Throughout the 1980's and 1990's, American copyright lengths were extended, and looser requirements for a work to gain a copyright were implemented. This has resulted in few video games entering the public domain without being intentionally released by the copyright holder. The only notable exceptions to this are training and propaganda video games developed or commissioned by the United States federal government; while they are allowed to own trademarks, they legally cannot own copyrights. This exception applies to games such as Recycle City, an educational game website hosted by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the America's Army series, which was devised as a recruitment tool by Colonel Casey Wardynski and initially published by the U.S. Army.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had used music from Yoshi's Island DS for their Flash game "Recycle City". After it had been discovered in 2019, the EPA denied claims that they had stolen music from Nintendo claiming it had been made by a contractor, and that "we are looking into whether the contractor received permission to use the music, to the extent permission was necessary in this instance." Since then, the song has been removed from the game's soundtrack.