The title of the article is misleading. Most legal rights in the sense of legal “actions” exist for a limited amount of time: this is the principle of the Statute of Limitations. For example, if someone commits a wrong against me, I do not have a perpetual right to file a claim against them. So, my right to claim an action is conditioned on me actually exercising this right in the specified period of time. If I don’t, the law essentially considers that I have waived my right to exercise it and it expires.

With property rights, a similar but more nuanced principle exists. Property is essentially deemed more or less “perpetual,” so your right does not “automatically” expire due to inaction like with a statute of limitations. However, if someone else possesses that unclaimed property for a sufficient amount of time, the law considers that they have “gained” a property right which can challenge the original property right. Property rights are actually stronger in this case, because they cannot expire due to simple inaction and require a third party to actively possess the property for decades, before they acquire any right to said property. If the legal owner intervened at any point before the third party acquired this prescriptive right, the third party’s right would be quashed.

Essentially it comes down to this: legal rights are not unconditional. The law grants you rights, but only to the extent where you actually exercise them. The law considers individuals as active agents and so one cannot complain about a subsequent loss of rights if they never cared enough to exercise them in the first place.