A significant step in ever-increasing copyrights was the 1887 Berne Convention, which fixed copyright in multiple countries at life + 50 years for all works except photographic (25 years) and cinematographic (50 years) - but took until the late 1980s to be implemented in the US and UK (although currently 189 countries have implemented it, and it's pretty much a requirement of WTO membership), and countries are free to set longer terms (I believe as long as they only apply to works created / published in that country - so of course if you create a work in a life + 50 years country and send it to be published, large publishers can also publish it separately in life + 70 years countries so they can collect an extra 20 years worth of royalty payments, and translations / spelling changes [e.g. UK English spelling to US English spelling and vice versa] are likely treated as separate works under copyright law). The EU's justification for life + 70 years was apparently that the Berne Convention was allegedly intended to be life + two generations, and life expectancy has risen since then (although technically, life expectancy has only risen 15 years once infant mortality is discounted), while the US' Sonny Bono Act was at least partially intended to harmonise copyright terms in the US with those elsewhere. Mercifully, nowhere yet has given in to those demanding perpetual copyright. Personally, I think it would be useful if copyright licensing and enforcement was tiered based on how long has passed since the work was first published, with only nominal fees in later years (so still conferring a degree of protection, but a halfway house between rigid enforcement with hefty license fees and restrictions on how the content can be used, and the free-for-all of public domain).

As numerous people who upload videos / stream to the internet are finding out, with the music industry's aggressive stance on enforcing copyright with the blunt tool of the DMCA (in the latest twist, they're even enforcing copyright on sound effects).

Sure, the artists / people who recorded the effects should be credited and probably have some form of compensation, but when the law likely regards someone streaming to an audience of a few dozen the same way as a television station broadcasting to millions, so likely requiring an outlay of several thousand currency units for a license, it makes it unviable to legally use that content - and while people using background music have alternative services offering "stream safe" music, the same obviously doesn't apply to those streaming rhythm games (technically, every third party map breaches copyright as it includes the music track, so those who create the maps, those who download / play the maps and those who stream playing the maps are all in breach of copyright law).

YouTube implemented a workaround with purchasing a bunch of licenses on behalf of those using its service and automated tools to correctly attribute copyrighted material and apply whatever restrictions the copyright holders demanded (e.g. all advertising revenue, geoblocking, takedown), but inevitably they're not perfect and are subject to abuse by copyright trolls and false copyright claims (often by people / organisations who leave no useable contact details with Google, so making it impossible to counter the claim since Google washes its hands of copyright claims).