CDRomance is a ROM site whose main specialty is offering pre-patched romhacks, fan translations, undubs, etc. and it's a great resource for such things for systems up to the PSP. I think they were deliberately trying to stick to retro systems to stay under the radar but predictably that didn't prevent the copyright ghouls from coming for them eventually.
Pretty sure the original laws in the US around copyright and such were 7 years with some ways to renew it.
Assuming my goal is to produce a functioning capitalist society (...) 7 years for like 95% of stuff to go public domain and only giving exemptions for very valid reasons sounds fair.
I can't even think of valid reasons besides maybe like a movie is produced and released and immediately a group or org of some sort sues the producers so they pull the movie to avoid further legal stuff while fighting the suit. Say they win the suit in like 5 years. It would be fair to give them 7 years from that date instead. But beyond weird stuff... 7 years for artistic endeavors to enter public domain seems totally fair.
I think people also forget that just because something passes into public domain that doesn't mean the original creator(s) can't still make money off of it. Like if an album came out in 1990, went public domain in 1997 (we cannot conceive of such a world...), and you discover it in 2024 like you can still buy the fucking album if you choose to if you want to give them, their corporate people, their descendants, whatever, some sort of payment. It would just also be available for public, free consumption. And it would have had 7 total years where the only legal path to owning the license to listen to it or whatever was solely through purchasing it through whatever method the artists had setup. Very few things like movies keep selling much 7 years post-release anyway.
Basically all the scaremongering from media companies from music to games to whatever all crumbles instantly with even the lightest inspection. Piracy has never been much of a loss for them and they're very aware of this fact. It doesn't stop people like Lars from crying forever. I actually don't even know what Lars is up to for the last 20 years but he can eat my ass forever for helping promote all this endless corporate whining about napster and then limewire, torrenting, direct downloads, etc. Fuck him.
And fuck the fanboys and useless idiots who boot-suck corporations like Nintendo who are insanely egregious in their enforcement. In my imagined-world prison is absolutely off the table in all IP circumstances. I don't care if some dude was selling bootlegs and made $1B. It's fair to take that money, ok, maybe some sort of reasonable fine, but not fucking prison. And that's the worst case offenders, people selling pirated material for profit. The usual case is pirating for personal consumption and maybe seeding or sharing in some limited capacity. The fact that prison is on the table for any of these scenarios is batshit draconian levels of corporate fascism. And yet that is the law in the US and many US-influenced nations (which is a shitload obviously). Next time some assclown is saying China is authoritarian and they're free in the US ask them how they feel about downloading torrents and the possibility of life-destroying fines and prison time for doing so. Unfortunately many Americans or westerners generally are so neolibbed up and brainwashed that they would impulsively, kneejerk defend imprisoning people for a "crime" that everyone on earth has committed even if by accident. Anywho says they never streamed any copyrighted material or torrented it or whatever is full of shit. You do it by accident all the time at a minimum.
But piracy bad for economy!1!!