Wanting to weaken or abolish any kind of property right - even the non-naturally-derived government-granted monopoly bargains that form copyright, patent, and trade secrecy - makes you extremely fringe in the legal profession. If you want to be a competent and successful lawyer while holding those opinions you have to firewall half your brain off from the other half. Partially because fringe people who want to change the law make terrible legal arguments[0], and partially because nobody wants to hire a lawyer that's arguing that forensic software should be decopyrighted and its source code forcibly expropriated by the state for the sake of avoiding a miscarriage of justice.

[0] Like me, right now, who thinks we should demand copyright term maximums

Who said anything about the state claiming ownership of this software? That's a huge leap of logic. We are talking about removing the state's power to use secret software at trial. This is a restriction on the government, not on the software authors. Any changes to copyright are irrelevant here.

We have pretty good proposals to deal with this problem that make no changes to copyright. I think the following seems pretty sensible:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/4368

I don't know the specifics, though.

"Fringe" in this case means "outside the Overton window", not "only implemented for a short fraction of the history of the human species". Otherwise we'd have to call suburban living and freedom of speech fringe ideas, because the 1st Amendment is only slightly younger than copyright itself and the formation of suburbs is still in living memory for a handful of 100-year-olds.

>>Partially because fringe people who want to change the law make terrible legal arguments

>No one has ever changed the law to benefit the rich, no sirree.

You followed this up with a link to America's mind-numbingly long copyright terms, so I would instead point out that none of those were extended by judicial fiat. Generally a "legal argument" means something argued in front of a judge about how the law is, rather than something argued to Congress about how the law ought to be. The reason why reformers make bad legal arguments is because they're trying to use the legal system to do an end-run around Congress, because the rich people already own Congress.

That being said, they also own the legal system indirectly. It's staffed by professionals who have a vested interest in a set of rich people paying them money. If SCOTUS said tomorrow that, say, 1A overturns the Copyright Clause, half the legal profession would be homeless by the day after.

Also, trademark as copyright is already precluded by the federal preemption clause of US copyright law; you specifically cannot cobble together other rights into something that looks and quacks like a copyright.

There are alternatives to “decopyrighting”: a government-sponsored development effort, open source from the beginning, for example. Or a government buying an existing piece of software to a willing company. Or sending money to that company in exchange of them publishing their source code.

The OP did not say anything about taking ownership of already-existing software without its owner’s consent.

Weird copyright idea of mine: copyright registrations lapse, and must be paid for regularly, but the copyright itself continues. You have to have a registration to be able to demand statutory damages and can only demand for the period of the registration. So, if it lapses, you can't demand anything. No copyright zombies, because if you cared enough, you'd have made sure the registration was up to date. But it still falls close enough to treaty requirements to not get thrown out.