They're not. They're in charge with helping you regain control of your own property.

The point here, as has been pointed out here, is that Apple wants proof that the deceased woman in question is, in fact, the owner of that Apple ID. Yes, it's more than a little draconian, and they should have better means of making that connection other than a freaking court order, but the fact of the matter is that security and convenience are on a sliding scale, and while it may be just a tad too far towards security, they're still trying to look out for their customers.

Umm... no, no it wasn't. Valve hired the guys behind Narbacular Drop, who then worked at Valve to create Portal using many of the same concepts, but Portal was developed entirely by people who earned their paychecks working for Valve at the time they were working on the game.

In other words, Valve didn't buy the game, they bought the team.

It's only "unenforceable" from a legal standpoint, but before it ever even sees a courtroom, it's already intimidated enough people to raise the company's BBB rating from an F to a B, and ruined other people's credit; the couple from TFA have been turned down for loans due to the credit hit they've taken because these guys sent that $3500 "penalty" to collections.

Why pay court costs for a judge to enforce your schemes when you can get the credit bureaus to do it for free?

Actually, the law HAS changed. Originally, copyright was for a much shorter time (14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the creator was still alive), but in modern times the length has been pushed so far that the "for limited times" part of the constitutional clause that gives the U.S. government the authority to CREATE a copyright law is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. Anything you see created today will still be copyrighted long after you die.

Unfortunately, this makes the public domain a nearly worthless concept; copyright is limited so that things will eventually become public domain, but with copyrights so long, nothing relevant to modern society belongs in it. Hell, we have entire forms of media that will never have a single item enter public domain until you are dead, buried, and dust.