The effect of this dramatic lengthening of copyright has come at a large cost with little benefit: older works cannot be used productively by motion picture companies, authors and artists

Oh, boo hoo... Won't somebody please think of the poor motion picture companies?!

Time to update it? Yes, everyone agrees. The question is how to update it, and chances are that it will be in a direction that helps the big corporations and hurts everyone else (including many of the actual content creators).

Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain.

and his heart was going like mad and yes subby yes it is Yes

I've seen all good people turn their heads each day, so satisfied I'm on my way!


/first thing I thought when I saw the headline
//only me?

It's the same as it's always been: big business buys the laws that they want, and nobody on Capitol Hill either knows or cares how it affects their constituents.

Things like the Berne Convention, ACTA, SOPA/PIPA, the DMCA, all the way back to Sonny Bono Loves Mickey are all designed to keep the rich happy at the expense of culture and entertainment. And as long as they still have all the money, they're going to keep buying the laws that give them all the money.

/so support local artists, I guess?
//write your congress critter?
///seriously, anybody know what to do about this?

Ivo Shandor: chances are that it will be in a direction that helps the big corporations
phyrkrakr: big business buys the laws that they want

Like I said, this article is suggesting that we need to help the poor motion picture companies so that they can use older works without paying the creator.

Theaetetus: Ivo Shandor: chances are that it will be in a direction that helps the big corporations
phyrkrakr: big business buys the laws that they want

Like I said, this article is suggesting that we need to help the poor motion picture companies so that they can use older works without paying the creator.

That's kind of a backwards way of looking at it, but sure, fine, whatever. Of course, does this mean that when they use the older works without paying the creator, that they create a new work which is then in copyright, and any other use of the old work violates their brand new shiny copyright?

Because that's happened, unfortunately.

Theaetetus: this article is suggesting that we need to help the poor motion picture companies so that they can use older works without paying the creator.

Yep, and I'm all for the status quo because I don't trust change in this case.

90+ years is absurd -- that's basically turning the value of original works into a glorified trust fund for the creator's progeny. But if you leave it up to today's Congress to change the law, we'd probably get bureaucratic annual renewals ad nauseum. The big studios can outsource that sort of work but indy creators would be overwhelmed just protecting their brainchildren. They're forced to give up, and the studios can move in and turn the now-public work into the next blockbuster. Zero royalties for independent creators.

The extensions by themselves sound like they're benefitting the publishing companies and labels. But there is one part left out here: in parallel to the extensions Congress also granted inalienable rights of termination to the original authors and their heirs. The purpose was for the starving artist, who sold away their rights for next to nothing before their works became famous, to get a second bite at the financial apple, and to allow their heirs to do the same thing for a limited time. Each extension period granted new termination rights for pre-1978 works, and all 1978+ works have a termination right at 35 years from the grant (or 40 years from publishing, whichever is earlier).

I agree that the public suffers from this, but I don't think the extensions were merely to placate the greedy companies. It was more to allow the original authors to benefit from their creations.

By the way, Eldred v. Ashcroft held such extensions as constitutional and not violating the "limited times" portion of the patent/copyright clause. The argument against is an easy one: if Congress can continuously add extensions, then they in theory are not "limiting times" of protection. The Supreme Court disagreed, with relatively weak reasoning imho.

dragonchild: But if you leave it up to today's Congress to change the law, we'd probably get bureaucratic annual renewals ad nauseum. The big studios can outsource that sort of work but indy creators would be overwhelmed just protecting their brainchildren. They're forced to give up, and the studios can move in and turn the now-public work into the next blockbuster. Zero royalties for independent creators.

Yep. See, for example, the fact that copyright vests as soon as you generate the work, but you can only sue for statutory damages and attorney's fees if you register the work with the Library of Congress. And the movie and music publishers all have armies of interns that constantly fill out registration forms. You didn't register, little independent artist? Sorry, but no damages for you without a long, expensive trial.

One thing I do think needs to be changed is a broadening of the Fair Use laws. IIRC the Trademark act allows non-commercial use of a trademark as a defense to infringement....I think fair use in Copyright should do the same...that way people like that poor mother who YouTubed her baby dancing to that Prince song won't get sued for infringement.

