That’s the basic premise of copyright laws.

It’s a trade. The default state of affairs is no copyright protection.

Society has decided to trade a limited duration monopoly on the copyright of the work, in order to promote more works being created so that we have more works in the public domain.

The entire purpose of copyright is to generate works for the public domain.

So, when the current copyright system fails to do that, we should change that.

You can’t seriously tell me that if we had a law that said: if you don’t make a video game available commercially for 30 years, it enters the public domain, that would have a meaningful impact on the number of video games created.

Because they published it; they were free not to do so if they didn't want anybody to reproduce or distribute it (in fact that seems like the easiest way to do so).

In order to encourage more people to make these works, however, our government grants them a temporary, limited monopoly on the work's reproduction and distribution, but this is a means to an end that we agree to for utilitarian reasons, not some kind of actual inherent right on their part or responsibility on mine.

Once it becomes a cultural artifact it becomes more than just "someone's work". The goal of legislation is / should be to figure out how to balance the different and competing needs into a system that works reasonably well.

What make you think the authors of these works (the workers, not the owners) would oppose this proposal?

The same thing that makes people entitled to society expending resources on the very real, physical legal protection of intangible ideas that they 'own'.

Creative works aren't made in a vacuum, all creators take from the public domain. They have an obligation to give back to it.

Copyright and patent terms were designed to facilitate that. The endless extensions of the former were a cynical, self-serving attack on a public good.

I fail to see how anybody could profit from not having their work used at all.

It’s copyright. Not authorright.

The exclusive ability to copy is granted as a conceit.

The restriction only came about because publishers got mad.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I do think there's something like a "right to ideas". Like you can't tell someone to just forget about something, things people experience become a part of them and I think it's reasonable to expect they should be able to share that with others.

I mean, after life + 70 years you already are entitled to other people's work. And a purpose of patents was to get people to release ideas so culture as a whole can grow from them, rather than just keeping them as trade secrets or whatever.

I absolutely think people should be able to receive some money for it, maybe even for life + 70 years, and people can always not release things, but I think once it's released it's not just yours any more, as it lives in the public conscious.