I find that most people don't understand creativity. If you believe an artist or inventor is some mystic sage who creates works ex nihilo, then you misunderstand creativity and attribute to it far too much. And therefore you might grant an artist a period of copyright that is longer than is really deserved or needed.

Through much of my life, I have been accused of being "creative". In elementary school my class recognized me as the best at drawing. In fifth grade I wrote a book that was checked out so many times from the school library that it filled up the check-out card front and back. In high school, I made dozens of little movies with my friends. After college I was a graphic designer, and both of my employers expressed awe at my work.

The best explanation of creativity that I have found is a video series by Kirby Ferguson called Everything Is a Remix, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc

It shows what I always knew in the back of my head: that nothing I ever made was from staring at a blank sheet of paper. It was just me ripping off all my favorite things I had seen before. Everyone tries their hand at art, and often it obviously is a copy. My secret was that I would take a little of this, a little of that, copy 5 different things and mix them all together, rather than making a straight copy of just one thing. I wasn't trying to hide anything, it was just how my mind naturally worked. I thought one thing from one movie was cool, so I took part of that. I thought something else from a drawing was cool, so I took some of that. Then I merged it all together, naturally, without really thinking about what I was doing, just trying to make something cool.

Then I saw that video and realized that is what pretty much everyone had been doing, no matter how famous. A great artist is not someone who creates stuff out of nothing. More like someone who comes up with a new recipe based on five previous recipes. I'm sure they deserve something, just not everything, foreverz!