Unless of course the author made it before an arbitrary date in time, or if they failed to follow every single rule required to copyright it, or if they were a citizen of a country that didn’t have a treaty in place, or if the owner is a corporation and it hasn’t been a billion years since the author died, or if the estate of the author was split between more than one person and a subset agrees but the others do not…
That’s the thing with this crap. It is all based on what the very wealthy wanted not based on what helped artists and not based on what made sense. So of course the Church of Scientology can keep religious texts away from the public, of course Disney will always own Mickey Mouse, of course some small poor culture doesn’t have a right to a single dime from the marketing of their heritage, off course the general public doesn’t have a right to their own culture, and of course it is perfectly fine to endlessly sell something you didn’t create because the publisher messed up a word in a legal blurb.
It’s a shit system and I won’t defend a shit system. I wonder why you do.