alt Hacker News> (copyright, that expire)
For all practical purposes, copyrights no longer expire.
Any creative work made in your lifetime is unlikely to enter the public domain within your lifetime unless it was made during your childhood, the author holds the copyright rather than assigning it to a corporation, and the author already has one foot in the grave at the time of its creation.
Average US life expectancy is 79 years, humans develop their capacity for memory between 3-7 years, and copyright in the US lasts for 70 years after the author dies, so any creative work you'd remember from your childhood will only enter the public domain in your lifetime if the author dies within 2-6 years of creating it.
Well, I'm not American, and the regulatory capture that you describe, and America's efforts to impose it on the world in order to benefit American corporations is detrimental to society at large.
But even if copyright takes a long time to expire, there's still a pile of culturally significant stuff coming into public domain every year. e.g. it's good that the works of Arthur Conan Doyle are now in the public domain.