Theaetetus: dragonchild: But if you leave it up to today's Congress to change the law, we'd probably get bureaucratic annual renewals ad nauseum. The big studios can outsource that sort of work but indy creators would be overwhelmed just protecting their brainchildren. They're forced to give up, and the studios can move in and turn the now-public work into the next blockbuster. Zero royalties for independent creators.

Yep. See, for example, the fact that copyright vests as soon as you generate the work, but you can only sue for statutory damages and attorney's fees if you register the work with the Library of Congress. And the movie and music publishers all have armies of interns that constantly fill out registration forms. You didn't register, little independent artist? Sorry, but no damages for you without a long, expensive trial.

True, but you can still sue for actual damages if you didn't register prior to the infringement. And if we're only talking one song then the actual damages is likely to be greater than the statutory anyway, except maybe for willful infringement.

Macinfarker: One thing I do think needs to be changed is a broadening of the Fair Use laws. IIRC the Trademark act allows non-commercial use of a trademark as a defense to infringement....I think fair use in Copyright should do the same...that way people like that poor mother who YouTubed her baby dancing to that Prince song won't get sued for infringement.

Oh, and that's the Lanham Act, not the Trademark Act. Wow.

Macinfarker: By the way, Eldred v. Ashcroft held such extensions as constitutional and not violating the "limited times" portion of the patent/copyright clause. The argument against is an easy one: if Congress can continuously add extensions, then they in theory are not "limiting times" of protection. The Supreme Court disagreed, with relatively weak reasoning imho.

Partly... It was also that the authors of the Constitution, in the Copyright Act of 1790, granted extensions of copyright to then-existing work (as well as granting copyright to works that were public domain, such as maps). Accordingly, the founders must have viewed such extensions and retractions of the public domain as still within the Constitution, so even the strict constructionists are happy.

Theaetetus: Macinfarker: By the way, Eldred v. Ashcroft held such extensions as constitutional and not violating the "limited times" portion of the patent/copyright clause. The argument against is an easy one: if Congress can continuously add extensions, then they in theory are not "limiting times" of protection. The Supreme Court disagreed, with relatively weak reasoning imho.

Partly... It was also that the authors of the Constitution, in the Copyright Act of 1790, granted extensions of copyright to then-existing work (as well as granting copyright to works that were public domain, such as maps). Accordingly, the founders must have viewed such extensions and retractions of the public domain as still within the Constitution, so even the strict constructionists are happy.

Right. My point was that, if the policy of the Copyright Act is to give temporary monopolies as an incentive to create, in exchange for public benefit, then repeatedly granting retroactive extensions violates that policy. The public receives little benefit from works averaging 140 years old.

However, if they broadened fair use to include non-commercial use, that might provide the public sufficient benefit to offset the extended monopoly.

Macinfarker: One thing I do think needs to be changed is a broadening of the Fair Use laws. IIRC the Trademark act allows non-commercial use of a trademark as a defense to infringement....I think fair use in Copyright should do the same...that way people like that poor mother who YouTubed her baby dancing to that Prince song won't get sued for infringement.

That's because it has to - Congress only has power to pass the trademark act under the Commerce Clause, so it has to involve commerce, by definition.

I'd go in a different direction... One is reigning in the definition of "willfulness" that the RIAA/MPAA have been pushing in statutory damages. It was never intended to mean what they claim it means, but no defendant has ever argued that definition.
Second is morally more important - copying something directly is relatively inexcusable... you can argue about people using it for non-commercial purposes "not being so bad" or that it should be under fair use, but there are arguments on both sides. But consider not direct copying, but incorporating something into a new work - a la GirlTalk, hip hop sampling, remixes, etc. The term for exclusivity of creation of derivative works should be much, much less, since that encourages new creativity. Say, an artist gets 3-5 years to remix on their own, and then it's fair game. Copy their album without changing anything, and they still get the full term of protection, however.

That still allows protection against piracy, while letting new works stand on the shoulders of older ones.

Under the current system, if I understand correctly copywrite can last 98 years, or is it 98 years after the death of the author?

