If something is not legally available then copyright law ought to make it eligible for free distribution. The authors nor the rights owners certainly don't see the content making money anymore (or they'd be selling it) and thus they can't lose money (that they never meant to charge in the first place).
Copyright, as originally envisioned, should be a temporary privilege instead of a de facto ghost racket for perpetual extortion.
I generally think that copyright should have to be extended every 5 years for an escalating fee. Part of the scheme is that to extend the copyright, you must list contact information for the current owners of the copyright. All these numbers below are purely examples of the kind of scaling I think should exist
So, from creation 0-5 years everything is automatically instantly copyrighted (as it is today). 5-10 years you must manually extend the copyright and it costs $500/work. 10-15 years it should cost $5,000/work. 15-20 years $100,000/work. 20-25 years $500,000/work, etc. By the time we're at 50 years, an additional 5 years registration should cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and would only be done for the _most_ important properties (like The Mouse).
(In my ideal world, these fees would go into an arts fund in the federal government that could be used to encourage the creation of less financially viable arts, like local theatre programs, arts education for children, etc)
In such a scheme if a work is particularly valuable (either because it's being mass distributed, or because it has value in not being mass distributed), then the owner could maintain the copyright, but it would just be totally financially non-viable for these kinds of abandoned games to remain locked up. There'd be absolutely no business case for it.
Say I make an indie game to sell on steam, earning a meager but acceptable income from it, and I want to provide it 15 years of patches and updates (not unseen in indie games).
Does updating it with a new patch adding a few features count as a new work or the same one? Or should I instead not do updates, but make a "part 2" instead since that's a new work? But then it's not the same game anymore and it may be a worse experience for players to have to get two separate games, rather than one improved one!
under this proposal, if you only copyrighted part 2 or your patch, then people would be free to copy the original version and make derivative works of it
This is already addressed by existing copyright law. For example, Sherlock Holmes has entered the public domain (mostly), but many of the more recent updates to Sherlock Holmes are not in the public domain.
So, existing law wouldn't be impacted by these questions.
The current law is that things in the original work are copyrighted from the time they are published, and additions or updates to the character start from when they are first published. If I draw a character today, the copyright clock starts today. If in 10 years I draw the same character but with a silly hat, then the clock for the character and hat starts from that date. It’s a little weird in the modern system, since both end up being the same (if since it’s author’s death+70 years), but in prior systems that have the clock run from publication, that’s how it works.
And these prior systems still matter, since there are works like Sherlock Holmes where most of the character has entered the public domain, but certain revisions remain under the copyright of the Conan Doyle Estate.
To more concretely answer your question, if you release version 1.0 of your game today, with “Space Marines” fighting each other with a shooting stat of 10, then in 10 years release an update that gives +5 to the space marines shooting stat, updates the art for the marines, and adds “Firebats”, then the parts no longer under copyright would be the 1.0 binary of the game, the old version of the Space Marines art, and the stats. What would be subject to copyright would be the 1.1 binary, the new space marines art, the new shooting stats, and the firebats art and characters.
For example, much of the DnD kerfluffle is over the open rulebook and monster manual. If you make a game that has a Blue Dragon and operates totally differently from the "Adult Blue Dragon" that's in DnD you're probably OK.
But if you make a game that has an "Blue Dragon" with an Amour Points of 19, a Health of 255, a Speed of 40, but 80 while flying, and a Str 25, Dex 10, Con 23, Int 16, Wis 15, Cha 19...then you're a lot more likely to get into trouble.
So you make make a knock-off DnD that has pretty much the same _mechanics_ its true that you're probably fine. But once you start borrowing all the of stats of things from another work that fit into those same mechanics... well, I Am Not A Lawyer, but that's definitely the kind of thing that you'd want to start running past a lawyer.
Right, your example got me thinking about Dwarf Fortress, which was initially released on 2006 (according to Wikipedia). By GP's assessment they would have to pay $100,000 a year to preserve their copyright? Seems a bit harsh, I think.
$100,000 for 5 years (though, again, my specific numeric suggestions were mostly an example placeholder, not the result of considered thinking about what exact values make the most economic sense).
It's also not clear to me that continued updates wouldn't reset the term.
So, if they wanted to maintain a copyright on the 2006 version of DF (v0.21.93.19a, released August 2006), they would need to pay $500 in 2011, and $5,000 in 2016, and $100k in 2021, for a total payment to the unitd sates treasury of $105,500.
However, even if they paid nothing the latest release (50.09, released June 28, 2023) would remain under copyright automatically and for free until June 28, 2028. So they _could_ choose to let the community have access to the oldest versions of DF under public domain, while retaining copyright on the most recent versions. Or they could choose to pay to keep even the initial versions locked up.
I'd also probably want to make sure that the legislative language ensured that you didn't have to pay the copyright registration on each patch release. So, if the DF team paid for the initial version to remain under copyright, _all_ the patch versions would retain that same copyright status without needing to be individually paid for. That seems like an implementation detail for the legislation that would be important to get right, but I didn't feel it was important to specify in the proposal.
> I'd also probably want to make sure that the legislative language ensured that you didn't have to pay the copyright registration on each patch release
Does that actually matter? Updated versions are derivative works of the original so as long as the original remains copyrighted who cares whether the patches are or not? Unless you're trying to monetize updates individually separate from the main product in which case why not register them?
Maybe? It's why I think it's something that if you got the far the legislative process would need to consider.
It's a detail that I could see being important to address in the actual law, or (as you note) it might be that everything falls out pretty naturally without needing to be addressed.
I think my point is: "if this ever got to the point where it was being drafted into draft legislation, the drafter should make sure this part works sensibly instead of being crazy".
I don't think anyone is trying to fork Dwarf Fortress and sell it on a different platform.
Actually, even if they did, they would likely have proved the market to the founders earlier; maybe lighting a fire under their feet to monetize quicker. The current renaissance of DF via the Steam release could have happened five years earlier -- inspiring five more years' worth of other business-focused indie developers...
well, dwarf fortress was for most of that time a freely available game with no DRM and sustained by donations, so it's hard to see how copyright was really benefitting them much. If as mentioned new updates would get a new copyright (and only older versions would lose it), I don't really see what incentive they would have to renew it much at all.
While it seems harsh for someone who is well-regarded today, the system itself discourages abuse of the intent of copyright. I think the tradeoff is warranted.
It would probably make more sense for copyright fees to be proportional to the revenue the company makes. Disney paying $500 to license Mickey Mouse after 5 years while making millions isn't equitable for a small business copyrighting a toy brand for instance.
I'd be open to there being an additional cost based on total revenue earned, but the scale should be the fixed costs, with significant additional revenue just moving that number up.
I think the goal for the financial cost of the extension to be roughly equal to the "harm" caused to the rest of society for locking it up. So, I think making the scale in some way proportional to revenue could be a rough proxy for "how popular is this thing", which is then a rough proxy for "how much does it harm society to lock it up for 5 more years".
That said, I'm more interested in being equitable to _society_, rather than being equitable to _creator_. Copyright should be just good enough of a deal that it encourages creative works. It doesn't need to do more than that.
As a sometimes-author and indie game dev, I find the sound of that to be exhausting. Tiny companies, and individuals especially, find it hard enough to deal with weird regulations and costs.
Like, some retired Grandma who writes popular mysteries is going to have to pay the government regularly to keep amazon from selling thousands of copies of her work without having to pay her?
Everyone who makes a side project game on itch.io has to keep it online forever, or they lose rights to it forever?
> some retired Grandma who writes popular mysteries is going to have to pay the government regularly to keep amazon from selling thousands of copies of her work without having to pay her
Well, for the first 5 years after publication, no. She would need to do nothing exactly as the world exists today. She would have an exclusive period of 5 years to monetize the book exclusively without having to register it, pay anyone, or talk to anyone.
After 5 years, she would have to pay $500 (again, exact value for discussion purposes, not a final proposal) and register it with a government website (with her contact information, and attesting that she still owns the work). After 10 years, she would have to pay again, and update the registration. Or, if the works are no longer valuable, she could simply not do that, and let the works enter the public domain.
The _entire point_ is that works that _aren't financially viable_ enter the public domain rapidly, and works that are continuing to produce financial value would be worth registration. >99% of works produced would likely never be registered (since every comment on a website counts as a separate "work"), and would enter the public domain after 5 years. Only a small fraction would be extended for 5 years.
But, yes, if you want exclusive rights to your game for 10 years, you'd have to pay a small amount of money and fill out a form on a website (my goal would be about the same difficulty as updating your whois information for a registered domain name). If it's not worth that amount of trouble, then the work enters the public domain.
> Everyone who makes a side project game on itch.io has to keep it online forever
My proposal had no _online_ requirement. So, no, that wouldn't be part of my proposal. Don't know where you got that requirement from.
As a consumer id just wait for indie games and smalltime books to become free. This ruins the demand and people have much less incentive to create.
In general taking money away and giving it to a government is not a productive solution and definitely hinders creativity
You can already do this to an extent. Wait a while for a book / game to have used copies available for a deep discount or easily checked out from Library
I agree that some people would do this. However the proliferation of early access games and pre-ordered/special editions coming with an early access period suggests there is a significant chunk of consumers willing to pay to get something earlier
If the studio expected > $500 of potential sales in years 5-10, then they would pay the fee and the game wouldn’t enter the public domain for 10 years.
Every game that experiences even a moderate success would probably be locked up for 15 years in this scenario, and every game that experiences even a hint of success would be locked up for 10 years.
I cannot imagine that the number of people who are willing to wait 10-15 years to play a game instead of spending $20 now will
materially harm the same of a game.
Waiting 5 years for small obscure game is easier then waiting for some massively successful game everyone talks about. Likewise, limiting your selection to 5 years old games is easier when you go for small niche games.
This would hit the small and niche companies hardest.
What happens if grandma became disabled and is living off the residuals of her books 10 years ago published? Should old artists just die in poverty like the good old days then?
This is such an edge case that it makes me think that maybe copyright isn’t the solution that grandma needs.
And by their proposal, the first couple extensions would be extremely cheap. It could be a simple form on some copyright.gov website to register your work.
The edge case is actually quite common-- many authors mostly survive off their entire body of work, not just the works published recently. This was an issue in e.g. Disney, who refused to pay royalties to Star Wars books published many many years ago because they claimed to have purchased assets but not liabilities. One of the authors who was suing for royalties needed the money for cancer treatments. Bad look.
5k/work is not cheap. That's how much publishers may pay for a book. 15k/work is prohibitively expensive for books.
> One of the authors who was suing for royalties needed the money for cancer treatments.
Ok but what if the author had not written a successful book but still needed money for cancer treatment. Maybe we should handle social security and healthcare separately from copyright.
I would be happy to change the proposal so that the original author, and only the original author could pay for the extensions much more cheaply, if they have retained the copyright for its entire lifetime.
