Balancing Needs with Copyright Duration

Because this is the year of the copyright and also because I have been fascinated in freedom of information I wanted to take a look at current US policy and visit, just a little, the debate between the desire for openness and freedom to appropriate and the desire to protect and monetize things which people/corporations developed and in many cases put forth considerable effort in time or money to develop.

Short of developing a theory, to which I have little to add, I sketched up what I think is a very succinct summary of the issue: