[zanny]

I'm pretty sure about 90% of professional creatives (artists, animators... programmers fall under almost all the criteria, too) are paid a salary as well. They work for DC, Disney, Amazon, etc. Tons working in either direct ad agencies or in the marketing departments of all kinds of business. All on a payroll.

[sparky_z]

Yeah, but they aren't who we're talking about here. That's called "work for hire" and it doesn't fall under an author's-life-plus-X-years rule. It has a fixed term.

Can you imagine the chaos if, every time someone died, everything they did for every company they worked for immediately fell into the public domain?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire