I’m speaking of creative works in particular. I’m generally in favor of the media entering the public domain when the artist dies, but when something enters the public decay, shit gets weird. Having Spongebob as IP keeps him on rails for who he is as a character. Change that, Spongebob as a character is changed by the public that could make the original unrecognizable. What’s the line when a derivative work becomes it’s own IP? What do you think?
Maybe we should have another system for canonical ownership, where the character enters public domain, but there’s still an idea of legally canon. So after expiry, anything SpongeBob related that wasn’t made by Nickelodeon couldn’t be considered legally canon. Cartoon Network could make a new SpongeBob series, but that would be legally fanfic if it wasn’t transformative enough. Then you could still profit by selling the legal ownership of the canon, but everyone else could express their creativity freely.