This is actually a problem that spans far beyond the vault-like behavior that HBO and Nintendo have been exhibiting. There's this notion of something called th

This is actually a problem that spans far beyond the vault-like behavior that HBO and Nintendo have been exhibiting. There's this notion of something called the copyright cliff where works that are quite old but remain under copyright are almost completely unavailable. And in the cases of books, this is not due to artificial scarcity at all, but rather that it's not economically viable to try to extract value from them. And so they just remain unpublished. Yet to get an unauthorized copy is still copyright infringement. It's good example of how copyright doesn't work very well in achieving its stated purpose.