The counter-argument to that is that you still get corporate owned "fiefdoms" where A) a company can keep things out of the public domain eternally for relatively cheap even if they don't make money off of it by subsidizing it from other balances, and B) the point of things eventually reaching the public domain is novel uses/reuses outside of what the original creator (or at least owner) imagined for it. (A is especially relevant in the era where there are really only 5 major media corporations with huge backlogs and enough "war chest" funds to protect them for potentially centuries/millenia.)
One counter-balance I've seen mentioned is that any proposed annual fee should be exponential (presumably with a relatively modest exponent such as say (1.0, 2.0]) with the number of years since original publication date.
Yes. It's a Catch-22 in current US culture. The solution to said Catch-22, at least in the US, was supposed to be the wording of copyright in the US Constitution, but it hasn't been strictly interpreted since arguably the first extension term act of congress and Eldred v Ashcroft all but sunk any hope that it ever would be...
Copyright, just like Patents, was designed as much to force things to expire as to hold them hostage to creators/owners ('limited monopolies' to encourage creators/owners with an emphasis on 'limited' to eventually win out for the public good). All copyrighted things should eventually expire, for the public good (that's what the US Constitution tried to provide for, originally).
There likely isn't a solution that our corporate overlords would accept that includes decent expiration terms, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying. It's the entire point of Copyright to regulate this sort of thing. If Copyright doesn't regulate expiration terms than what is the point of having Government involved at all? Might as well save the courts time and money, cut out the middle man, and let the megacorps build their own "Mickey Mouse cops" to police copyrights at that point... We don't have to live in that dystopia and we can as citizens demand that the federal government do its constitutionally mandated job of providing for the public good.
One counter-balance I've seen mentioned is that any proposed annual fee should be exponential (presumably with a relatively modest exponent such as say (1.0, 2.0]) with the number of years since original publication date.