Whom would you side with?

People whose livelihoods and retirement depend on their copyright.

Or people who want to play old video-games for free.

Being able to play old video games for free is not the point though, it's just a nice side effect of an intellectual property regime with a reasonable duration, say something less than 150 years.

the people who want to play old videogames for free

With the people that understand that reality isn’t as black and white as you make it out to be and that will hopefully find better compromises going forward.

Show me an actual person whose livelihood or retirement depends on their copyright (and not, say, owning somebody else's copyright). I'm not convinced that the current state of copyright law actually benefits authors and artists.

There are no residuals for game devs. It's work for hire, so holding on to this idea that they will get paid money for every sale (even after it's no longer sold - but maybe somehow once these assholes "resurrect" a game they never bothered to bring back after 30 years, will somehow benefit the actual people who made it is a joke). This has nothing to do "their livelihood and retirement"It's about protecting corporate profits in the very slim case they may discover that bringing something back (ha sure) will benefit the corporation that OWNS the rights.

IP isn't the same across the board it's not like game devs are singers who have ASCAP/BMI etc protections. Game devs are code jockeys who get shit on by the corporations with NO rights to the actual work THEY produced. Why do you act like this is the same as music with perpetual rights to the actual creators? It rarely if ever is.

You can go ahead and "blame" the workers you claim to support for failing to "put that in their employment contract, it is a "free market" for labor, after all" or you can work on changing the system to at least let the past be free and open and history have a chance of being important or just let it all be locked in a vault, in disuse in the "hope" that maybe someday a corporation will "release" it again as a game. Or you can let people who ARE passionate about it work on it and let the public have the right to it.

As the parent comments point out, the LITERAL REASON OF COPYRIGHT IN THE US CONSTITUTION is to benefit the public. It has nothing to do with giant corps getting rich as fuck off other people's labor. Contract law gets in the way and lets these pricks steal the work and wealth, deny people the rights and only THEY get the benefit, this is the precise opposite of the public benefit intended.

Culture happens on faster and faster cycles than ever before, yet instead of admitting the speed of it, these behemoths who own IP, demand continual extensions (well until the most recent time when Disney finally relented and let Steamboat Willy enter the Public Domain recently).

Instead of promoting "innovation" (as phrased in the US Constitution), it promotes lethargy slouch and continued re-use of the same things. It's the exact opposite of the intent. And no, this bullshit about "livelihoods and retirement" mean jackshit in game dev. You shit your game out, you got paid for that work, and that's it. All the excess profits go to the corp, not the actual devs. IP in this case is not about humans owning/making, and it's corporations through and through, and unless you held onto the same corporation for 40 years, as the creator, it's not going to be you getting the supposed benefit of this.