Yes. The original idea of copyright was to encourage more original creation AND later modification by granting exclusivity for a limited time in exchange for making it non-exclusive forever after.
The Copyright Act of 1790 set the duration at 14 years, with a 14 year extension if the author was still living after the first 14. It's been extended 4 times and is now 70 years after the death of the author or 95 years after publication / 120 years after creation. I agree it's now a cruel joke that has nothing to do with the original intent other mocking it.
I have no hope this can be fixed in any major way because it's now a fully bi-partisan issue. The RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobbyists have demonstrated absolute, long-term control of both major parties for decades (despite what any politician claims while campaigning). There are only a handful of politicians for whom this is a hill they're willing to shed political capital on. And, in an honest moment, they'll admit the congressional process is stage managed such that regardless which party is in power at the moment (or even a super-majority), meaningfully restricting copyright closer to its original intent will always lose by at least one vote as long as the two-party duopoly controls the U.S.
Given that sad, disgusting reality, my post was trying to suggest a way to claw back the smallest, extremely limited win for non-commercial retro preservation that might: A.) Have the slightest chance of actually happening, and B.) Actually be the slightest bit better than what we have now (which is nothing). The ironic part of making any constructive suggestion to improve things even 1%, isn't that it'll almost certainly not pass the RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobby anyway, it's that those who agree with me will bury it under objections it doesn't do enough (or doesn't abolish all IP rights).
Sure, and that's what anyone into retro gaming or preservation has to do. The problem is that "law" is a legal monopoly on the use of force. So far, the retro preservation community has managed to preserve most of electronic gaming and computing's history up through around ~2010. But only because the technology didn't yet exist to make most 'legacy' digital IPs worth exploiting. There are signs the tacit truce that's existed between retro preservation and rights holders is crumbling.
Interest in retro is booming and Nintendo, EA, Sony and others are increasingly releasing new 'remasters' of retro IP. The same AI tech making decomps/recomps faster and easier for enthusiasts is also shifting the economics of retro monetization for IP rights holders. We can no longer rely on them "looking the other way" and tacitly allowing retro preservation. Rapacious media corporations are determined to squeeze every dollar from the expanded IP rights they paid a lot of political donations to purchase (California senator Nancy Pelosi is retiring a multi-hundred-millionaire). The DMCA and other provisions they bought into law are incredibly expansive. In the past, they had little reason to use them against retro gaming. Now they do.
They now have an opposition which might have the $$$ and will to fight against copyright: AI lobbyists. The world's richest man owns an AI company. As AI makes people realise just how much everything is a derivative work, and remixes of this nature become easier, I suspect the whole concept of IP is going to change dramatically and more people will question its necessity.
or doesn't abolish all IP rights
While that might not happen fully, AI might be the catalyst driving things in that direction.
otherwise there is no moat and all that fortune that you envision them spending on anti-IP lobbying would not exist in the first place.
When copyright was invented, it was mostly applied to books (not even book series / franchises), which don't cost that much to write, even if you take printing into account, and are usually written by a single author or a small team.
Nowadays, copyright is applied to huge cinematic and video game universes, which cost hundreds of billions of dollars to make, and don't have a single "author" behind them. It's a very different law for a very different reality.
When Moby Dick was written, Moby Dick was all it was. Nowadays, every new movie in a given universe is intended to bring profits on its own, but, by making that universe more popular, it increases future profits for other things in the franchise too. This is all reflected in the accounting, and requires copyright to be much longer than it once was.
We need to kill indefinite (or even long) copyright and the music industry has been one of the worst offenders.
> the characters? does an abandoned ET game open up the franchise to public domain?
I'm confused. I specifically called those examples out and suggested one way they could maybe be carved out to prevent that exact concern. Even if my suggested 'way to carve' is dumb, my point was that lack of granularity, prevents carving out anything at all.
FWIW patents usually also expire after 20 years.
Shouldn't trademarks basically take care of this?
Indeed. NFS:U2 came out in late Nov 2004, goes double platinum, sells 11M copies and EA shut down online multiplayer by Aug 2006. Reasonable debate can be had about time frames but games out of print over 20 years should be an easy call. The problem isn't just copyright duration, it's also lack of granularity. We need a middle-ground like 'Expanded Fair Use' which kicks in after 20 years and enables non-commercial sharing of the actual code, without also weakening a franchise game's characters (Mario, Sonic, Zelda) or entire 'cinematic universe'.
As for "all sorts of cool possibilities", just look at what the retro modding community has already done with HD texture packs, expansions and fan translations.