Wow someone smoking the whacky backy or what.
Confident during the cold war we did not have all these copyright laws, noted that most of the filmers back then were freelance or even say artists never made it big untill they died and someone then buys it out.
The fact that someone can claim ownership over content they did not create and then charge others for its useage is wrong.
It should remain free for public education, the people that own the licence are not the creator of the content, so why should they get away with profiting off others work.
Take for example while we are on the topic of historical information, my incestory, it is ran by a group of individuals that somehow managed to bribe government's into allowing them access and ownership of everyones family history and charge you a fee to look at your family tree history.
Like these history archive footage, regardless if it is digital and like your family tree, it is free information that no one should be allowed to claim ownership of when it is not their work.
Just greedy rich people making loop holes to profit, now I would understand if it was music rights, but even then, does any of its money get paid to the family of deceased artists?
Take mgs 5, david bowe, when will that day come when the stuido that published the song in the games intro decide, i know, we need to make more money off this track "the man who sold the world" and lets revoke licensing rights, but ohh shit they already paid for it.
I know lets now claim because it is digital we can now claim it has an expiration date and unless they pay up more money, legally they have to pull the game.
This is exactly why the son of david bowie ensured he kept the legal rights to his fathers music his alter ego starman, as shortly after his death they wanted to buy out all rights to his music and history and turn it into a film.
And rightfully he declined and fought to keep his father's music to him and not to release it to greedy twats wanting to own it all and profit.
Its daft because the families dont get a penny off tue royalties or profit made.
During the cold war the DMCA *spits* did not exist but the basic principles of everything else remains unchanged really, and even as awful as the DMCA is it is mostly clarification for the computery world we find ourselves in.
I am still nowhere near someone that did not make something being able to charge for it is wrong.
A copyrighted work is a good like any other. You can lend it, lease it, rent it out, do some kind of reciprocal barter...
If at some point someone decided something was better off sold for a lump sum while the work continues on being a copyrighted work a bit like the time I sold my old car as it was not being used then so it goes. Money now or smaller income stream, and aggravations associated with collecting it, is a tradeoff people make all the time, indeed if you want to consider credit/debt as this then arguably the basis of the financial system as a whole.
If you preclude that you pretty much ensure only songs (or books, or films, or games) someone wrote themselves, performed themselves (possibly on instruments out of patent or that they themselves own the patent to), recorded/mixed themselves... which is ridiculous as nothing ever gets done if you go for that. By allowing collaborations, assigning of copyrights, work for hire and more besides we get things far more than any one man can do.
It is not a magical new right that was cooked up. It is baked into the very idea of ownership of goods.
Your ancestry lookup example. It is basically the phone book problem.
Lists of numbers are tricky to copyright. That someone took the time to collate all the numbers to areas, and possibly names, format the text to sit on a page (a tedious job if ever you have done it)... means they can sell that result if they so desire.
You would be free to go to local cities (or churches depending upon where you are -- births, marriages, deaths being their domain a lot of the time), consult their nice paper records from the 1800s, decipher things (many things were written in older languages, and in handwriting that makes the average doctor look like a typewriter), rinse and repeat for as far back up the family tree as records exist for.
However it seems this company decided to do the grunt work of digitising records, collating that into a database and is now selling access to that work. Because a computer does it for a lot more people and far more efficiently than a genealogist or other records specialist does not change the fundamental of it being a service you are paying for rather than rights to data itself. Indeed you would be free to digitise all the records yourself and create a competing service if you wanted to -- they don't have the rights to the data underpinning it as much as their database built from it.
"Free for public education"
Education is usually an exception to copyright concerns. This however is also not education as much as fictional entertainment. Unless you are further arguing that all videos of things of historical significance (if ever a nightmare term to have in a legal test), or for a drastic shortening of copyright lengths maybe in these specific cases (personally I would be quite content to go back to statute of queen anne lengths, or least just pre various extension lengths in which case works from the 1960s would be coming up into the public domain).
"lets revoke licensing rights"
This would be a matter of contract law rather than copyright, and arguably only applies to the creation of new works (which these downloadable games tend to function as -- if Steam or whatever wanted they could drop the money for effectively a run of the game and sell that "stock" onwards). Trivially solved really by allowing resale of goods, which theoretically should already be the case (right of first sale if you want a term to search for there).
"because the families dont get a penny off tue royalties or profit made"
If I am to take your logic then the families in all likelihood did not create/contribute to the work either. If I am continuing to follow that logic then why do they get to benefit any more than the neighbours of the person or some random on the street?
I am not sure where the rest of the David Bowie thing comes in though. So some chancers decided after he is dead that they would try to buy up the rights because they think they can make a profit in the future, or allow them to dodge issues later. OK. We could also talk about how said cold war (and earlier) artists were largely between a rock and a hard place when it came to recording contracts (don't work for the majors, no radio will play no, no concert hall will book you, they knew this so offered a fairly small cut), publishers for books much the same (up until the whole desktop publishing revolution there really, maybe with a small reprieve for vanity presses a bit before then)... fun stuff there but still does not fundamentally change the idea of work for hire being a possibility, and copyrights to a works themselves being able to be bought and sold like items.
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