Copyright legislation as it stands is not only flawed, but demonstrably, actively hurting our society against the spirit behind its inception. The 'stealing' rhetoric misses the point that while the right to property is fundamental, you cannot actually own ideas. Society merely grants you the ability to pretend you do and circumvent the free market for a period of time. In return you accept that this right is given to you in good faith and that society gets that right back after a period of time.
The problem is that the social responsibility currently is not enforced on copyright holders, and the length of copyright has been extended to irrelevance to protect corporations that arguably do not need protecting. (So what if Disney lost Mickey Mouse? MM is a core cultural artefact now and should belong to the public)
Ignoring the complicated part about the length of copyright protection, the intended flow for copyright is for the content to be available to the public eventually, and so I think we should legislate to make it so it is the responsibility of the copyright holder to ensure that is the case. That would largely help resolve the current problem. (I.E. make it so copyright is granted on he grounds of content being "easily accessible" such that content that is not drops from copyright, and make DRM schemes subject to the same)
As it currently stands, "pirates" provide a useful service to society, and hell, even copyright holders often use the services of pirates. (there is many official compilations that use ripped ROMs from the internet as the copyright holder had lost the original files, or using reverse engineered hardware. Hell, Rockstar used NOCD cracks from the internet in their original releases of their old GTA games on Steam)
I'm not sure how you interpreted the copyright process to be flowed in a particular way, when it's really not perceived in that way with regards to the actual letter of the laws. The entire intent of copyright laws is to offer protection from copying. Works only enter the public domain due to the following scenarios: 1) when copyright expires, 2) production of governmental work, 3) intangible works (think speeches, lectures, etc), 4) insufficient originality, and these are just off of the top of my head. At the same time, the laws are flexible enough such that if a creator wants to enable their work to enter the public domain and remove the copyright that they are granted, they absolutely can. As long as you hold copyright protections, you own the expression of idea. Yes, but there are other levels of protections that can be applied to ideas: patents for example are seen as the strongest protections since you are actually protecting a unique idea that cannot be replicated by anyone else (of course this would surmise a tangible idea). So to say that ideas cannot be owned or protected isn't entirely true.
This is why the Disney example of MM entering the public domain in around 2023 (assuming no lobbying), is ignoring the fact that Disney has something like 19 trademarks on "Mickey Mouse." Furthermore, the other thing people don't realize is that Mickey Mouse is embedded into Disney's identity, gives them the argument that they should be offered protections after 2023. The idea is really only about people's interpretation that Disney should "buy into" the system (after all, they've made works based on fairy tales in the public domain) rather than the actual law itself because the only reason Disney is able to get away with it is because there's no such thing as "buying into" a system.
I think the problem with pirates is that people project preservation as their motivation towards them, when that's not really their endgame. I do agree with the arguments here that there should be a difference between Archive.org vs. generic rom sites, one is a clear archival site while the other one is clearly designed to get people to download ROMs and profit off of doing so with ads.
No, from a moral perspective, it is a perfectly sound justification. The law is the law but you can choose to agree or disagree with it. There is no inherent morality in legality. The easiest way to demonstrate this is to look at several laws we have abolished and would find uterly indefensible today.
This is a dangerous way to frame the morality/legality aspects of law, particularly because the common argument with this logic is: "I disagree with this law, therefore my behaviour is justified." This is not an argument that will hold up in court nor be taken seriously for any given crime or action that you're accused of. So yes, you are free to have this as your belief system, but don't be surprised if consequences still occur irrespective of that belief system.
the longevity of intellectual property is ridiculous. corporations can sit on properties for years, doing nothing with them except suing anyone who tries to create their own original art using it. how long intellectual property lasts speaks greatly to the "fuck you, got mine" attitude often permeating our culture today. that's extremely stifling to art. imagine if fanfiction was cracked down on as hard as fan games.
The problem is that games are commodities as much as they're art, so the conundrum is that the download of something like AM2R is going to interfere with Samus Returns, which is a fair argument to make. Especially if the game in question had problems such as reused assets from established games instead of original sprites (there's still a level of complexity too, the Pokemon fan games stand out as TPCi is known to use everything at their disposal to ensure that their own IP aren't impacted). So to you they might do nothing, but they might be working on plans to either follow with a remake/remaster/sequel/etc sometime down the road. I will concede that this becomes even more problematic if we're talking about games from defunct companies since there's no way that they will ever see re-releases.
Having said that, the problem I have with an argument like this is that what is the alternative? If I/a corporation own a series of IPs that I have plans for in the future, then why would it not be within my/their rights to hold onto them?
