Today it's just an excuse, wheel out Jimmy and have him say about how his grandfather just wanted to do right by the kids and imply that people using Jim's granddad's story idea now it's entering the public domain are "stealing" from him and this is an outrage.
Copyright is by its nature rent-seeking, you get income from owning something, and not by actually contributing anything of value. Even in the rare cases where it really _does_ keep some artist's recently bereaved family out of poverty we ought to be asking why aren't we keeping _everybody_ out of poverty?
The original argument tried to justify this rent-seeking by saying we are getting something from it, these brilliant ideas might never get published if Copyright doesn't ensure there's a reward. And if they're not published we'd never know about them, you can't riff on Mickey if nobody has ever seen a Mickey Mouse cartoon. And you know what, I don't agree but if the bargain had stuck at 28 years I'd hold my nose. But of course it didn't. We managed to get _Big Pharma_ to put up with a genuinely limited exclusivity period for their drugs, and a world where generic medicines not only exist but thrive - yet somehow Big Content got extension after extension for some guy's idea for a cartoon mouse (among many other things).