So any work for hire, or other aspect would be expensive to renew. Anything owned by a corporation, LLC, or other non humane entity would be expensive.
But if the original author has maintained control of the copyright since it’s inception, I’d be fine giving them a much cheaper renewal price.
This would encourage companies to take more, more frequent, and smaller bets while iterating rapidly instead of milking endlessly like we see with Disney. I like it. I still feel protected with my personal creative endeavors while corporations are motivated to move on their ip or lose it.
What ticks me off is situations where I literally cannot buy a game. I would gladly pay $60 today for a copy of civilization 2 that ran perfectly on modern operating systems with the sound track and everything. I literally cannot buy it. It's not for sale on GOG because no one knows who owns the rights.
So there’s a need for a copyright registry that is affirmatively maintained. Forget to register and exhaust a generous grace period that comes with a substantial fee relative to lifetime earnings of the work or Copyright lapses permanently and irrevocably.
So every broke artist that cannot afford the fees would not benefit from their work once it becomes recognized way later in their life? that sound pretty bad.
Becoming an artist that makes it big is like winning the lottery. It almost never happens in the modern era because we are flooded with extremely talented artists that have no differentiation between them.
But further, those "make it late" artists are almost certainly making the majority of their money on their later works. And if we get into the nitty gritty of art, it's super common that the rights to those early works are long sold for $.10. It's unlikely the original artist could see any sort of monetary benefit.
On the flip side, media protection is a huge racket that is primarily a detriment to society. It stops media companies from innovating (just keep making mice videos), encourages nasty behavior (Like Disney's vault, where they purposefully lock away media so they can re-release it every n years, for a limited time only), and ultimately limits creativity. Consider how often we hear the story of a youtube video getting taken down because someone hummed something that sounded too close to copyrighted material. That is an active harm to art that is very common.
The vast majority of artists make all the money they’re ever going to make off their copyright in the first few years, so seems like a fair trade to end perpetual corporate copyright if an extremely tiny number of bleeding heart edge cases lose out.
On many levels, this would not work well. A quick example: Stories written for children typically do not generate as much revenue per year. They make up for that, eventually (if they are popular) because they are new to every new cohort of children, so that stories like "The Pokey Little Puppy" get sold for decades before falling out of favor.
Your scheme would make writing children's stories less attractive.
In general, overly clever schemes like this often do not work as anticipated.
> Your scheme would make writing children's stories less attractive.
Honestly, this is fine.
We already have tens of thousands of good children's stories, let those who do it for love of the art or the exceptional ones (like Rowlin make more if they want.
No, it's not fine. Children are important, and worthy of getting new stories that address their needs.
In general, judging which categories don't need the protection of copyright amounts to deciding which categories of readers don't matter. It's elitist and unhelpful.
> In general, judging which categories don't need the protection of copyright amounts to deciding which categories of readers don't matter.
I agree if you say "don't need protection", though I think that's a harsher criticism of my proposal than is warranted. Maybe there are categories which need stronger protection that what I proposed, which is fine.
But I think you're also not considering the fact that _entry into the public domain_ is also a huge positive value to the reader.
So, we need to have a balance between adequately incentivizing works, and works entering the public domain. I'd argue the current balance we've struck is totally fucking broken, and gravely harming readers of all types.
But, I'm open to the criticism that we would run the risk of this scheme of not adequately incentivizing certain works. I think that's good feedback.
Wouldn’t this scheme benefit children? Imagine growing up on Arthur and hitting early adulthood as its copyright expires and being able to contribute to the Arthur universe you grew up on. Conversely, I wonder how many people know Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is public domain and different from the version Disney has had since the 50s. The way things are now, I couldn’t make anything related to most of the things I grew up with because everything being pushed on children is owned by a corporation.
The issue with Alice's Adventures is separate from copyright. Many (most) people have never read Lewis Carroll; being in the public domain doesn't change that, and there is no giant profit in publishing books in the public domain, so they aren't going to get a big promotional budget.
That’s the point, though. It would be more famous except that there’s a seemingly endless amount of money promoting corporate-owned media. Things might be different if the media kids take in is more organic and they might be more encouraged to contribute to writing and art if the things they grew up on weren’t encumbered by copyright.
Another thing to note also is that kids had stories long before Disney was making VHS tapes and before we had Scholastic pumping out picture books. It’s not like we as humans are incapable of creating without a monetary incentive.
> No, it's not fine. Children are important, and worthy of getting new stories that address their needs.
Equating retaining ownership by copyright to protection, is an example of reasoning used to abuse copyright. The products still exist when they enter the public domain and need no additional protection, that copyright offers. It's really disturbing to see commenters repeat the attitudes that left copyright in such a degenerate state.
If the goal is to get new stories, a short period of copyright is magnitudes better than copyrights lasting for lifetimes. OPs system allows people to copyright their work for free for 5 years, which is when most works will be most profitable anyway
Authors generally don't build their careers by publishing books in 5 year periods. They generally build a body of work over decades whose residuals keep them alive in hungry/lean years. You also run into issues e.g. The Last Unicorn's author whose rights were taken from him because of elder abuse! Once he gets them back he gets nothing? That sucks.
Eh? All categories of copyright should be equally weakened. The readers happiness matters far more than the author's pocketbook for they outnumber him.
Children's stories have been made since time immemorial.
I would be totally fine with that, but I think it would be...not politically viable. This scheme is basically my compromise that I think could be able to survive in some form.
I think your proposal is a better version of copyright, but I think as a starting point for a legislative discussion it probably doesn't get a conversation off the ground
I think I'm trying to say that you're as likely to get abolition as you are a term of copyright shorter than has ever existed in the US, so why not shoot for the moon?
Because it's not clear that short copyright terms are harmful. Modern copyright shouldn't make us lose sight of the goal of promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts". 15 years is a reasonable starting point for achieving that aim. If it's still too long it could always be further reduced later.
I don't think so. Vast majority of creative works fall out of favor in the first 15 years of publication, so creators wouldn't be giving up anywhere near as much as if copyright was totally abolished. The situations are not comparable in the slightest.
I mean, we get to decide for them because copyright is an artificial limitation imposed by law on society to benefit creators.
It is a compromise between society and creators that is codified legislatively. We get to decide “for them”, because it’s an agreement between them and us (where the “them” and the “us” are actually both just the body poltic).
It’s a mistake to think of copyright as the natural order of things. It is a legislative creation, with the specific purpose of encouraging works entering the public domain, which is why we get to decide.
There used to be time without copyright at all. And the copyright was tightening rather slowly until it reached that infinite super serious thing it is now.
That won't work, because most copyrighted material is worthless, and we can't predict what retains value in the long run, and most don't. Mickey is a rare example of value surviving to the point it was worth (in dollars) protecting.
That's why I prefer a flat tax.
15% goes to the copyright/patent distribution system. Anyone can copy and profit off anything, but just pays 15% into the system.
The system then pays out based on the rules and registration information.
Public domain is then redefined as whatever is tax free.
And, you can also buy anything directly from the government.
Prices are determined by market value if it's a physical product. For digital goods, some rules may have to be defined, and maybe rules to define rules defined. Copies of songs could all just be 25 cents, etc. Books 2.99. But this is to own a copy (defined as having a copy on your system plus having paid for it). Just listening to a copy could be free.
At least this is the direction I wish the world were headed.
so let's say I wrote a book that I like it, some people like it but it was far from a success -and I want to prevent from being copied, I have to pay $100k after 15 years? In publishing times that's not much, books published in 2008 would have to pay that to avoid being copied and distributed freely.
The specific amounts were for example only. I could see making it much flatter for the first 20 years, and then escalating rapidly after that.
But, yes, in general, if you want to prevent it from being copied you would have to spend ever larger sums of money to accomplish that.
The entire point of copyright is a deal to encourage author's creating a work *so that it can enter the public domain*. This scheme is designed allow _most_ works to enter the public domain much earlier than they do now, while still allowing the most economically valuable creations to be pushed off for quite a while.
But, you the author wanting to prevent your book from being copied is a _harm_ to society. So, the goal with this scheme is that the extension costs should _roughly mirror_ those harms of continuing to lock a work up. The idea, then, is that when the economic benefit to you the author is _larger_ than those societal harms, then you'll pay for the extension.
But when those economic benefits to you the author is _less_ than those societal harms, then you'll stop paying for the extension.
> But, you the author wanting to prevent your book from being copied is a _harm_ to society.
I take issue with this. You are not harmed just because you don't have free access to something you want. Refusing to buy your kids some candy does not "harm" them.
Using this definition of "harm", you having money in your savings account is a "harm" to "society". Using your logic, the government then ought to force you to donate all your savings and excess possessions to "society" so that harm is reduced.
Sending people with guns just because someone shared sequences of words you claim "ownership" over is a cost and harm. Society does not inherently owe you keeping your ideas exclusively controlled by you. It's a form of a artificial, but pragmatic concession in the hopes it will encourage people to produce more interesting sequences of words. If it wasn't for social consensus you would not be able to control it and wouldn't be able to do anything about it (unlike physical property, which you can physically protect).
> You are not harmed just because you don't have free access to something you want.
Yes I am.
Art is the language of our society. It being locked away is absolutely a harm. Art is our culture, and our heritage. To deny it to people is absolutely harmful. It may be a tolerable harm, and one that we think is necessary to endure. But it is a harm
If I download a movie from the internet, the state can force me (with all the power of the state: courts, judgements, guns, etc) to pay $30,000. That is a harm.
Copyright is a legislative restriction put on me by the Government. That is a harm. Now, it can be a harm that's worth it. We may collectively decide that it is worth the trade-off to threaten me with financial ruin for watching a movie, because if it doesn't happen movies wouldn't be made. So, we might all agree that it's a harm that we need to live with.
But to pretend it's not a harm to deny free access to our culture and our art is just flat out wrong.
If you think it's not harmful, then let me ask: why can't we just abolish copyright law entirely. If there is no harm to consumers, then I would argue that there is similarly no harm to creators.
I think it's possible to sidestep the harm vs suboptimality discussion. It's clear that there is a benefit to the public when works become public domain, and copyright law should balance benefits to creators and consumers (though of course we all fill both roles to some degree). Laws also have to be politically viable, of course.
> Using your logic, the government then ought to force you to donate all your savings and excess possessions to "society" so that harm is reduced.
I would argue that governments do a "soft" version of this with redistributive tax schemes and social programs.
People saving money IS a harm to society and government does various things to discourage it at certain times. OP's copyright solution is similar in that it merely discourages keeping a copyright, it doesn't outright forbid it
I could see some negative patterns cropping up with this. Author writes book, publisher sits on it until the 5 years are up and then they can publish without royalties to the author. Same would happen for a movie script or the like. Publishers just turn into scavenging hyenas waiting for copyrights to expire
1. Author publishes a dozen novels over the first 20 years of his/her career. All of them are good, but none of them sell well.