I'm not clear on that. If itr's 98 yrs from publication, I believe The Hobbit (1923) will be Public in 2021?

Somehow I don't see that happening :-(

God, James Joyce is a bad example to use, his grandson Stephen, who held the copyright to Ulysses, was the biggest dictatorial bollox you can imagine. He allowed almost no-one reproduce or re-enact any part of Ulysses, and on the few occasions he did he charged a massive fee. He was single handedly responsible for holding back Bloomsday as a day of celebration, it couldn't be celbrated properly thanks to him. Him losing copyright to Ulyssey is probably the best thing to happen to Irish literature for the last five or ten years.

Ivo Shandor: Time to update it? Yes, everyone agrees. The question is how to update it

Easy. Pick a reasonable period of time, given the medium, for the author to exploit the major commercial potential of the work:

Books, let's say 10 years.
Movies, 10 years is a lot, but ok.
Computer software: 5 years.
Music: dunno -- 10 years?
etc.

Those terms may be renewed, indefinitely if the copyright holder desires, but the initial renewal comes at a substantial cost, and the cost of each subsequent renewal doubles.

This makes the copyright holder have to decide whether there is additional commercial potential in the work and continue to exploit it to stay ahead of the renewal costs, or else surrender the work to the public domain.

Madison Ave. would love this.

Imagine all your favorite commercials, but with better jingles!

Into the flood again
Same old trip it was back then
So I made a big mistake
Off to Marie Callender's for delicious cake

I think about video games and old 8-bit titles that have not seen the light of day on something like virtual console. In order to legally play Battletoads (Hardest game ever but incredibly rewarding), I would have to own a functioning copy of the game and a functioning NES console. It doesn't look like Nintendo/Rare have any plans to port it either.

the game is 21 years old and awesome, but there is no real chance aside from paying a fortune on ebay to ever have any chance of doing it legally, and Nintendo/Rare don't see a cent of that money either.

If they copyright expired the rom could be legally distributed as freeware, or even licensed to port. Make your works accessible and you can make more money off of them.

In my opinion, copyrights and patents should follow the same set of rules. 20 years of exclusivity, give or take, from the moment that the patent/copyright is applied for. After that period, the work or invention becomes "generic" and can be used freely by anybody.

Theaetetus: Macinfarker: One thing I do think needs to be changed is a broadening of the Fair Use laws. IIRC the Trademark act allows non-commercial use of a trademark as a defense to infringement....I think fair use in Copyright should do the same...that way people like that poor mother who YouTubed her baby dancing to that Prince song won't get sued for infringement.

That's because it has to - Congress only has power to pass the trademark act under the Commerce Clause, so it has to involve commerce, by definition.


Yes, but isn't non-commercial use typically a defense under most states' trademark laws as well?

I'd go in a different direction... One is reigning in the definition of "willfulness" that the RIAA/MPAA have been pushing in statutory damages. It was never intended to mean what they claim it means, but no defendant has ever argued that definition.
Second is morally more important - copying something directly is relatively inexcusable... you can argue about people using it for non-commercial purposes "not being so bad" or that it should be under fair use, but there are arguments on both sides.

But consider not direct copying, but incorporating something into a new work - a la GirlTalk, hip hop sampling, remixes, etc. The term for exclusivity of creation of derivative works should be much, much less, since that encourages new creativity. Say, an artist gets 3-5 years to remix on their own, and then it's fair game. Copy their album without changing anything, and they still get the full term of protection, however.

That still allows protection against piracy, while letting new works stand on the shoulders of older ones.

If I understand you right, this would primarily benefit those who sample older works for use in newer works. I think that would be tricky because there are artists whose sole works consist of beats and other music themes, the rights to which major artists purchase for incorporation into their works. Placing a short duration sampling would likely frustrate many artists whose works have longlasting fame.

Moreover, that solution really doesn't benefit the public any more than the extensions do. It simply makes it easier for labels, publishers and artists to make derivative works. The public domain does not benefit.

Copyright exists for the public good; now that it's causing more harm than good, it's time to scale the laws waaaay back.

tortilla burger: In my opinion, copyrights and patents should follow the same set of rules. 20 years of exclusivity, give or take, from the moment that the patent/copyright is applied for. After that period, the work or invention becomes "generic" and can be used freely by anybody.

