Openai's New Sora Video Generator to Require Copyright Holders to Opt Out

For many years it actually did work like this in the US. You had to register the copyright and then renew it after 28 years within a certain window. You can even see at the scans of the old registration indexes - they're still relevant for determining public domain of many works.

The US is usual an oddball in international agreements and this is no exception. The modern "copyright by default" method is relatively recent in the US, in 1989, when the US acceded to the Berne convention of 1889 which was already in use by many other countries.

Every country has it own rules and dates of various laws coming into and out of force so the overall global picture is rather muddy for any random given work. Generally "death of last surviving author plus 70 years" is the rule for works made in living memory, and if it's not that it's "publication plus 95 years". The general upshot is that if anyone is still alive who was alive when the author was, it's in copyright still.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyright_rules_b...