First: I entirely agree with you regarding DRM. Second: the "baseless framework" of property rights is how it has worked for centuries. Hardly baseless. The new world is the exception and I don't see how it has materially changed the rights of a creator to their own works.
I will say that our current system is extremely broken with regard to the public domain, primarily because of things like DRM and intellectual property, both of which I believe are harmful to society as a whole. I also believe copyright had been extended for way too long. These are things we should push hard to change because I agree, they break the implicit agreement that justifies copyright.
But in the world you are imagining, every new work of any kind would have to be registered with someone to make sure the sources are made public when the copyright expires. Then of course, you would have the massive enforcement effort to ensure the sources actually get released. Little Jimmy starts working a little game on his parents' computer? Better register that with the copyright office so the sources don't get lost in ten years when the copyright expires. It's ridiculous. That's not the way it works and its not the way it should work.
The framework of explicit "imaginary property" is new, within the past few decades. Thinking of copyright (et al) as general property rights leads to errant conclusions. Such as that at copyright expiration, the owner is forfeiting their "property" to the government. I refer to it as baseless because it's not modeling physical reality (information isn't exclusive-use), but backfitted based on wishful thinking of how some would -like- the world to operate.
Registering a work would be quite easy in this day and age - a hash for confidential priority, and then an easy upload to cement the registration. "Little Jimmy" wouldn't need to register anything until he decided to start distributing his game, and only then if he wished to take advantage of copyright.
Works being implicitly granted copyright is at the root of the problem with DRM.
A DRMed track is not a creative work, but a mechanically-created derivative of a creative work. Allowing the original creative work to remain secret while still allowing copyright on mechanical derivations of it creates the situation where the content creator can have their cake and eat it too, by releasing a crippled limited-purpose derivative with no intent to add the work to the public domain.
The crux of the matter is this - if creators use the law of the computational jungle to prevent full access to the work (to remix/port/etc) after copyright expiry, then why should members of the public not similarly revert to the law of the computational jungle wherein copying is Free?
> The crux of the matter is this - if creators use the law of the computational jungle to prevent full access to the work (to remix/port/etc) after copyright expiry, then why should members of the public not similarly revert to the law of the computational jungle wherein copying is Free?
In this I believe we agree. I completely agree that any technical protections applied to the distributed work should be removed, or at the very least allowed to be removed by others after the period of copyright expires.
I will say that our current system is extremely broken with regard to the public domain, primarily because of things like DRM and intellectual property, both of which I believe are harmful to society as a whole. I also believe copyright had been extended for way too long. These are things we should push hard to change because I agree, they break the implicit agreement that justifies copyright.
But in the world you are imagining, every new work of any kind would have to be registered with someone to make sure the sources are made public when the copyright expires. Then of course, you would have the massive enforcement effort to ensure the sources actually get released. Little Jimmy starts working a little game on his parents' computer? Better register that with the copyright office so the sources don't get lost in ten years when the copyright expires. It's ridiculous. That's not the way it works and its not the way it should work.