[Cerium]

Why should society protect copyright for goods that are discontinued? Discontinuation of a product is generally a financial decision; in essecne you are making a public declaration that the product is unprofitable and throwing up your hands.

Your right to protection against piracy should end when you discontinue a product.

[Pxtl]

That argument extends far beyond digital goods. There are a myriad of great physical books, albums, games, boardgames, etc. that are out-of-print, and so the only legal way to experience them is to find somebody with a copy and borrow/rent/buy it from them. The IP rightsholder has decided it is no longer profitable to make more. So the problem you describe is exactly the same for physical media.

I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong but that this is scope-creep.

[autoexec]

> The IP rightsholder has decided it is no longer profitable to make more.

That's rarely the case. Most of the time rightsholders want to keep old works out of circulation because they would compete with the new works they are promoting and want people spending their money on instead.

There are some physical works that are expensive enough to produce that profit can be an issue, but things that are extremely inexpensive to produce such as paperbacks or disk media (CD/DVD/bluray) still go out of print all the time. It's not that those artistic works couldn't make the corporation a profit. It's just that the company is betting that they can make higher profits by keeping those works out of the hands of the public, which is deplorable.

I can't blame a company for not producing something that actually won't make them money, but corporations locking away our culture for more than a century just so that they can maximize their profits is a sickening example of pure avarice that copyright law wasn't originally intended to allow for.

The real issue with physical products is that they're harder for the public to duplicate. If I could copy a complicated out of print board games as easily as I could an out of print album on MP3, I'd argue that we should have the right to do that too. 3D printers haven't caught on to the point where there's one in every home, or it might even be possible.

[Pxtl]

That's a distinction without a difference, imho. Either IP that the owner has decided to stop selling should be free to reproduce, or it shouldn't, regardless of their justification and the medium.