This is a great argument in favor of shorter copyright terms.

Instead of a situation in which everyone loses (the status quo), after some point, the games would become public domain because the maximum possible copyright period has run out, enabling people to play them again.

This seems like an argument for copyright terms which are short by default but can be extended if the holder cares about them and pays some fee; so any abandoned content would actually become available to the public instead of being locked away for whole generations.

I don't see any benefit to the public in allowing a company to pay a fee to extend their copyright. Once the copyright has lapsed the company will still be free to do whatever they want with the property, it's just that so will everyone else.

Or at least require active registration and renewal, which fixes the "orphan works" problem to a certain extent.

If there is no copyright holder anymore, then who will sue you if you just start selling the thing?

It's genuinely very difficult to have things completely lose any kind of copyright ownership is the thing. If they're individual works, ownership follows the estate wherever it goes for decades. If it's a corporate work/work for hire, the assets were probably bought by someone in a firesale, and then they might have gone out of business and all their assets were bought too and so on ad nausium.

Proving that no one owns the copyright to the satisfaction of any company or person who's even a little risk averse then becomes essentially an archeological or genealogical task that's rarely worth it.

This is why we get an endless stream of movies and books built on ideas from before 1920 and everything made since then that isn't a blockbuster of some sort languishes into obscurity. Eternal copyright is where ideas go to die.

> It's genuinely very difficult to have things completely lose any kind of copyright ownership is the thing.

that's why we should have kept copyright limited to human creators and not allowed them to be bought up by effectively immortal corporations who can pass, sell, or auction off those rights to other corporations. Just one more way the public is being robbed from art and creative works that should be freely and easily available to them to enjoy and build off of.

I think it's a bit hard for things like games or even movies to be owned by a person given how many people have to work on those. Having a shorter time limit from publication would be easier and better for the public.

I agree 100% about the shorter time limit being preferable but only as long as that limit is significantly shorter than the life of the copyright holder and can't be extended. With things as they are today, the real benefit of denying corporations the ability to own copyrights would be in that humans actually die.

I don't see much of an issue with multiple individuals having equal share of a copyright though. We already pretty much have that now as it is. For a single recording of a song you're already dealing with a large number of rights that may not all be owned by the same people covering things like the composition, the performance/recording, synchronization, and distribution which could itself include separate licenses for different mediums (radio, physical media, streaming) or markets (domestic vs international), but somehow we manage to work it all out most of the time.

The important thing is that the problem of perpetual copyright goes away and people can start accessing and building on their own culture without fear of being sued for massive damages.

If copyright was limited to human creators, then you'd have to track down and get a license from every single person who touched the pixels and code in the game rather than from the one corporate entity. That would be thousands of people in a modern game using a mature game engine.

I mean, I don't think this is really that big of a problem? The reality is that currently, those people are assigning their copyright to the company. They are already participatories in the licensing of that game, they just sign away all their rights, including surrendering their involvement in the term of the copyright.

I think what we're really talking about here, if we wanted a copyright system that didn't allow corporations to own works, would be ending copyright assignment.

In that case, it's likely that part of your employment agreement would simply include a perpetual, exclusive, licensing agreement as well for all works performed on the job. It would be important that the company keep these licensing agreements on file, and would change the legal bias from "company presumed to own" to "company must demonstrate it owns," but that shouldn't really be that onerous. Companies already have to establish contractual basis for nearly everything they do anyways.

And it would put the cards on the table and it would probably make it easier (or at least more possible) to negotiate things like royalties on work that currently almost never gets it.

Also it'd make it a hell of a lot harder to exclude someone from the credits of a game because they quit 2 weeks before it went gold.

> In that case, it's likely that part of your employment agreement would simply include a perpetual, exclusive, licensing agreement as well for all works performed on the job.

Exactly, creators would license their work to their employers and if not much much sooner, at least when the creators have died the copyright would expire and the company (along with everyone else) would be free to continue doing what they want with it.

Then whoever can make a non-frivolous claim to the copyright will crawl out of the woodwork to sue you for damages because they suddenly have a financial incentive to do so.

Honestly even the largest companies don't seem to care too much about suing people for copyrights they don't actually own.

In the cox cable lawsuit, with billions in damages at stake, the major record labels under the RIAA had a ton of infringement claims thrown out on appeal because they didn't actually have the rights or hadn't registered them at the time of the alleged activity.

It shaved a fair amount of cash off the damages cox was on the hook for, but it must have taken them an immense amount of time and effort to check the rights on all those works to find them and as far as I can tell, the labels who falsely claimed to the courts that they had the rights didn't see any consequences for their part.

If there's no accountability for failing to keep their own records in order even in such a massive high profile copyright lawsuit why would they ever bother?