You see, that's how you discourage an innovator: if you let society benefit from his work to his detriment, he's likely to tell society to innovate without him and go get a nice office job.
Strongly disagree, at least in situations where the works are abandoned, largely unmonetizable and on the verge of disappearance.
I believe that the risk of discouraging innovators who would be upset at the idea of their works existing in some form, years after their relevance is a reasonable trade off in comparison to the value that the sum collection of these works could provide to the future.
Especially when you consider that every innovator working today is building off of the preserved knowledge of past generations who's works have similarly fallen into the public domain. Disney didn't have to cut a check to Shakespeare Holdings, LLC when they made The Lion King; for example.
That's not to say that I am an anti-IP absolutist in this regard. I think that the ideas of copyrights and patents aren't inherently bad. I think it makes pragmatic sense to offer a temporary monopoly on works. I just think that the balance point between serving the creator and serving society needs to be evaluated.
