Exactly. The purpose of the copyright law is to benefit the public (at least as the founders intended it), not to enrich corporations and creators. The temporary monopoly of copyright was in the service of the larger goal of benefiting the public and the nation, not the ultimate reason for copyright to exist.
Corporations want you to think about this exactly backwards: that copyright exists to benefit them, not the public. This has been an extremely successful propaganda effort to invert this meaning in the public mind. Copyright was always about striking a balance between the greatest number of works being created and the benefit to the public of those works being available in the public domain as soon as possible.
I think on balance it’d be better if copyright didn’t exist at all (along with other societal reforms), but an acceptable compromise would be 14 years with the possibility of a 14 year extension. (By the way, something like 99% of works earn just about all that they will ever earn in the first five years of their availability. Absurd 100+ year copyrights only benefit corporations, not creators or the public.)
Corporate propaganda is so pervasive that I am in awe of its power to control society.