alt Hacker NewsThe media you cite are still copyrighted, meaning that it’s illegal for other people to distribute them or make money of it without a corresponding license. If that weren’t the case, creators might be more reluctant.
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thaumasiotes • yesterday at 6:20 PM
The Fortress of Doors blog had a good article on the history of flash game development. That article included an overview of the process, in which an explicitly-considered step was "after you upload your .swf file to the site that paid you to display their logo, every other site rips off the file and republishes it themselves".
That's why what the first site paid for was having their logo displayed in your game.
They know full and well they're unlikely to ever make money on there art so the protections such as they are aren't material. In fact their copyrights are often roundly ignored online with copies spreading freely a thing that's success for most of the people posting things for free!
If the justification for copyright is supposed to be that it and the promise of control of their creations is the encouragement to create people creating for free is a direct contradiction of that thesis. The fact they're automatically given copyright doesn't mean they're creating it because they have that theoretical control.