It respects the people in society who believe that, as long as a commercial work continues to make significant amounts of money, they are entitled to the profits of their labors.
It also respects the statistic that most creative works stop being commercially exploited within about 28 years [1]. A shorter default copyright allows society to reap the benefits of the default effect [2], in which a creator who is no longer interested in the sale of their work is psychologically more likely to just let the default option happen, which in a world with regular extensions of copyright would mean their work would enter the public domain and others could make use of their work.
It also forces creatives and companies to back up, with results, that they believe their works are, for their own benefit, worth denying the public access to. If a work deserves or needs more than 20 years of profit to justify its existence, fine, but your belief being backed up with a $20,000 deposit, and the knowledge that the cost to you is only going to go up from that point, speaks a lot stronger than just one's word.
It's also the short benefit. If game companies abandon the IP and stop paying the money to maintain it, the community can continue to play it. As it is now, we will have to wait a hundred years to have rights to play some games. Even though the servers were taken down decades ago, and the companies have no intentions of supporting that software ever again.
Copyright doesn't in practice prevent 3rd party game servers and copyright expiration won't suddenly enable them. We're dealing with mostly closed source games for which the server code was never released.
It does actually. Blizzard has successfully pursued legacy WoW servers because of their usage of protocols, and an imitation of their copy righted content.
Personally I think copyrights should be for 25 years. Based on the fact that it is almost impossible to find books older than 25 years old on Amazon ( unless they are in pd )