2. Author does not pay the copyright renewal fees because they are too expensive. Anyone can now copy those books and pay nothing.
3. Author's next book is well-received. The author is hailed as a genius and there is suddenly a ton of interest in the author's earlier works.
4. Everyone but the author makes money on the author's older works.
Edit: The point here is that when a work is successful, which is rare, it is unfair for everyone other than the author, who is most responsible for the work, to profit from it.
For me, the value of the books is the value they provide to their readers, not the money they provide to the author. We want author to be able to get money because it will incentivize them to write. I don't think it's realistic to think any writer will not write because his work may become famous only after he has published some books and therefore won't be as profitable as some other copyright scenario. That is just not how people think.
I know that some people see copyright as some kind of justice system to ensure creators get their due. I think that view in general leads to copyright maximalism, and is not a good place to start from when discussing the value of copyright
> but why should the publishers who pay the author nothing benefit the most?
How do the publishers benefit from a work that enters the public domain? They have no more right to use the work than anyone else. I think the margins for publishers would be very low after a work enters the public domain.
Why are they making derivatives of a work that nobody cared about? If someone else comes along and makes a profitable derivative, seems like they have added something that the original author just didn't have (Better story, Better marketing, etc)
Actually, without copyright the publishers will be getting almost nothing as with everyone being able to publish the price will quickly go down to printing and postage.
I'm sure they could release those things, but how could they hold a monopoly when everyone is allowed to do their own translations, sequels, and movie adaptations? Maybe there would be some big successful publishers with that business model, but that seems like a good thing if they produce good content.
Wouldn't the author then be extremely incentivized to create a new novel after the well-received one?
Since that new novel would be granted an exclusive monopoly period, and the author now has significant notoriety.
So, since the explicit goal of the system is to incentivize _new_ works, and this system incentivizes _new_ works in that scenario, it seems like an explicit success of the system, rather than a problematic example.
In the current scenario, at step 4. the author can simply retire on the success of those previous books. That _fails_ to incentivize new works. So I'd argue my proposal works _better_ at the goals of copyright in this scenario than the current system.
The author could be dead and his family could be impoverished, or maybe his best novels were his earlier ones. Should publishers make tons of money off his earlier, better works while his family starves?
Also, copyright isn’t just the original work, it’s also derivatives like sequels, translations, and movie adaptations. Should all of them make money while the author and his family get nothing?
In the real world, limiting copyright like you suggest is a non-starter.
In that scenario it doesn't sound like there's a lot we can do to encourage the author to create new works. Which is, again, the explicit and primary goal of copyright law and jurisprudence.
I think you're missing the point. None of the works would have been produced in the first place if there wasn't the possibility of making a return on the investment in time, energy, etc.
the author could be alive, and write new works, and that seems more likely
any member of the family could also contribute to society by writing new works
remember the goal: to promote new works; not to make the author money, or their family money, or their family's descendants money; and not to enrich or prevent the enriching of any given publisher
allowing the author and family to milk old work in perpetuity, whether independently or through a publisher, would seem to incentivize the opposite of that
In some ways, writing a novel (or producing certain types of works) is like buying a lottery ticket. Most of the time it will be worth nothing. But if it is a winner, then the buyer would like to be able to cash it in. If, on the other hand, you couldn't win the jackpot even if you hit all the numbers, then people would stop buying lottery tickets.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to write or produce creative works, even when the reality is that most works will not be successful in any way. If you take away the possibility of reward for the few works that are successful, then that will result in fewer works being produced.
nobody is proposing "taking away the possibility of reward", or making anything such that "you couldn't win the jackpot even if you hit all the numbers", so it sounds like there're no issues with the proposal
if there was data that shows copyrighted works usually earn nothing the first 5 years, and earn significant value after that, or even that annual earnings from copyrighted works usually increase after 5 years, the argument against the proposed reform would be more convincing,
but in any case, the purpose of copyright is to encourage new works, not allow authors to perpetually cash in on old ones like a lottery ticket instead
This situation just doesn't seem that likely. How often has an author with absolutely no sales whatsoever on their first few books then gone on to release a best seller? If their early works are profitable at all, they would renew the copyright for the relatively low rate and still be holding it when their new bestseller comes along.
If the author is dead, then what are you even arguing about? Of course copyright should not be extended past death. Do you think Charles Dickens descendants should still be getting paid for his work? It's ridiculous
Copyright is supposed to be an incentive to creating things, with the ultimate benefit of an eventual richer public domain. Yet the author in your scenario didn't lack the motivation.
Under the proposed system, he'd also be more likely to be encouraged to continue creating new works, rather than just retiring because of the one successful book.
Under the proposed system, he probably would never have written anything because the most likely outcome is that he would gain nothing even if his works are successful.
Considering how much effort your hypothetical writer put into writing several books w/o getting any compensation makes me doubt their motivation was money.
The author can sell their own book even after copyright is up. Indeed some people may prefer to buy it from them. I think the system would totally change how people perceive these things
Firstly, why would the author ever hand over their book to such a publisher?
Secondly, why wouldn't the author have a contract with their publisher guaranteeing terms?
Thirdly, surely the publisher is incentivised to make as many sales as possible in the 5 years before the copyright expires, when other publishers can then sell copies (assuming it's been successful enough to make it worthwhile).
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what copyright is.
Copyright is a system designed to encourage the creations of work. It was not designed as a system to allow people to main perpetual control of their own art and work.
The original term of copyright was 14 years (with an optional 14 year extension). Why do you think the founder's believed that people "shouldn't be in control of their own art"?
You are "leaching" off thousands of people from history every moment. Using words and concepts they came up with, eating food from fields tamed and conquered by long dead people.
Rights exist as heuristics for making the world a better place, full of fulfilled happy people living meaningful lives. We benefit from the works of others and this is a good thing, it is our main advantage over creatures like the octopus.
25 years. That is generally the luge of a regular book. Sure there are exceptions. I can't find it, but a study was fine a few years ago and there were virtually no books on Amazon older than 25 years and still under copyright
You do not need to charge that much. If nobody is monetizing it, nobody is going to maintain the copyright. Patents work similarly.
Monetization does not need to happen every year though. Think Disney vault and how they would keep classic movies out of distribution intentionally to keep them valuable. This complicates the “legally available” test somewhat. Charging a nominal fee to maintain copyright is a good test though. It makes sure that “somebody” still considers themselves the owner and makes sure they care more than zero.
When Marvel releases a new movie, some absurdly large chunk of revenue is earned in the first 5 years.
Why allow them to extend it at all? Even 5 years is excessive, give them 18 months. Disallow it entirely for any work that was ever released with DRM. And since we're talking video games, I'm not certain that online games count as being DRM-free... if it can't be 100% self-hosted, no copyright for you.
Marvel's an interesting choice, because the comic book depiction of Iron Man (for example) came out in the 60's, and almost certainly didn't make anywhere near the kind of money that the movies did. I'm not generally opposed to copyright holders getting some revenue from the later adaption of their work, especially in situations like that.
5 years is cutting it really close for your typical film adaption of a book: the first Twilight and Harry Potter movies came out 4 years after their books, and I could definitely see movie studios just waiting an extra year to cut out the original authors.
My ideal world would see original authors retaining these kinds of royalties for prolonged periods of time (maybe 40 years or the life of the author, whichever's longer), but losing their monopoly rights in a much shorter timespan: basically, for the first 5-10 years copyright works the way it does today, but beyond that anybody's allowed to make derivative works, in exchange for some legally-mandated revenue slice.
> the first Twilight and Harry Potter movies came out 4 years after their books, and I could definitely see movie studios just waiting an extra year to cut out the original authors.
So Rowling only gets to be some 8 figure millionaire instead of a 10 figure billionaire? That's so unfair.
> My ideal world would see original authors retaining these kinds of royalties for prolonged periods of time (
The prolonged period of time should be 18 months. I don't think the concept of "royalties for adapting someone else's work" is severable from the concept of copyright. These things are either the same, or royalties are some subset of copyright.
Even just re-typesetting a book is an adaptation as far as these things are concerned.
Right now, a copyright holder has a monopoly on their IP: they alone can decide who can use their works, and at what price, for the entire duration of their copyright. My suggestion was that that monopoly should only last a couple years (5? 10?), and then after that, it's a free-for-all. Re-print the book, adapt it to a movie, whatever, with the caveat that some fixed share (say, 1-5%, idk) of your revenue is owed to the creator.
The way I see it, that's the best of both worlds. If your goal is non-commercial in nature (e.g., game preservationism), then you're free to redistribute for free. If your goal is commercial, you're making money off of someone else's work, pay some token royalties, but, here's the big "but": the original author doesn't get to say "No, you may not adapt my work this way".
It even works for software copyright, with the caveat that you'd need to put some thought into how to deal with multiple claimants of royalties would work (since owing 50% of your revenue to 25 different authors seems excessive). Maybe have a cap of, say, 10% that, after reached gets subdivided based on some criteria.
18 months is flatly too short. Most creative works take longer than that between completion and market. You have to give artists some time to attempt to extract value from their work. Listen: J.K. Rowling is an evil bitch, but the world loved her work, and she was compensated as such. I feel the same way about Notch, of Minecraft fame. Guy's a dick, but it's hard to say he stole much of his fortune.
Respectfully, this isn't so much a coherent set of principles about the limited monopoly copyright grants, but rather fan service. Copyright doesn't draw distinctions between video games and player piano rolls, and why would it? What would lead any of us to believe that we'd ever alter copyright to forfeit rights when things are DRM'd? One of the complexities of copyright law is that it's harmonized across much of the world, so you're asking for radical changes not just to US law but for all of Europe as well.
"The mouse" isn't an abstract entity you can copyright instead you would have to copyright countless actual works and the price to keep hundreds or thousands of individual works would be essentially billions to keep "the mouse". While this is an interesting concept if the practical effect is to end most copyrights within 20 years wouldn't it be simpler just to do that?
> I'd also probably want to make sure that the legislative language ensured that you didn't have to pay the copyright registration on each patch release. So, if the DF team paid for the initial version to remain under copyright, _all_ the patch versions would retain that same copyright status without needing to be individually paid for. That seems like an implementation detail for the legislation that would be important to get right, but I didn't feel it was important to specify in the proposal.
A government getting ungodly sums of money to do a very complicated task when they can't even manage the simplest tasks without corruption or mismanagement?
How is maintaining a simple registry a "very complicated" task. Secretaries of State in every state do this. This is the kind of nuts and bolts operations that governments are actually equipped to handle.
Oh, you were complaining about the parenthetical statement where I suggested my ideal use would be for it to go to the arts?