Don't forget software, where 99% of the shiat that comes out is generic.

dragonchild: 90+ years is absurd -- that's basically turning the value of original works into a glorified trust fund for the creator's progeny.

Not to mention that you're basically torpedoing any legal replication for preservation by those who don't hold the copyright; as a result more works will be lost.

Personal rules, keeping in mind that
1. Copyright on an unpublished work is basically until the death of the creater. No stealing some poor smuck's work that he's been working on for 40 years.
2. In order to be protected by copyright, it has to be registered.
3. Copyright on published work is 10 years.
4. Copyright is renewable for a fee. First registration is free. Subsequent renewals gradually get more expensive.
6. There will be rules about valid registration submissions. Submissions will be required to be a complete copy, preferably be digital, and in an industry common open archive format - MP3 isn't good enough quality, FLAC would work. A master disc would be even better.
7. The fees for renewing work will be set such that they pay for the preservation of registered works. I'm a computer guy and well aware of the complexities of storing the massive amount of data involved. It'd have to be stored redundantly, preferably in a cloud, with a relatively large amount of effort spent to either keep support for the formats going(thus why you want to choose industry standard ones), or transition the material automatically and losslessly into new formats.
8. For materials of expired copyright, users will be allowed to access the information by paying a nominal fee - one sufficient to pay the extra expenses of keeping a distribution system of sufficient size to meet demand. I'm picturing something like a coross between Wikipedia and Netflix.

For longer copyrights, I'd have 'orphan' rules, where after X effort trying to find the creator of a work, the work enters the open domain if he or she isn't found. Want protection? Register the work with the copyright office and keep your information up to date. Perhaps require the user of the work to post a bond in case the creator eventually shows up.

Personally, I'm all for a maximum of 20 years, if not specifically setting copyright for electronic media to 15 years (Pretty much for about 90 percent of properties you're NOT going to see any use if they've not been updated in fifteen years, and even as soon as five or ten years after publishing there is a very real worry about preservation--not just because of "bit rot" and deterioration of media, but even finding a working reader for media in some cases).

Thanks to perpetual copyright (and let's not really fool ourselves at this rate--Walt Disney is going for perpetual copyright for "Steamboat Willie" the same as the trust which owns the rights to "Peter Pan" recently got perpetual copyright in the UK; this is despite the fact that there are some real questions over whether "Steamboat Willie" was property copyrighted under the laws in place at the time) there are likely entire operating systems and other pieces of computer history that pretty much will only run on emulators or literal computer-museum-quality Big Iron that have been lost.

(This also doesn't touch on orphan works being distributed as abandonware, which is probably best described as a "grey market" area; there is literally nobody to get the copyright from because the owners no longer exist, said software hasn't been available for sale for decades in some cases, yet it cannot legally be distributed because permission cannot be obtained from a non-existent company with no successors.)

I was confused at first then I read "For example, when I was in private practice at a large law firm,"

So what, you don't own it, not yours regardless of how long it's been since anyone has had contact with the owners.

tortilla burger: In my opinion, copyrights and patents should follow the same set of rules. 20 years of exclusivity, give or take, from the moment that the patent/copyright is applied for. After that period, the work or invention becomes "generic" and can be used freely by anybody.

Not a great idea. Plenty of authors make one truly good thing their entire lives, something things that continue to sell well after their deaths. If something that they created makes money, shouldn't they still be getting a cut of it?

Plus you KNOW that may major corporations would be simply sitting on the sidelines and publishing great works as soon as the copyright expires, entirely so they don't have to pay the original author.

I say lifetime of author + 10 years. No extensions, period.

If it could be done, the old 28 + 28 system would work just fine for most mediums. What 56 year old piece of IP is still making money that won't be protected? People aren't going to stop going to disneyworld to see Mickey mouse if you can hire an off brand one for your birthday party. Merchandising would take a hit, but that's the point. You milked that cash cow for 90 years. It's time to rip off some other public domain stuff and stay ahead of the curve!

good thing nobody in here is going to write the new copyright law

Fireproof: If something that they created makes money, shouldn't they still be getting a cut of it?

