This story, in a nutshell, shows why it's ludicrous to have a 70-year copyright term. There are large swaths of our culture that are going to be locked away for decades precisely because <i>everybody</i>, corporations and individuals alike, are bad at keeping records for longer than a decade or so.<p>If we'd had a more reasonable copyright system, No One Lives Forever would have been public domain by now, and anyone would have been free to update it, re-release it, use its assets for other projects, etc. Instead, it's (figuratively) locked away in a warehouse somewhere, like the Holy Grail at the end of Indiana Jones.