That's fine, it's a parenthetical because I don't think it would survive the actual proposal because of concerns like yours. I think the US government is able to do a decent job of funding the arts, but I'm aware a lot of people don't agree, so I'd definitely expect that in the end the funds would just pay for the administration of the program itself, and the excess would go into the treasury and general fund.
> In such a scheme if a work is particularly valuable (either because it's being mass distributed, or because it has value in not being mass distributed), then the owner could maintain the copyright, but it would just be totally financially non-viable for these kinds of abandoned games to remain locked up. There'd be absolutely no business case for it.
Value is in they eye of the beholder. If someone makes $30/month from an indie game they developed 30 years ago, is it ok to take those 30 because they ain't 3 million?
I genuinely like the idea of regularly having to renew the claim to copyright, though.
> is it ok to take those 30 because they ain't 3 million?
I don't think this is a fair stating of what would be happening.
We aren't _taking_ anything from them. We are no longer _granting_ them exclusive control of the work.
But copyright isn't the default state of existence. It's an agreement between author's and society. The _purpose_ of the agreement is to encourage new works entering the public domain.
The current copyright term is fundamentally broken. It's _far_ longer than it needs to be to encourage the creation of new works.
Answer me this: would be the person who developed their indie game 30 years ago not have developed it because they knew that it would no longer be producing $30/month 30 years hence? I sincerely doubt it.
The term should be _just_ long enough to encourage the creation of new works *and not longer*.
Further, the author could...release a sequel to the game, which might make $30/month for another 30 years. Perhaps this might also encourage the creation of new works
> they developed 30 years ago
Interestingly, the original copyright law written by the founders was 14 years, with an optional 14 year extension. So the founding father's response would've been: "Yes! Of course! They already had 28 years to profit off their work! It's time for the public to get to enjoy this...indie game? What's an indie game?"
Why couldn't they continue to sell the game? There are lots of works out of copyright that still make money just by virtue of the method of delivery (i.e. a bookstore selling a physical copy of Don Quixote is preferable to many people over downloading it online)
I think first 5 years should be free, then the author declares the value of their work to be X and pays a yearly tax of 0.05 * X to keep for copyright for as long as they want.
To make sure they dont put a low X, have anyone be able to buy the copyright from the author for X. If someone wants to buy, author can raise X to keep their copyright.
This is a nice system because it is naturally progressive and balanced, huge corps with billion $ IP will finally start paying a ton to have the gov keep enforcing their copyrights.
The only way this would be a nice system is that it would icentivise everyone to make everything free and open source, or don't create anything at all, since if you create siomething with the intention to get value from it, anyone else can decide to take it from you simply because they are Apple and you don't have the 100k to stop them. It's already bad enough that big companies can buy smaller companies just by waving the cash at the owners, and all the Figma, Centos, etc users get to suck it.
Except that it wouldn't even be nice in that sarcastic way, because what happens to copyleft in that world? I think it's critically important that the "you may have but not steal this" in GPL doesn't expire in a mere 5 years, and no one has to pay hundreds of thousands to prevent a big for-profit company from stealing something that they could have had for free anyway.
The problem with a lot of these systems is that copyrighting happens at the time of creation whether you register or not. If you don’t register, it may be harder to prove someone is violating your copyright in court, but it is still the IP of the creator (or employer of the creator if a contract was signed). I guess you could argue that if you haven’t bothered filing for copyright after 5 years the value is approximately $0, but that poses the following problem:
Let’s say I make a web comic that’s basically worthless for 5 years. Then, after 8 years Jimmy Fallon or some other late night show sees it and shows it on the air. Overnight, my old comics, which I have implicitly valued at $0.00 or close to $0.00, become incredibly popular. Disney or an IP troll or whoever can come along and then buy my early comics for pennies before I realize what happened and I get nothing.
Unfortunately the Disney vault works exactly this way. Generate pent up demand by refusing to sell a product, which is exactly how copyright works for them.
I however agree with you and have no moral concerns if a company doesn't want to sell me a product.
Copyright is supposed to strike a balance between creators and the public. That balance has been so distorted as to be unrecognizable today. It needs a reset!
These are part and parcel of the same problem. Publishers want to strip creators of ownership as soon as possible because their back catalog is a pile of gold and they are the dragon using it as a makeshift bed. At their scale creative works are more valuable for the status they confer upon the company than for being an actual thing that they can sell.
All of this is deliberate, of course. The copyright bargain we currently have today was struck in the 1970s - a time in which much creative work was a collaborative effort that practically had to be capitalistically owned by a for-profit corporation. Self-publishing was entirely a product of counter-culture, fan conventions[0], and vanity presses[1]. The only fig leaf to the notion of these being authors rights rather than just a weird kind of tradeable monopoly is rights reversion - a thing which publishers hate with the passion of God.
[0] Yes, those actually did exist at this time. Remember: San Diego Comic-Con started in 1970 and Comiket in 1975. If you think that's old wait until I tell you about the historical Sherlock Holmes fandom!
[1] I suspect this was a derisive term coined by large book publishers as a reaction to people who aided self-publishing artists.
This idea presumes you're talking about copyrighted mass media which was distributed widely, which is only a small subset of copyrighted material. A very large amount of copyrighted material is never distributed, or is very limited in distribution to begin with.
Privacy. I have the right to make something, not share it, and prevent others from sharing it without my permission. Or I may share it only with those who I choose to share it with.
But you don’t need public copyright for that. If you share something with a limited set of parties just draft an NDA. If you publish to the public with which you can make no prior agreement you use copyright.
The fact that copyrights are automatic is a gigantic reason why NDAs aren't a good solution for this. The people who are in the best position to abuse someone's creative privacy are often the same people who won't sign NDAs.
What if I want privacy in matters that are not copyright able? Clearly copyright is for commercial property, and privacy is an entirely separate matter that should be dealt with by anti-stalking laws, etc.
Strong disagree. If I choose not to share something today, I do deserve, at a minimum:
1. the right to commercially share it later
2. the right to prevent others from commercially sharing it without my permission
3. the right to share my creations with a limited group of people, commercially or non-commercially
Say for instance, you share a creative work with someone in confidence. They should not have the right to freely copy and publish your work without your permission.
It is very common for people to create works which are private and or shared with small groups of people, and it is important for our laws to protect people's rights to keep those works private or semi-private.
Or to put it another way, a 'leak' of a private work shouldn't be a free pass for the rest of the world to share and/or monetize that breach of privacy.
> Or to put it another way, a 'leak' of a private work shouldn't be a free pass for the rest of the world to share and monetize that breach of privacy.
I half-agree with you on this. On the one had when you share information with others, people should have some kind of right to share with others when you shared with them. On the other hand I don't think that someone has the right to profit off of something you created without your permission.
IMHO, there is no kind of privacy when it comes to sharing something unless there is a meeting-of-the-minds agreement that all parties agree to before hand.
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public.
> * Someone sharing with another party in a situation with a large power imbalance (and so they refuse to sign an NDA with anyone)
Don't share it with them until they sign. If they sign and violate the NDA, you got your payday.
> * Someone sharing in a social situation where NDAs are not practical (romantic, familial, or personal relationships)
If you don't trust your spouse then get a prenup. The other categories aren't special.
That said, if your work is so easy to copy it probably wasn't (or shouldn't have been) valuable to begin with. Implementation matters more than ideas. So most of these concerns are silly to me.
No, an artist absolutely should have a reasonable expectation that their improv at a coffee shop won't be ripped off next week by a billion dollar publisher.
> Don't share it with them until they sign.
Which would be possible in a situation where someone has the power to do so, but this isn't always the case. In industries where there are large negotiating power imbalances between creators and others they work with, you will typically find that creators have little to no negotiation power. There's a reason we have many legal protections in many parts of the law outside of contract law.
> If you don't trust your spouse then get a prenup. The other categories aren't special.
A spouse is the most formal of the examples I listed. And a spouse in many places is someone you've already entered into a formal legal agreement with. But to the contrary, I don't think it is reasonable to expect people bring NDAs to a first date.
> That said, if your work is so easy to copy it probably wasn't (or shouldn't have been) valuable to begin with. Implementation matters more than ideas. So most of these concerns are silly to me.
The concept of privacy isn't predicated on monetary value.
> No, an artist absolutely should have a reasonable expectation that their improv at a coffee shop won't be ripped off next week by a billion dollar publisher.
Nah. There's no way for that artist to know if some other artist did the exact same bit a week earlier. If they happened to have done so, tough luck! Doesn't matter that you came up with it independently on your own.
> Which would be possible in a situation where someone has the power to do so, but this isn't always the case. In industries where there are large negotiating power imbalances between creators and others they work with, you will typically find that creators have little to no negotiation power. There's a reason we have many legal protections in many parts of the law outside of contract law.
So don't share it with them if you don't want to take the risk and you also don't want to enter into an agreement.
> A spouse is the most formal of the examples I listed. And a spouse in many places is someone you've already entered into a formal legal agreement with. But to the contrary, I don't think it is reasonable to expect people bring NDAs to a first date.
So don't share it with them if you don't want to take the risk and you also don't want to enter into an agreement.
> The concept of privacy isn't predicated on monetary value.
Indeed, it's predicated on privacy. Don't share what you don't want to share.
> Nah. There's no way for that artist to know if some other artist did the exact same bit a week earlier. If they happened to have done so, tough luck! Doesn't matter that you came up with it independently on your own.
If this should happen, this previous artist would be able to claim copyright on his creation. That is what copyright is about, protecting your creative creations. If you write a song and perform it on the streets for free, no one should be able to just take the song and perform it themselves without your permission.
...so are terms of use, which often include "you can't share this without my permission" so even if copyright law weren't so awful, the people who would be doing the sharing would still be breaking an agreement to do so.
Most things in life aren't software and don't have a TOS. I know this is a tech forum, and people are usually thinking about tech, but most of what copyright applies to is still not software.
It's not strictly commercial vs non-commercial though, I could sell the only copy of something for a lot of money... and copyright ensures that it can't be legally reproduced.
copyright has nothing to do with commercial protections, it gives you the exclusive right to have control over of creative work you produced. If you have copyright no-one is allowed to copy your work without your permission, no matter if it is for commercial use or private use. Its about intellectual ownership, not commercial usage.
Like, if someone distributes pornography of themselves, and they are now a nurse or something and are out of the industry + don't want their images distributed anymore, I think distributing pornography of them against their permission just because they aren't distributing it themselves sounds extremely heinous.
True, copyright is purely about monetization. And in fact it doesn't even help in most cases around professional pornography because the actor is not the copyright holder. The studio is.
It's a difficult topic. Unlike revenge porn which is completely against consent, the actor has signed their distribution rights away. It's really something they should think of very carefully before doing.
And in the cases of porn actors gone mainstream (Sylvester Stallone and Sasha Grey come to mind) it's not really been a big problem for them.
As a photographer, I think I and I alone should be able to dictate what happens to the photos that I take.