Why would they stop getting a cut of it? They would lose exclusivity over it. There's a big difference there. Not to break out the glasses-wearing-hipster of copyright, but Cory Doctorow releases every book he publishes under a Creative Commons license, which basically means he has no exclusivity over the contents of the book (I believe he's doing NC-SA, if memory serves). He still turns a fairly nice profit from his labors.

I definitely think that the term of copyright needs to be shortened, and I don't think lifetimes should come into play (especially since much copyrighted work falls into the "work for hire" category, and lifetime doesn't come into play anyway). I also think the level of exclusivity should be lowered, or put another way, fair use rights should be expanded.

While you're at it work on Patent Laws too.

With our consuming public constantly changing to the next big thing, I actually see no compelling reason not to return to Queen Anne's Statute. Fourteen years. Fourteen years is a long time for a piece of media. Even school textbooks don't usually get used for that long before being revised.

Firethorn: dragonchild: 90+ years is absurd -- that's basically turning the value of original works into a glorified trust fund for the creator's progeny.

Not to mention that you're basically torpedoing any legal replication for preservation by those who don't hold the copyright; as a result more works will be lost.

Personal rules, keeping in mind that
1. Copyright on an unpublished work is basically until the death of the creater. No stealing some poor smuck's work that he's been working on for 40 years.
2. In order to be protected by copyright, it has to be registered.
3. Copyright on published work is 10 years.
4. Copyright is renewable for a fee. First registration is free. Subsequent renewals gradually get more expensive.
6. There will be rules about valid registration submissions. Submissions will be required to be a complete copy, preferably be digital, and in an industry common open archive format - MP3 isn't good enough quality, FLAC would work. A master disc would be even better.
7. The fees for renewing work will be set such that they pay for the preservation of registered works. I'm a computer guy and well aware of the complexities of storing the massive amount of data involved. It'd have to be stored redundantly, preferably in a cloud, with a relatively large amount of effort spent to either keep support for the formats going(thus why you want to choose industry standard ones), or transition the material automatically and losslessly into new formats.
8. For materials of expired copyright, users will be allowed to access the information by paying a nominal fee - one sufficient to pay the extra expenses of keeping a distribution system of sufficient size to meet demand. I'm picturing something like a coross between Wikipedia and Netflix.

For longer copyrights, I'd have 'orphan' rules, where after X effort trying to find the creator of a work, the work enters the open domain if he or she isn't found. Want protection? Register the work with the cop ...

You are taking away the best point of copyright law. Everything created is automatically copyright of the author. I think copyright needs a re-think but more in terms of fair-use provisions rather than removal of author copyright. A lot more provisions need to be made in terms of non-commercial and non profit use of copyright works.

If anything I believe copyright should be given indefinitely. I konw a lot of people think that would suck but the reality is that in the digital world of today any created work is essentially timeless. Efforts and incentives should be given to authors to make their works free but you cannot just take someone's property because they have had it for a long time.

Faddy: You are taking away the best point of copyright law. Everything created is automatically copyright of the author. I think copyright needs a re-think but more in terms of fair-use provisions rather than removal of author copyright. A lot more provisions need to be made in terms of non-commercial and non profit use of copyright works.

More fair use would be good as well.

If anything I believe copyright should be given indefinitely. I konw a lot of people think that would suck but the reality is that in the digital world of today any created work is essentially timeless. Efforts and incentives should be given to authors to make their works free but you cannot just take someone's property because they have had it for a long time.

Yes, it would suck. It would destroy much of the preservation of our history. Who would hold the copyright to the Mark Twain works? The Mona Lisa? The various Venus Statues? Atlas? The Illiad? Also, 'they have had it for a long time'? We're currently looking at dates where it's not expiring in the author's lifetime, but his great-grandchildren's.

For every older work where the auther has died and the copyright is clearly held by a reasonable heir, there's another that's held by an unreasonable heir, another where the heir doesn't know he/she holds it, another where the heir hasn't bothered putting contact information out(and thus can't be found), another where the copyright is tied up in the courts, another where it's otherwise dropped off the face of the earth (died heirless, for example).

