The fact that the authors death factors in at all automatically makes a young person's IP more valuable than an old person's. That's a really dumb system. It should expire x years after creation and the author's death should be irrelevant.
A more harmonious option could be X years or until the authors death, whichever is higher.
It preserves the “you own your work for your natural life”. Whether that’s what copyright should be is a separate question, and I think the answer is absolutely not, but easier to change gradually than all at once.
If X in death + X years is big enough, then age becomes less of a factor. Most IP's value drops as time goes on. In the majority of cases, after 70 years the value of IP is approaching zero, a further 10-50 years dependent on the creator's age won't have much more of an affect on the value that IP can create.
I agree X years after creation sounds like a much better system though.