The idea that you can somehow control your image is insane. You can't forcibly control your reputation, why should you be able to forcibly control photographers who legally photograph you?
Your idea of somehow "dictating" what happens to the photos you take is equally insane if not more so. Your photos are just bits, information. Trivially copied. For you to be able to "dictate" literally anything at all would require control over the computer I'm typing this comment on and every other computer on earth.
> For you to be able to "dictate" literally anything at all would require control over the computer I'm typing this comment on and every other computer on earth.
Crimes are enforced above ring 0, at the physical layer.
Privacy rights are about stopping information from coming into existence in the first place. We want corporations to not collect data about us at all.
Copyright is about controlling distribution of information that already exists and has already been published. It's complete nonsense in the age of information.
> Crimes are enforced above ring 0, at the physical layer.
Surely you're not suggesting throwing in jail anyone who downloads grandparent's photos off of his website.
There are other ways that privacy rights are enforced, but the right to not distribute a creative work (and prevent others from doing it) is also a right that people have under copyright, and I believe they should continue to have.
> Surely you're not suggesting throwing in jail anyone who downloads grandparent's photos off of his website.
Correct, I am not. I am saying that most places around the world do dictate what he does with a computer already, and legal systems don't need a technical solution to enable it. The fact that nobody can electronically prevent them from copying bits is irrelevant. We are discussing the law, and courts use prisons, not bits.
> legal systems don't need a technical solution to enable it
They absolutely do. Without technological solutions, they don't even have a snowball's chance in hell of even so much as identifying perpetrators of copyright infringement. They can't stop it even with technological measures in place. In order to enforce copyright, they literally need to end computing freedom as we know it today. Computers gotta come pwned straight off the factory so we can only run software that they approve, so that they can reject software that copies their bits.
> We are discussing the law, and courts use prisons, not bits.
Let's discuss the law then. I propose that copyright should stop existing altogether. Simply because laws encode the customs of a people and copyright infringement is absolutely one of those customs. It is normal and natural to infringe copyright.
You infringe copyright when you download a picture or video from a website. You infringe copyright when you screenshot some social media post. You infringe copyright when you share something with your friend via messaging app. You infringe copyright when you make some funny meme by editing text into some popular culture picture. You infringe copyright when you download a copy of some blog post so you can read it later. It goes on and on. Pretty much anything you do infringes copyright. I've seen people arguing that fucking memcpy infringes copyright. It's mind boggling and never stops.
People do all of this stuff without even realizing it. How could it possibly be illegal? The only reason I can think of is constant lobbying by trillion dollar corporations.
There are always unanswered questions, legal FUD, and a lack of case law when a new technology brings up previously unanswered legal questions. This is just how law works. It doesn't necessarily mean that all of those things are illegal, or that the foundational law is fundamentally flawed. Yes, more case law is needed. Yes, some small tweaks could be necessary to clarify what 'copying' really means on the internet. But no, the underlying concept of copyright is still very necessary to protect creators from those with the power to exploit them.
> It doesn't necessarily mean [...] that the foundational law is fundamentally flawed.
I say it does.
Copyright was created in the age of printing presses. In order to violate copyright at significant scales, you had to be an industry player. You needed access to the expensive machines. It simply wasn't possible otherwise. Obviously, copyright makes sense in such a world. It's even enforceable since corporations are big targets.
But we are living in the 21st century. Everyone has globally networked general purpose computers in their pockets capable of copying and transmitting information at speeds and scales unimaginable to anyone in the last century. Everyone infringes copyright on a daily basis without even thinking twice about it. Copying is a fundamental computer operation, computers make it easy and natural to copy virtually anything. There's nothing they can do to stop it without literally destroying this wonderful invention.
Copyright is clearly hanging on for dear life. I say let it die.
> Your photos are just bits, information. Trivially copied. For you to be able to "dictate" literally anything at all would require control over the computer I'm typing this comment on and every other computer on earth
Do you feel the same way about companies violating open source licenses?
Your medical records are also just bits in an EMH system as are your text messages to your significant others. Is it okay if I share those?
> Do you feel the same way about companies violating open source licenses?
Of course. There should be no copyright nonsense to begin with. Those licenses shouldn't even exist. Nor should anyone ever be punished for using leaked or decompiled proprietary source code or anything of the sort.
> Your medical records are also just bits in an EMH system as are your text messages to your significant others.
Medical records are collected by healthcare professionals who are ethically and probably legally obligated to keep it secret. This confidentiality exists for obvious reasons, nobody would consult doctors otherwise.
> Is it okay if I share those?
You don't have access to them. You can't share them even if you wanted to. Unlike copyrighted works, those bits shouldn't be and actually aren't distributed to massive audiences worldwide. Everybody understands that once information is out there it's essentially impossible to contain it. That's why they keep it secret.
Only copyright industry is delusional enough to want to sell copies of data to everyone on earth and control what they do with it.
> Your medical records are also just bits in an EMH system as are your text messages to your significant others. Is it okay if I share those?
Medical records are covered by separate body of law, so is a conversation with your lawyer, and so are matters of National security. They have no relevance to copyright
Yes and yes. (But also, it's trivially easy to state why that type of information should not be shareable in a way that wouldn't apply to commercial photography, you can assuredly come up with these yourself with a minutes thought)
In the US, being factually accurate is an airtight defense against libel.
Face it, you don't get to control what other people say about you, nor should you want to. (Whether that "saying" is gossip, in print, or photoshopping your face on to unsavory things.)
In Sweden, it's not. I do think that it's reasonable to have certain expectations about what can be spread about you as a private person, regardless if the things said are true or not.
I agree but only if you have a consent form of the persons depicted of course.
And the state of mind is important too. I help at kink events sometimes and I don't accept consent forms from drunk people and don't get them photographed. Unless I know they've agreed to it before.
>I agree but only if you have a consent form of the persons depicted of course.
How many of the millions of published photos of recognizable people on the internet do you think have consent forms. Stock photos yes. But I'd be willing to bet that well short of 1% of the photos of people on Flickr, say, have consent forms.
Well yes, but in the environment I would take photos this is a much bigger concern obviously. I know even there not every photographer takes a form. But they always ask for consent verbally.
I wouldn't run the risk without it personally. Especially in the kink community where consent is paramount and forms are already an established method for other activities as well.
I know flickr etc is not so strict on consent but I personally would be. Especially when it involves anything remotely risqué.
The thing is that people change and societal values change over time. It's better to have that consent when someone changes their mind and blames you.
What if some actor no longer wants a movie where they're portraying the main character to be distributed? Should they be allowed to do that? Should the studio be forced to stop its distribution or edit the actor out of the scenes that they appear in?
A similar (albeit weaker) regime already exists in the EU for "orphan works", i.e. works for which copyright holder(s) cannot be found or contacted. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work
Then there’s the hilarious case of No One Lives Forever, a well regarded game from 2000, where the ownership rights are murky with several organisations willing to say on the record that they have no idea if they own it, that they have no intention of finding out, but that if anyone attempts to resurrect the games they will find out and sue.
> Whether orphaned software and video games ("Abandonware") fall under the audiovisual works definition is a matter debated by scholars.[14]
[14] Maier, Henrike (2015). "Games as Cultural Heritage Copyright Challenges for Preserving (Orphan) Video Games in the EU" http://www.hiig.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Maier_JIPITEC-... (PDF). JIPITEC. Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. p. 120. Retrieved 2016-01-18.
This is one of those things that a bit of technology could so easily resolve.
The government sets up a website where you can upload the work you want to copyright and register yourself as the owner. If it's something like software, you must upload the code. It wouldn't be visible to anyone, but would be there in case the copyright expires.
If someone wants to use your work, they can contact you though the website.
If you don't reply (edit: this should say acknowledge) in some reasonable amount of time (say three months), then the copyright is considered abandoned and the work enters the public domain.
For existing works, give people say two years to upload and register. Anything not registered (or at least marked as "in dispute") becomes public domain.
This at least solves the abandoned works problem, as well as the archiving problem. After 100ish years, we'd have a copy of every work as it enters the public domain.
>If you don't reply in some reasonable amount of time (say three months), then the copyright is considered abandoned and the work enters the public domain.
I'm not sure why I'm legally required to respond to requests for the use of my copyrighted works. I can simply ignore them. Requiring that I respond to them will create an undue burden on me.
I don't mind as long as I can bill you personally for forcing me to hire someone to respond to such requests, at a reasonable rate for a legal attorney with a specialty in copyright. He can even provide invoices, although the time required to produce the invoice will be included in the invoice.
Why should I pay to respond because you want to use my copyrighted material? You're the one with the request, I don't have to respond to it. You want a guaranteed response, you pay me for that response.
How about you pay me to respond to you instead? At copyright attorney rates for my region. You send my attorney a request and your billing information, and he'll reply to you on my behalf and send you the invoice for his time.
Otherwise people will be able to cause huge financial impositions by essentially DDOSing people with copyright requests. You want a guaranteed response, you pay for that response in advance, otherwise kick rocks.
Which would be fine, because those services still cost money and/or require maintenance. There would still be a way to track down the owner of the copyright. You could even make it part of the law that the respondent must be the copyright holder or have had contact with the copyright holder within the last X days.
Uploading the work itself doesn't seem like it would work in a lot of cases. I'm picturing e.g. Google trying to upload their entire monorepo with hundreds of thousands of file changes per day -- to what end exactly?
What government? World government? Yours? Mine? Who will pay for it? What will happen is an author is hit by a car and falls into coma? How will authorship be established? Worldwide federated authentication of authors? How will it work of authors in Iran?
Technosolutuonists are funny sometimes. “Just add a little bit of blockchain”.
> What government? World government? Yours? Mine? Who will pay for it?
The US Government, since we are talking about US Copyright.
> How will authorship be established? Worldwide federated authentication of authors? How will it work of authors in Iran?
US copyright doesn't cover worldwide works unless they register in the US.
> Technosolutuonists are funny sometimes. “Just add a little bit of blockchain”.
And I never said blockchain. I said a website where people upload and register their works. You know, like a digital version of how it works today where you mail a copy of your work to the copyright office. But with the added bonus of a contact feature.
> What will happen is an author is hit by a car and falls into coma?
Presumably there would be a dispute process available for these rare edge cases. This is in fact why it would not be a blockchain. So that the legal system still has final say.
I mean with everything copyright, it's complicated. If for example you create a work in the UK, it's automatically copyright in the UK. Because of international treaties, that copyright is honored in the US. But it's not a US copyright. It doesn't follow US copyright law for expiration for example.
I'm not a copyright lawyer, I've just looked into it before. This is my layman's understanding after talking to a lawyer.
Copyright is a monopoly, and it should be scrutinized as such.