Thus the time-limit on copyright, and the requirement for registration. I should have been more clear - you don't have to register to receive protection until you seek financial compensation for your work, which was #1. It's when you go to publish that you register, which ensures that copyright can be tracked down.

Your first registration is free. After that you get charged the 'archive fee', which is going to be about what it costs to maintain your work in the Library of Congress. Well, it and all the first time registrations and works that have fallen into public domain. Maybe have the feds toss some money in to keep the public domain stuff going, or have access subscription fees for it. Basically, it shouldn't be a huge hurdle. I'm thinking $20 range for renewing a book. This means that books of neglibible commercial worth fall into the pubic domain first. If the author dies and the heirs forget about the book, or it's otherwise forgotten about, it enters the public domain.

Realistically, Disney would end up being a major, major supporter of the library if they don't want huge chunks of their IP falling into the public domain. That helps ensure that even Disney tries to determine whether keeping said copyright is economically worth it.

In the end, we view copyright under different standards. You view it as property. I view it as an incentive to create, to allow you to profit by enriching the country. The US constitution goes "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Firethorn: Faddy: You are taking away the best point of copyright law. Everything created is automatically copyright of the author. I think copyright needs a re-think but more in terms of fair-use provisions rather than removal of author copyright. A lot more provisions need to be made in terms of non-commercial and non profit use of copyright works.

More fair use would be good as well.

If anything I believe copyright should be given indefinitely. I konw a lot of people think that would suck but the reality is that in the digital world of today any created work is essentially timeless. Efforts and incentives should be given to authors to make their works free but you cannot just take someone's property because they have had it for a long time.

Yes, it would suck. It would destroy much of the preservation of our history. Who would hold the copyright to the Mark Twain works? The Mona Lisa? The various Venus Statues? Atlas? The Illiad? Also, 'they have had it for a long time'? We're currently looking at dates where it's not expiring in the author's lifetime, but his great-grandchildren's.

And to add to this--we are ALREADY running into cases where copyright is so long that pretty much the existing work will have completely degraded into unpreservability.

tl;dr version:

Between "bit rot", obsolescence of/breakdown of computer storage media, and breakdown of/legal un-emulatability of the boxes to run the software on...pretty much present copyright terms practically ensure the destruction of every bit of non-GPL'd, non-explicitly-public-domained software that has ever been written for a computer since the days when computers were invented--if the letter of the law was followed, that is. Twenty years is an eternity in the computer world; 90 to (potentially) upwards of 120+ years where it can't legally be copied...most computer software would be every bit as lost as any real trace of what the earth was like in the Late Bombardment Period (when it still had Rocks Of Considerable Size slamming into it and the surface was basically lava).

Longer but more technical explanation:

Computer software, which has been held to apply to the present US definition of "Berne Convention Copyright" (copywritten upon creation, under copyright for life + 70 years in the case of author-published works and 95 years for works published by a corporation, pretty much cannot be reasonably archived in many cases without violation of copyright.

In some cases, the author corporation has effectively abandoned the computer software but has not released it into the public domain (pretty much the case for practically all software prior to "NT Family" versions of Windows--a LOT of classic video games are in this limbo right now); in some cases, the company which originally created the software (and owns copyright) has since gone out of business with no successor firm--meaning technically the copyright has been "orphaned" with nobody legally able to place the work in public domain or transfer copyright to a successor organisation. (This last bit is the case with a LOT of historical operating systems, and also is the case with a lot of classic PC video games.)

In some cases (thanks to consolidation, transfers of rights, etc and even such things as distribution agreements) it is not entirely certain WHO owns copyright over some computer software. (An interesting case of this is VMS, the operating system used by VAX computers, as well as a lot of the older DEC operating systems; DEC was bought out by Hewlitt-Packard (who promptly snuffed it out of existence), HP has merged with Compaq, HP is now in the process of de-merging with Compaq, pretty much considers Digital's entire line to be abandonware, and finally has offered the licensing and distribution rights to what remains of the Digital User's Groups nationwide. It's probably even worse for companies that have been completely parted--it's questionable whether anyone truly owns the rights to IRIX, as Silicon Graphics (the original group) no longer exists and the Silicon Graphics name was bought by an unrelated third party. We won't even get into the utter clusterfarkage over who all might own intellectual property related to the Amiga--there's actually been some legal sparring between rival groups on that end, there are at least four separate groups that have claimed to have the IP rights to AmigaOS, AND there's the complication that a third-party company has bought the Commodore and Amiga names for purposes of selling small emulation boxes.)

