I agree that it shouldn’t be an extreme either way. Like you mentioned, it’s crazy that the Happy Birthday song is still copyrighted. It was composed by two people, and the last of the two composers of that song died in 1946 . The last creator has been dead since the year after WWII ended, and the song is still copyrighted.

On the other hand, I think that having time-specific copyright is still very important for a lot of artists and creators. If anyone can create and sell merchandise based on you, you’ll lose control of your brand image/reputation. If no one has to pay for creative work, it won’t be reasonable to continue that art/passion for many people. If artists, authors and the like can’t make income from their work, they’ll have to spend their time at a regular job instead of working on the next cool thing. That also means that we probably won’t get the next cool thing.

Most people don’t want to work hard on something just for someone else can take credit for it, even on a small scale. I think that that’s reasonable, especially for creative works. If it was actually easy to create these things, everyone probably would, no? If creating art is as effortless as some people claim, those people should have no problem respecting those copyright protections. They can just easily make their own, right?

I feel terrible for the people who have worked on their craft for their whole life, as now they’re having to worry about losing the protections that let them do their thing.

There’s no way that only regular people would take advantage of copyright protections dissapearing. This would probably turn into many "artist vs xy corporation " scenarios, but it would also be in more places than just music. Can you imagine the implications for other industries? Big companies would totally just steal ideas and works from small businesses. Not having copyright laws would mean that the law would be on the big companies side, and that the small business owner would be screwed.