It does provide some much-needed to protections for rights holders, but it provides very little protection for consumers. Fair use is something at least, but doesn’t help when rights holders engage in predatory practices that only serve to harm consumers (e.g. the hell that is video streaming today)
Idk what a better copyright law would look like, but I do know that we can do better, and believe it can be done in a way that benefits everyone fairly.
Just playing the devil's advocate here but what if the copyright owner does not want the content distributed anymore? Maybe now they find the content distasteful or embarrassing.
The original term on copyright was 28 years maximum; under that rule, most copyrighted works would already be in the public domain. I think 28 years is probably closer to the "right value" than 95 years, but I'd be okay with a bit longer.
Who cares what they want? I don't. Culture should belong to us, not them.
Copyright exists to allow them to turn a tidy profit so they're properly incentivized. It's not there to enable their delusions of control nor their perpetual rent seeking. They've already turned their profit, now it's time for the works to enter the public domain. Nobody cares whether they like it or not, it's human culture and it belongs to us all.
I see what you mean now. If creators don't publish their creations, they won't be experienced by anyone. They don't matter to anyone, we don't even know they exist. I suppose it's sad in an existential way that their works could be lost without anyone experiencing them or any preservation efforts being made but what can you do?
I think it's also important to consider that the sharing of creative works is also not so boolean. Works don't always fall into neat categories of "100% publicly published to the world" or "100% completely private and irrelevant to anyone". There's a lot of grey area in the middle.
I didn't suggest that it was. I'm suggesting that this perspective on copyright is very myopic. Regulating copyright as if they are all culturally significant works is like regulating haystacks as if they consist only of needles.
The analogy doesn't hold. Not all copyrighted works are or will be culturally significant, but all have the potential to be culturally significant. We have no way of knowing ahead of time. It's regulating haystacks as if any individual straw may actually be a needle.
A work that isn't publicly shared by the author could be shared by someone else without permission. Copyright law does and should continue to criminalize this.
Literally everything "of value" that was ever published was unpublished for some period of time.
Also, people may keep works private not because they lack value, but for other reasons.
As a very simple example, a someone might take a racy photo for their own private use, not because it would have no commercial value, but because they prefer not to commercialize it. And there are hundreds of other reasons why someone might choose not to share a work with the world.
Culture itself does. I am referring to the fact that most things that people create are not published, do not become popular, and don't become culturally relevant.
As much as I wish that my meeting notes from my standup this morning were good enough to become a cultural icon, I'm pretty sure the entire planet, including me, will forget about them next week. Mundane creations like this consist the vast majority of copyrighted works.
You gotta be kidding me. They literally own our culture. In the most capitalistic sense imaginable. Actual government-granted monopolies on ideas, bits of information. Works you grew up with? You and your children will be long dead before they enter the public domain. If they could delete the copy you have stored in your brain, they would.
> All you'll do with your approach is make creators less like to ever create unique works.
That's too bad! The entire bargain with copyright is that creators are granted an exclusive period with their work in exchange for the work entering the public domain.
That's the deal.
It's a complete violation of the spirit of the copyright agreement to take advantage of the financially useful period of monopoly over the work, then use the remainder of the exclusive period to try and ensure the work cannot be archived and cannot enter the public domain.
Wu Tang Clan recorded an album and sold it to Martin Shkreli for $2 million (he no longer owns it). If I manage to get a copy of it, should I be able to distribute it freely?
Depending on the contract, Shkreli may have those rights. I’m talking about if I managed to record a copy of the record would there be anything wrong with me distributing it?
Temporary problem that will work itself out with time once the last creators die. After one generation under this system, nobody will create anything that isn't useless free garbage.
>> If something is not legally available then copyright law ought to make it eligible for free distribution.
Ok. Past Futurama episodes are now $10,000 per view. That is still available and not an absurd cost (just ask anyone dealing with with patented technology). So we would need some sort of commission to decide what a reasonable cost should be, which would be a quantum leap away from free market principals.
We jumped away from "free market principles" the moment we forbade copying of those past Futurama episodes for 90 years. There is nothing naturally scarce about copies of creative works; we impose artificial scarcity through a government-granted monopoly in order to allow the creation of those works to be funded through the sale of copies[0].
Having a government commission decide what is and isn't a reasonable price does smell of command economy, but creative works already exist in a command economy. The only difference is that you can't Disney Vault your shit anymore. Boo hoo. In my opinion, once you've sold your work, recouped costs, and paid everyone, you shouldn't be able to then pull the coin out of the vending machine and take works off the market. We give monopoly rights in exchange for creative works being made and publicly available, not for them to be made and then thrown into a fire.
My personal opinion as to how to fix this problem would be to authorize the Copyright Office to issue compulsory licenses to reproduce works that are over 10 years old and either are orphan works[1] or whose known owners are unwilling to license[2]. These licenses would only be issued to libraries - i.e. either government-run libraries or non-profit agencies with substantially similar goals to one, such as the Internet Archive. And if someone can actually assert both ownership and a pattern of ongoing licensing then they can cancel the compulsory licenses that the libraries get.
We can actually determine what a 'willing license' would look like by looking at comparable deals in a particular market. If whoever owns Futurama wants to charge $10,000 a view but Disney is licensing The Simpsons and Family Guy out to Netflix for a few pennies per view, then we can safely conclude that the $10,000/view price is there just to keep the work off the market. We don't need the Copyright Office to say "anything more than $X per stream is too much."
[0] This is not the only way that creativity could be funded, of course. But it's the only way that mainstream buyers of creativity are willing to participate in.
[1] Works whose current ownership is unable to be determined. A lot of the games that are legally unavailable in the VGHF study are unavailable because the owners went out of business and the rights are tied up between four different creditors who all don't know what they own.
Compulsory/statutory licensing would be one solution. As I understand it, that's what allows libraries to exist. Music on the radio (at least here in Sweden) is handled through collective licensing, which is nominally optional, but practically impossible to avoid if you want any radio money.
The incentive of exclusivity could be reasonably preserved by making the statutory license valid only after some amount of time has passed since release.
> Compulsory/statutory licensing would be one solution. As I understand it, that's what allows libraries to exist.
I don't think that's the case. At least, what allows libraries in the US is the "first-sale doctrine." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine , "The doctrine enables the distribution chain of copyrighted products, library lending, giving, video rentals and secondary markets for copyrighted works (for example, enabling individuals to sell their legally purchased books or CDs to others)."
Something similar is why I can place an ad to sell my used Mac without violating Apple's trademark.
I assume Sweden (and the EU) have something similar. If not, that makes second-hand book, magazine, or any product sales rather difficult.
> 19 § När ett exemplar av ett verk med upphovsmannens samtycke har överlåtits inom Europeiska ekonomiska samarbetsområdet, får exemplaret spridas vidare.
Translated:
> 19 § When a specimen, with the consent of the author, has been transferred within the European economic area, the specimen may be further transferred.
The law goes on to carve out exceptions for computer programs and movies specifically, as well as renting generally -- those kinds of transfers are not allowed without author approval.
However, in combination with Biblioteksersättningen/författarfonden ("the library compensation/author fund"), which collects money based on the amount of lending in public libraries and distributes it to authors, it comes pretty close to statutory licensing in practice. It's not immediately clear to me that the payout is proportionally divided, though, so depending on how that skews, I may be way off.
"Technically correct"? That seems like the same concept.
> as well as renting generally -- those kinds of transfers are not allowed without author approval.
Could you elaborate? If I set up a used car rental service in Sweden, and that car includes a user manual, then do I need permission from the copyright owner to include that manual in the rental?
] This is because it only benefits domestic authors. In the Nordic countries, library compensation has not been part of international copyright but part of national cultural policy. Other consequences of this are that the library compensation has a maximum amount, so that the most borrowed authors do not receive compensation in proportion to the lending and that no compensation is paid for loans from research libraries.
That quote tells me the payout is not proportionally divided.
I would be pretty OK with capping the price of old games at 2× median sale price during the period they were on market or $40 adjusted for average inflation since the year they were released. Applicable no sooner than 10 years since their initial release.
Aye, but instead the reality is that copyright can only expire by running out its term. If a company gets acquired, its copyrights get transfered to the new owner. If a company goes out of business, the copyright either gets sold to cover bankrupcy or becomes the property of the people who owned the company. If a person holding a copyright dies, it goes to their heir(s), and finally, if someone dies without heirs, it becomes state property in the US.
The only way for a copyright to expire is either by running out its term, or by the current copyright holder voiding it.
Let's go further and tax it. If it's still worth something for you after X years, claim it, but also pay the tax. When calculating piracy damages, use the same value as what you declared as taxable. If you want society to defend your rights, pay for it.
Not a bad idea - some entity must show legal ownership via chain of custody and make a claim every year, if they can't do so, it becomes public domain with an extra 1 year grace period or something.
No, it should be non-transferable (but commissionable, so that companies can still own copyright if they paid employees to generate works), have a fixed short term (say, 20 years), and should be voided when the copyright holder expires before the copyright itself expires.
I'm pretty sure if a copyright owner dies without heirs the copyright is orphaned, it doesn't become state property in the US. That's the problem. If the work became public domain it would make more sense.
That's the sort of provision that is effectively unenforced, and is hence null in practice. I expect most states do not know whether they own any IP from dissolved companies, nor will they prosecute anyone who "infringes" such rights.
Ignorance of the law is no defense against prosecution, and any claim that "it's null in practice" is about as bad legal advise as you can give.
Even if the company went bust, and the former owners died, and they have no legal heirs, that copyright is STILL active and now lies with the state, whether the state knows that or not.
It might be called an orphan work, and it might take a whole lot of digging to discover it's now owned by the state, but it is owned, and they do have the right to prosecute over infringement if someone at any point goes "hang on, we own this, and we can make close to 50% of our annual budget by prosecuting".
> People can choose not to make the product of their work available.
And these people have chosen to make it available. If you want to create something and keep it all to yourself, fine, do that, nobody will force you to release it to the public. But once you have released it to the public, you shouldn't be able to take it back.
People are allowed to be selective about how they make things available, and they're allowed to stop putting the effort in to keep them available without forfeiting their rights. Again: we aren't entitled to access this stuff, except by contract, which spells out our remedies when they exist.
For precisely the same reason people believe tax dollars should go towards enforcing the GPL. You're welcome to disagree, but not to withhold your tax dollars when you fall into the minority.
You're just regurgitating what the current laws state. The whole point of this discussion is that said current laws lead to most media effectively becoming lost after a certain period of time and this is a problem, so the law should be changed.
And to be even more clear: The constitution has to explicitly permit copyright because otherwise it would be an unconstitutional limitation of people's rights, most importantely of free speech.
I’ve long favored a copyright abandonment law where refusing or failing to make a work available voids the copyright.
I also think this should apply to derived works. For instance, if a film or a book is changed and only sold in the edited form, this should void the copyright on the original version.