What makes this worse--Computer storage data (no matter the data--whether paper tape media, drum memory, disk memory, CDs, DVDs, Zip drives, magnetic tape, etc.) has a finite storage life--even backup tapes and CD-Rs have an effective lifetime of maybe 10-20 years depending on the method of construction, disk and drum memory tend to be shorter in lifetime, and even paper tape and punchcard media will decay or degrade because it's been used and because they didn't exactly use acid-free archival stock material.

What makes this even worse--Especially in the case of older computer equipment (and honestly, anymore this really applies from anything from the early nineties back--it's especially acute with stuff from the early 80s back, though) the mere availability of devices that can read older media is questionable. Nobody makes the odd 3-inch disks used for the Amstrad CPC disks or the old Twiggy disks in the original Lisas; Lisas and pre-OS X Macs used disk formats (and in the case of Lisas, a form of disk branding) that effectively requires specialised floppy disk readers or interfaces between the older box and a newer computer to read; good luck trying to find a 14-inch hard disk cartridge (a common format in the 70s and early 80s) or even anything that'll read 5 1/4" disks, much less the old 8-inchers...

(This is also completely aside from the fact that--once you get into computers from before 1986 or so--pretty much ANY interfacing with modern equipment to read data is going to require some fairly massive custom homebrewing. Disk controllers do exist for Amiga disk drives (ironically, probably the best cross-platform 3 1/2" "Sony format" disk readers ever made--they can read Amiga, PC, HFS- and MFS-filesystem MacOS disks, and a plethora of other more obscure formats) but this is an exception--most computers of this era don't even have Ethernet (and if they do, it's usually the old coax kind that used RG-58 cable and BNC connectors--if not damn near hardline), many did not have modern-standard serial and parallel ports but used other standards, and (once you get into the 70s on back) the standard "interface" is not serial but rather a 20mA "current loop" connector designed for teletype machines.)

Because of this--even ASIDE from the copyright issue--a fair amount of old software from the 50s through the 70s is lost; pretty much especially with some of the older CDC, IBM and DEC operating systems what we have left is what ended up on paper tape, what ended up on punchcards, or what someone decided to copy as archives and managed to transfer to a more modern backup before "Berne Copyright" laws were held to apply to computer software. A lot of stuff from the 80s onward risks being lost like this; in many (if not most) cases, pretty much the only preservation of this is via the abandonware community and computer museums--who, even though in many cases no successive copyright owner exists and the work has been orphaned--are technically operating in a legally gray area; technically illegal, but nobody's around to sue, or nobody gives a damn.

(Yes, save in a few exceptional cases--again, emulation of DEC equipment and their operating systems comes to mind, as well as GPL'd software--pretty much emulation as a whole is in a rather grey area akin to "grey market" imports of cars, consoles, etc. One could argue that emulation in and of itself is a "Library of Congress workaround" that allows an exemption (there is a DMCA exemption that pretty specifically allows "jailbreaking" or defanging a program's copyright protection in the case it interferes with the usability of that program, particularly if the publisher goes under) but--to my knowledge--this hasn't been tested in the courts yet. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though. :D)

In some VERY rare cases, creators of a computer software product (whose company went defunct) have been able to "buy back" the copyright and have placed the work freely into the public--Star Control II was saved like this (in the form of the now-freeware Ur-Quan Masters). Unfortunately, most computer software (save by hobbyists) was pretty much done as works for hire, and unless you were Lord British it was rare you could have enough control to retain a clause that copyright reverted to you in case of the company folding.

In short--thanks to the copyright lengths nowadays, pretty much one has to (technically) pirate operating systems and old software to even keep them preserved and in a usable state long enough to be emulated when the copyright expires.