Re: It ought to be.
"only person who *doesn't* benefit from the something wonderful is my widow?"
Are you not intending to leave her anything in your will, then?
To be honest, the whole 'lifetime of the creator' thing is bullshit and should be dropped. Copyright should be set at something like a fixed 20 years. If what you made was that good, you (or whomever gets the rights when you die, or whomever you choose to sell those rights to) will make plenty of money in that 20 years. After that's expired, it goes public domain and others can acquire it for free.
This way, you protect the livelihood of artists, but not to the point that you can write one Christmas jingle and then your family doesn't need to work for the next 5 generations. You make older art (or code, or schematics, or whatever) freely available to the whole world, so people can see how it works and make better, more efficient versions of it. And you even encourage competition, by removing an effective monopoly.
The only possible criticisms of this position boil down to two things: 1) You don't want competitors to see how this thing works (which means you're a monopolist, despite the position usually being held by people claiming to like capitalism), and 2) You want to do one thing when you're about 23 and then retire (usually accompanied by bitching about how other people are lazy).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
