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Yeah it's an interesting problem. Modern copyright law seems pretty obviously problematic for software and needs an update, but IP is always tricky and the system we have works well enough, I guess.
In general I think it would be great for game companies to have to release the code open source if they're going to stop supporting something, even an old version of a game. WoW Classic is a great example, how there was obviously a huge amount of players that still wanted to play it but weren't able to due to Blizzard's decisions. And now it's mostly dying with the Turtle WoW lawsuit. Tragic.
Copyrights should expire much sooner, a few years at most. I can't imagine any serious drawback.
Copyrights should be limited to life of author plus like 10-15 years at most, patents normally require significantly more inventiveness and cost and legal procedure to even turn into an enforcable legal right (you can write any old BS on a piece of paper and if you intented to be creative in any way whatsoever it's automatically covered by copyright) and they don't last more than a few decades.
Why extend to life of the author?
As I understand, the main benefit of copyright is to get authors paid for works that are physically free to copy. They should be paid, or many people won’t be incentivized or able to afford creating such works.
But why should they continue to be paid after a few years, when they haven’t done anything else productive (if they did, for example created another work, they’ll be paid from that).
Without copyright you have things like people bastardizing Tolkien's creations while he is still alive and writing more about his world he created. It would seriously have pissed him off, and justifiably. At least now the bastardising happens when he's dead and doesn't care any more.
We still have that, it's called fanfiction. About the only difference is you can't earn money on it (usually).
Pretty important difference: it prevents Disney from putting $100 million into marketing their own version of Tolkien while he was still writing his.
This is already a known phenomenon with existing IP constraints.
"Someone writes new novels set in your world" vs "someone writes new novels set in your world that take over your brand by sheer volume of marketing" is an important difference, yes.
You can't stop anyone from writing a story, especially nowadays. In practice, copyright has a chilling effect.
If there's no money in it you've driven away a lot of people (cynically: the most talented people who would offend writers the most). In a pre-internet world your reach is also going to be functionally miniscule so, except for the love of the game, while do it?
This is true even in fanfiction where Anne McCaffrey's antipathy towards fanfiction blocked it from FFN for years (despite the pro forma disclaimers writers would make). Back in the day you could scare fans trying to write novels in your world off the major sites purely through copyright law (I think Ao3 feels it's on sturdier ground now and has Dragonriders of Pern fics)
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