Public Domain isn't so bad. It's not the worst thing to happen to John Romero, who's seminal zombie movie Night of the Living Dead lapsed because of lack of copyright indication. Instead of giving up directing forever and curling into a ball, he made more movies in what became a genre and he's fairly well off from that. And we get to live in a world that has Resident Evil, House of the Dead, Zombies ate my Neightborhood, World War Z, Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland etc.
This is what people need to understand. Public domain exists to enrich culture. America is VERY young and honestly has little depth of culture. We have one, but it isn't storied. Other countries have so much culture because long before copyright, most works were legend/folklore/fairy tales. Stories were passed down again and again, told in different ways by different elders.
America has little of this tradition. There are figures like Johnny Appleseed and John Henry, but by and large, our culture is entangled in copyright. The entire purpose behind copyright was to provide a short period of time for creators to monetize their work exclusively, so that creative people would have incentive to introduce new ideas into the public sphere. Greed has since corrupted the original purpose of copyright and has more or less created a stranglehold on access to ideas.
It is bad enough for a company to own a pop culture character into perpetuity, but copyright is now so strict that people sue any one for attempting to create any idea that is deemed too similar. For instance, Marvel licensed the rights to the X-Men to Fox, which included live-action television and film rights. Since that left Marvel unable to produce live action programming about the X-Men, they came up with an all new universe of mutant characters. You may remember the show if you are old enough. It was called "Mutant X." Fox sued Marvel over the production, claiming it was too similar to the X-Men content that Marvel had licensed them (unfair competition). Several years later, Marvel and Fox settled out of court. That is the sort of ridiculousness that comes from copyright.
If copyright has no limit, then the time will come sooner than you think in which the rest of our culture will look like the smartphone wars between Google, Apple and Samsung, in which every person with a stake in the market accuses others of having no right to create their own take on a concept.
Public Domain is what comprises most of the Disney catalog. Public domain is how we got a John Carter/Barsoom live action film (Disney really capitalizes on public domain, which is ironic, because they are the chief opposition to public domain). Public domain is how Joss Whedon was able to take a crack at making his own take on Much Ado about Nothing. Public domain is how we get works like Resident Evil and Underworld (all novel derivatives of prior concepts such as Night of the Living Dead, Dracula and The Wolfman). Public domain is how we can have Thor films from Marvel. Public domain has not cheated any person or corporate entity from generating revenue. However, the lack of public domain does cheat our culture.
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