If you wrote this into law, copyright holders would immediately put a notice on their website that a copy of any of their films/books/music/whatever is available for sale at a cost of $1M if you write a letter to their postal mail address.
That would meet the law as "offered for sale".
It's hard to write a law that says "offered for sale for a sensible price, in form the buyer desires, and without excessive hoops to jump through"
> It's hard to write a law that says "offered for sale for a sensible price, in form the buyer desires, and without excessive hoops to jump through"
No it isn't.
"If the work is not offered in a manner that can be purchased reasonably in a manner conforming to industry standards unless (1) it is A (2) it is not A but is B..."
This is not true for abandoned works, or works for which one cannot locate the copyright owner. The tiniest of hurdles to maintaining copyright could make a large amount of works available.
I think that makes complete sense. After all, something similar already happens with trademarks: if you don't use it, it lapses. Presumably companies only invest time and money on using the trademarks they expect to yield a return on that investment; if they aren't making money off of it, why should they get to keep others from doing so?
Well it is a "temporary" privilege. It is just that "temporary"timeline is longer than the life of an average human. I disagree with the assertion that if it isn't legally available... But I do agree that copyright is too long
It could also be that I make a game, then a somewhat similar sequal, and I only want to sell the sequel. What right as a consumer do you have to distribute the first one for free then?
We can decide to make laws based on the society that we all want to live in. If our objective is maximizing the amount of creative work available to society, it may make sense to say that creators of those works enjoy monopoly on the reproduction and sale of those works, but do not gain the right to deprive society of the works. Some minimum good-faith effort to actually publish the works is a perfectly reasonable requirement on copyright.
The purpose of copyright and patent law is to promote innovation.
If your new IP is so similar that it’s threatened by the mere existence of an older IP then it’s probably not innovative enough to deserve protection anyway.
The question is missing the point the parent is making. Parent is saying that the purpose of IP is to, in the long run, benefit society. As a result, we have collectively agreed ( for various definitions of agreed -- I certainly think they are way too long ) that protecting author's works for a period of time is desirable. As such, after some time has passed, why does it not end up in the same category as old published books ( public domain )?
Is your company still up and running? No rights, unless the company explicitly voids the copyright.
Did you go out of business but you didn't sell the copyright? No rights, unless you personally void the copyright.
Did you die, but did you have (legal) heirs? No rights, because copyright is inherited.
Are you a US citizen and you died without legal heirs? Still no rights, because (and this is the most insane one) your assets become state property and copyright is considered an asset.
The only two ways consumers will be free to distribute that first game is either by the clock running out on the copyright, or by whoever is the copyright holder explicitly legally voiding the copyright before then.
Well, no legal rights, obviously. But that doesn't mean that's not what ought to be the case. Laws aren't infallible, especially copyright law. If you have to break them to do something, that's hardly a reason not to do it, it's a reason to think about what you're doing.
As for the emulation of old games, this article talkes about a pretty commonly understood point, many old games simply can't be played outside emulation. This is importent to the argument as a whole because it changes how we should view these games, as they literally have no value. Art is worthless while it's isolated, it has no meaning to anyone, nothing to provide to anyone. The work of those that made it has essentially been forgotton about, and if it hasn't been forgotten, it will be. Same is true for video games, a video game does not have value until someone knows what it is. Currently these games exist in this state, they have literally no value. You couldn't find people to buy these games outside of speculative reasons because no one gives a flying fuck about these things. So when someone argues that emulation is theft, it's moot in these cases, because there's no value there, nothing to steal.
There's also less altruistic arguments for emulation that are valid too, arguments for emulating games that do still have some value. One may do it as a form of protest, they want to edit the game, they want to play it more easily, or they want to put together a comprehensive list of emulated games that everyone can have access to. There are good arguments for all of these, despite the fact that they're often illegal and sometimes may even harm the original creators. Each argument should be considered on its own merits before the action is judged as something that ought not to happen.
Solution: bundle a license for the original with purchases of the sequel.
Now it is on the market, so it can't be distributed for free.
You make money off people who think they just want the original. But you also get a copy of the sequel into their hands, and they might try it and like it.
True, it's not absolute freedom to sell things precisely how you want, but it seems like a pretty reasonable compromise to me.
> If something is not legally available then copyright law ought to make it eligible for free distribution
What about stuff that's in flight? Or your IP that you've developed that is taken off the market and you are incorporating into another product? Or stuff you put out there and it flops because of timing and you plan to relaunch again in 2 years? There are many situations where this doesn't hold up.
You sentiment makes sense but implementation is tricky.
True. But to take and distribute freely somebody's copyrighted material is essentially taking all the value out of the material. Some similar in that way.
I don't get less enjoyment out of a video game because somebody else played it. In fact I might get even more enjoyment because of that since we could play it together or discuss it!
So that means the value stays the same or even goes up in my book!
This type of thinking always seems very entitled. Just because you can't obtain a copy of something in a convenient manner it should be distributed for free?
It's ok for things to die. It's ok for things to be hard to get. The world doesn't need all media available at all times to everyone.
It's not okay for things to be impossible to get after it expires from copyright. That was the entire deal that was struck to allow copyright to exist. The entire bargain is that the creator gets an exclusive protection in exchange for the work entering the public domain.
If the work doesn't enter the public domain, then it shouldn't have received a copyright protection.
> The world doesn't need all media available at all times to everyone.
The world also doesn't need any more media created, the amount of good - no, great - media that I'd like to consume that already exists is vastly greater than the amount of time I have in my life to consume it.
Given that state of affairs, why do we even need any laws that encourage the production of new media?
I mean, I'm highly sympathetic to the situation of the starving artist, but I'm not at all sympathetic to the situation of his publisher. If copyright, and the creative industry, and all of its production of new works disappeared tomorrow, it would have no meaningful impact on my life.
Art is a reflection of society and culture. We absolutely NEED more art created. It drives humanity forward.
> If copyright, and the creative industry, and all of its production of new works disappeared tomorrow, it would have no meaningful impact on my life.
In relation to my previous point, no new art being created would have a massive negative affect on all of society. Everyone, including you, would be impacted. It also comes off as shortsighted and unsympathetic to the starving artist to say that their lively-hoods being impacted/eliminated would have no impact on your life.
> I mean, I'm highly sympathetic to the situation of the starving artist, but I'm not at all sympathetic to the situation of his publisher.
A publisher offers an artist many benefits, ranging from distribution reach, legal protections, and other benefits that a single artist would have a hard time managing on their own.
Reforming the copyright system and the relationships between artists and publishers requires a very nuanced look at all of the issues to allow art, artists, and society as a whole to flourish.
Entitlement isn't an inherently bad word. Current copyright law has limits, facilitating the removal of distribution monopolies of works once an expiry date is hit, after which the law entitles me to do whatever I want with those works.
Your second paragraph could only be written by someone blind or ignorant to historical analysis and it's importance.
Old content can compete with new content, causing publishers to lose money. I'm not saying copyright law is good in the form that it exists today, but just because old content does not make money means that old content being available can't lose them money.
There would just be loopholes that can’t realistically be closed. Like they sell only physical copies out of one location in a rural place that is basically inaccessible. I’m also not for forcing people/companies to maintain an online marketplace of their goods.
My imaginary approach is that you'd have to submit an actual copy to the Library of Congress or equivalent every year / every 5 years / .... So it forces you to at least track what you're copyrighting and have a working "production line". You could still refuse to sell it to anyone, but that would be essentially pique.
Absolutely. But that person also does not have a divine right to prevent someone else from copying and selling/distributing it either. Especially when doing so does not deprive the original creator of anything unlike physically stealing something.
In what universe does someone selling a book I wrote not deprive me of those same sales? How about I sell my book if I choose to and you decide whether to sell yours.
If I write in my journal it is copyrighted. I may not wish for you to have a copy of my journal. The law should then require me to let you take a copy of it despite me not wanting you to have it?
Copyright is about whether I can make and distribute copies of something I've legitimately acquired; for private material like a journal it's irrelevant whether it's copyrighted.
Copyright applies whether or not the origin was "legitimately" acquired or not. Its what makes that journal continue to be private. If you accidentally stumble upon my data like a journal or some fiction I wrote, what then stops you from republishing it however you want if not copyright?
> If you accidentally stumble upon my data like a journal or some fiction I wrote, what then stops you from republishing it however you want if not copyright?
Trade secrets, privacy laws, what have you. Copyright was never intended to cover that case; if it does it's purely accidental, and if we want to address it well then dedicated laws are a better approach.
My journal or some piece of fiction wouldn't be covered under any US trade secret statue that I know of. I don't know of any privacy laws outside of any PII in the journal, but a piece of fiction I wrote wouldn't be covered under any privacy laws for sure.
The only thing giving me the right to stop somoene from distributing it without my approval is copyright.
Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not legally available?
Streaming and on-demand content delivery, rather than purchased physical copies, does the same damage to other content as to games. Per internet traditions, the porn industry is leading the way. No doubt the copyrights to millions of porn films belong to long-defunct studios, leaving no legal access. Today is it porn, tomorrow it will be the older Futurama episodes.
But industries want this state of affairs. Any time spent with old content is time not purchasing the new content. To keep the content creation industry going consumers need to forget past material. Want to watch old Simpsons episodes? Want to play the original Civilization? No. Those are dead. Here are some new versions.
> How many films and TV-sows are now not legally available?
Or if they are, they've been changed to remove material that can't be distributed. WKRP in Cincinnati is an example of this.
From the Wikipedia page for the show:
> WKRP was videotaped rather than filmed because at the time, music-licensing fees were lower for videotaped programs, a loophole that was intended to accommodate variety shows. Music licensing deals that were cut at the time of production covered only a limited number of years, but when the show entered syndication shortly after its 1982 cancellation, most of the original music remained intact because the licensing deals were still active. After the licenses had expired, later syndicated versions of the show did not feature the music as first broadcast, with stock production music inserted in place of the original songs to avoid paying additional royalties.
Books too. The vast majority of books (or paper media overall) ever printed are no longer available new. There _might_ be some electronic version, but realistically not. Library systems help fill this in, but there are so many titles are are simply difficult to obtain.
For old books it's understandable but for modern books it's unforgivable. Even if the author is old school and wrote it on a typewriter or by hand, at some point that book has been digitised for production. I wanted a book recently that is paper only and was published in 2015. I emailed the publisher to request if they'd make it available as an eBook and they didn't even bother replying. Why on earth publishers continue to release paper only books in 2023 is beyond me.
Some books absolutely do not lend themelves to a digital format. I'm currently in the middle of House of Leaves and there are sections of it that play with the fact they are printed on paper.
I've read House of Leaves multiple times, a few in paper and a few on my Kindle. There was no discernable difference in enjoyment between the two formats - your conclusion is false.
If you only read it on Kindle you would miss out on the whole section where the text is printed in boxes that are mirrored on opposite sides of the page. On that note, where did you even find a Kindle version?
