I think of this more like: Just while you're not offering your work for sale in a country, then we all just agree as a society to look the other way as it's pirated. But you can end this get out of jail free card at any time by providing an official alternative.

Not doing this creates memory holes for artistic content. TV shows from decades ago with unclear rights ownership will be gone, disappeared.

Not just offer it for sale, but if you ever publish it. Once you've let something be part of the common culture, it belongs to the people.

What's the difference between offering it for sale and publishing something? That seems like an artificial distinction.

Plenty of things are widely published without charging money for them, and things are sometimes sold but privately to a limited audience (e.g. Kit Williams' artworks) which I wouldn't consider to be publication.

I don't see how it's unreasonable these days. You can just simply leave it up on Bandcamp, GOG, and whatever may emerge in the future as a video ownership platform (as opposed to video rental).

Not unreasonable? It forces people to engage in commerce whether they want to or not, and "but we want it!" doesn't seem like the kind of compelling public interest that could justify that. Beyond that, it's trivially easy to work around (ok, now my software costs $10M a copy.)

I think of society as in the best case providing good for the public, not simply as a vehicle for companies to extract money from people.

If a company creates something, that does not happen in a vacuum, it requires the support of a whole society of people to happen.

The value created should ideally be for the whole society to use.

If a company can't even be bothered to sell it, or goes out of business, then that work that the whole of society did, was wasted. The historical record, which belongs to everyone, becomes incomplete.

I don't think that's right and in my opinion they should then forgo their claim to it.

Our historical record should not be at the whim of bean counters.

Yes.