It’s so bleak watching entire demographics of people being more-or-less openly categorised as expendable. Alerts intended to spur action in response to an impending disaster should be available to as many people as possible.

Even a selection of generic translations with a time inserted would be better than this, and it’s heartwrenching that they’re not even willing to put that tiny amount of effort in.

Yes, but sometimes producing for the public domain is their job. Sponsorships, grants, and other funding instruments exist for people who do work which is committed to the public domain.

Provided that you’re not throwing the excess out, it’s not too bad? They’re reusable but they do wear out eventually, and when that happens you can just draw from the backlog.

Alternatively you can always use them for other things - I don’t keep 37 of them, but the handful I have I’m always using for stuff which isn’t just groceries.

Not necessarily? You’d retain first-to-market advantages, particularly where implementation is capital-heavy - and if that’s not enough you could consider an alternative approach to rewarding innovation such as having a payout or other advantage for individuals or entities which undertake significant research and development to emerge with an innovative product.

I think the idea that nobody would commit to developing anything in the absence of intellectual property law is also maybe a bit too cynical? People regularly do invest resources into developing things for the public domain.

At the very least, innovations developed with a significant amount of public funding - such as those which emerge from research universities with public funding or collaborative public-private endeavours at e.g. pharmaceutical companies - should be placed into the public domain for everybody to benefit from, and the copyright period should be substantially reduced to something more like five years.