concepts are there in draft form?
For those who have never gone through the litigation process and therefore have never had to try and prove up these issues, they can be time-consuming and costly. The distinct advantage of a “life plus” regime is that these questions simply don’t arise. Plus, the whole body of an author’s work comes into the public domain at the same time, rather than piecemeal, as would be the case in a fixed term copyright. This can be an advantage (e.g. publication of complete sets of an author’s work). Proving the length of the copyright term is therefore a simple matter of determining when the author died, which in the U.S. is more often than not a recorded event.
A fixed-length short term, moreover, may encourage those who have the resources to develop a work to simply wait until the copyright expires and then use the work for nothing. Example- a young writer sends his manuscript to various publishers, hoping to get published. Publishers decide not to publish, but keep manuscript. Some number of years later, after fixed copyright term has expired, publisher pulls manuscript out of vault, decides to publish it. The writer gets screwed. And there is an incentive, under a fixed term system, to do this, particularly with younger writers. The shorter the term, the greater the potential for screwage.
As far as rights surviving past death, there is an old saw with a degree of truth that death creates a great upsurge in interest in an author’s work. Many times, a work may not generate much return until after the author’s death. I cited in another thread the example of the composer of “Rent”, who died suddenly and unexpectedly before the work had its first performance. He dies. If copyrights don’t survive death for some time, the heirs of an author are not only deprived of the income they would have enjoyed had he lived, but may also have to pay his debts without the benefit of the income from the creative assets he produced in life. Had he just gone into refrigerator repair and put the money in the bank, his family would have done a lot better.
Copyrights exist so that those who generate creative works can make a living and provide for their futures and their descendants futures, just like most everyone else tries to do. Because a work may not generate income (i.e. recover the investment in time and opportunity cost) until some time after its creation, perhaps not even until after the author’s death, copyright survivorship provides some encouragement for those with a creative yen to become an author or painter or sculptor and skip refrigerator repair school.