I have heard that part of the copyright deal requires you to publish things with the property every few years, otherwise, you are at the risk of your property becoming public domain (especially if you don’t do anything to protect your rights to it).
So I was wondering, if say, LEGO never releases anymore new products under the Bionicle IP, would that mean that eventually, Bionicle might become public domain? As far as I can see, LEGO has never particularly cared much about defending their IPs they own unless they are active themes, so if those copyright rules work this way, they are bound to lose most of their past IPs (perhaps some of them they have lost already) and Bionicle is definitely included.
If theoretically Bionicle were to become public domain, that would mean fans could create their own movies, videogames, books etc and make money from them, and LEGO would be able to do nothing about it, because they haven’t done anything with their property, and haven’t made any efforts to preserve their rights to it.
I figured this might be an interesting topic to talk about, so I am curious, would it be possible for Bionicle to become public domain if the IP remains unused by LEGO? Or is there something about how the copyright rules work that I am missing?