>> Why on earth publishers continue to release paper only books in 2023 is beyond me.
Because digital books are horrible. A have a self of work-related books full of reference images (military equipment). I budget about 100/month for book purchases as many of them are 200+ each. There is no plausible replacement. Just ask anyone who collects painting or movie posters. A digital file is no replacement for a reference copy on a shelf.
One book that I purchased new only two years ago for <100$ is now out of print and apparently going for 500+ on ebay/amazon.
> A have a self of work-related books full of reference images (military equipment). I budget about 100/month for book purchases as many of them are 200+ each. There is no plausible replacement.
Er yes there is. A large tablet. Which would allow you to zoom in on those images in high resolution if the book was formatted properly by the publisher. Connect some AR glasses and now you've got a massive book you can read comfortably anywhere without strain.
> A digital file is no replacement for a reference copy on a shelf.
It absolutely is, particularly if your book is primarily text and you want to search that text on a regular basis. Or if you're out in the field and you don't have space to carry an entire library of maintenance books with you. Which might actually be quite a common scenario in the military. Unless you know the book back to front (and even then it's debatable) searching via a computer is going to be faster than flipping through pages manually.
The digital file will not decay (unless the underlying hard drive decays) and it can be available, theoretically, forever. It can be shipped around the globe in the blink of an eye, and doesn't require anywhere near the same carbon footprint to do so. It can be easily replicated and the potential market is anyone, anywhere, on the entire planet rather than anyone with access to a book store or living in a location where a bookstore will ship to.
No-one is trying to take your paper books away. But presumably a digital file of that book was sent to the printers. So why is that digital file not readily available for consumers to purchase to consume in the manner that best suits them?
Nope. No tablets allowed anywhere near where I work, certainly not some random device that wants to just connect to the public internet to download some random pdfs from a defunct book subscription service.
>> The digital file will not decay
Yes they do. The chances that a tablet with a digital file, or a subscription service, will still be accessible in 10/20 years are not good. A physical book will last centuries.
>> Or if you're out in the field and you don't have space to carry an entire library of maintenance books with you. Which might actually be quite a common scenario in the military.
Nope. That is a very rare circumstance in the modern military. What is not rare is someone wanting a specific question answered about an old bit of equipment or place, something nobody has touched in a decade. Someone in the field needs info and calls back to the support unit. Suddenly that old paper book on the shelf about some forgotten topic or place is a literal lifesaver.
And in the real military, one cannot assume network connectivity. We have to keep working even when the lights go out, especially when they lights are out. Paper books can do that.
> Nope. No tablets allowed anywhere near where I work, certainly not some random device that wants to just connect to the public internet to download some random pdfs from a defunct book subscription service.
Cool bro, good for you. Not everyone works where you do.
> Yes they do. The chances that a tablet with a digital file, or a subscription service, will still be accessible in 10/20 years are not good. A physical book will last centuries.
If you're making a point about the file being in a proprietary format and unavailable for corporate reasons then yes. But otherwise, no. We have been copying digital files between devices for decades now.
> Nope. That is a very rare circumstance in the modern military. What is not rare is someone wanting a specific question answered about an old bit of equipment or place, something nobody has touched in a decade. Someone in the field needs info and calls back to the support unit.
A call they wouldn't actually need to make in the first place if they had the book in digital format on their person. But we can assume that's an intelligence risk if it goes missing so we'd rather keep the info safe on base. That is understandable. But it doesn't change the fact that one of the pros of ebooks are their portability.
> Suddenly that old paper book on the shelf about some forgotten topic or place is a literal lifesaver.
There's literally no reason why that old paper book couldn't have a digital copy in an archive somewhere and probably does.
> And in the real military, one cannot assume network connectivity. We have to keep working even when the lights go out, especially when they lights are out. Paper books can do that.
It's almost as if both formats have different pros and cons and the consumer should be able to decide which work best for them and their own needs rather than having that dictated to them by the publishing industry or the needs of the military. I don't really consider having a copy of the "Crime Writer's Guide To Police Practice and Procedure" by Michael O'Byrne on my tablet whilst I'm backpacking to be a national security risk.
Reference books are the best candidates for being digitised. Why would you want to physically search a real physical library for hours to find a dusty forgotten book about a forgotten piece of equipment when you could just Ctrl+F and instantly find what you seek?
Any other kind of book I do much rather prefer the paper version though.
Getting some slaptick+satire comic books made after the main $COMIC_BOOK_INDUSTRY in Spain it's night impossible.
And it sucks, because these comic books from the 80's are a masterpiece where the author were not tied to their editors and they innovated like never did. Think about stories close to Futurama in humor but for younger teens and without dumbing down them (political jokes and so on).
There was a show in the late 1980’s called Murphy’s Law about an insurance investigator who lived on a floor of a warehouse like the base in Sneakers and had an asian girlfriend. It had some of the best comedic pacing I’d ever seen on TV but only made one short season and never got into syndication or home video which is too bad.
I've been searching for Scrubs for a while now. I don't know if it's due to the country I live or what, but I can't find the whole show to watch.
I saw they have it on Hulu, but the app itself seems like a nightmare.
As I'm writing this post, if I try to log in Hulu I get a message "Something went wrong. Please try again later."
I guess my parents pay for a delivery service here that gives us access to Disney and Star+, but I don't know for sure if Hulu is included in the package. There are so many streaming services now a days that I can't keep track of the ones I have access to anymore.
I've been thinking about going back to torrents sites and trying to get it unofficially;
You might need to go to DVD for something that old.
There are advantages to getting owned DVDs, like the fact that they can't mess with the content later. Music licensing problems are fairly common. For Scrubs Season 1 in particular, they had to change all the music around for Netflix's streamed version. The DVD version, as far as I know, has the original music.
Dark Skies. It was x-files if set in the 1960s. But as it used music from the time, the classic music licenses have since expired and nobody is willing to pay enough to renew them.
Also, why in the world isn't The Twilight Zone (the one from the 50's) in the public domain? It already set up the genre, it has been exploited in TV with ads for sure for decades. Also, I think Rod Sterling is not alive since a good chunk of time, ditto with the producers. There no loss on torrenting that series. If any, it would help on sales on current sci-fi series.
Scrubs is one of those shows that used licensed music heavily, so the versions available on streaming are edits that remove or replace the soundtrack.
A lot of shows have been hit by this, with even DVD releases poisoned by changes. In this case the only way to access the original works is through piracy.
"The Library of Congress conducted the first comprehensive survey of silent films over the past two years and found 70% are believed to be lost. Of the nearly 11,000 silent feature films made in America between 1912 and 1930, the survey found only 14% still exist in their original format. About 11% of the films that survive only exist as foreign versions or on lower-quality formats."
It's too sad that we as a species are allowing our culture and history to be lost ... for some temporal profit of a minority of people. Any IP that is 20+ year old should be automatically free to copy.
To argue the other side, why should we store things forever? Storing things and organizing them has a cost, and if modern society thinks a particular work is no longer interesting, why not let it be forgotten?
Do you think our grandchildren’s grandchildren in 2196 will still want to watch a B- level movie produced in the 1980’’s?
I'm still trying to get MythBusters and DuckTales* in German. I can only find fragments on youtube and some shady websites.
I'm totally willing to pay full price, but there's simply no offer.
Edit: I just learned about justwatch.com (thanks HN!) There's one streaming service listed which offers at least two seasons for 7 € per month - including commercials :/ it became so hard to buy stuff legally.
* the available DVD are incomplete. I could fill some gaps in English.
I feel like TV/Movies are generally more available in Amazon for rent at least. Not great to be required to pay the same prices as we did in the past. For example the original TMNT is 3.99 to watch (rent) and $13 to buy. It seems to me like it should be $1 or free on some subscription network and $3 to "cloud own" permanently.
Usually someone will have bought the copyright when it was liquidated.
If it was dissolved while still owning the copyright then it becomes bona vacantia. What happens to that depends on the country, in the UK it technically becomes property of the King, and you can buy the rights from the government.
Yeah, I found the articles comparison to Titanic bit of a miss, while it specifically might be reasonably well available, tons of classic movies and even more so tv is not, same as games. Books would have been maybe better comparison, they I think have bit better availability in general.
Just last weekend I wanted to play Cryostasis after seeing a playthrough on YouTube. It's a pretty unique mid 00s shooter that is relatively light on the shooting and heavy on atmosphere - you're a researcher meeting an icebreaker to leave Antarctica in 1981, but when you find the ship it's been wrecked since 1968, and the game follows you unraveling the mystery using supernatural time-jump powers. Instead of a health bar, you have to keep your body temperature high enough. It's a genuinely unique title that approaches the genre differently from pretty much any other...and it's literally impossible to buy.
It's been delisted from Steam, Good Old Games, and any other storefront I could find online. People resell genuine retail keys that can get the game activated on Steam for ridiculous sums. Reposted hearsay online is that the original source code is lost so there will never be a remaster. There's a copy up on Archive.org, and without it from what I can tell this title would just be lost to time.
There's so many cool, weird, obscure games from the 90s and 00s and its their weirdness and obscurity that puts them most at risk for disappearing and becoming unattainable.
My go-to example of game that are "lost" is No One Lives Forever and its sequel. In this case, though, I don't know about the source. All I know is that studio M&A have rendered these titles to be in eternal copyright limbo.
It reminds me of how old television shows (like Doctor Who) are often missing good chunks of the early runs because they recorded over the tapes. Television was seen as ephemeral and if they never intended to broadcast it again then there was no need to store thousands of feet of tapes for episodes that (they believed) would never be wanted again.
I can imagine something similar happening with video games—they put in the work, shipped the product, and didn't think what they had done was important enough to preserve for posterity, because who actually thinks that about their own work?
Television was seen as ephemeral and if they never intended to broadcast it again then there was no need to store thousands of feet of tapes for episodes that (they believed) would never be wanted again.
A lot of big band music was lost because the band leaders were against recording music, whether for phonograph or radio.
It was supposed to be a a philosophical objection, but I suspect they also didn't want to put themselves out of business.
Ran into the same problem with Asobo Studio's Fuel, which got yanked off the market only a few short years after it's release. Had to install a shonky repacked version from IA and apply a bunch of fan patches to it.
It's a good game and historically important too, being a technical progenitor to modern MS Flight Simulator 2020. It sucks that it's become so buried.
This is why piracy is nearly always the best option.
Want to play the original Tomb Raider? Well it's for sale, in many stores, and for many platforms. Trouble is they're all glitchy. Meanwhile, download a PS1 emulator and the ISO, and it works perfectly.
Saw something on Netflix a while ago that you're only now getting round to have time for? Woosh, it's gone. Meanwhile, download it from BitTorrent and it's yours forever, no internet needed. Same with Spotify and songs.
Pay for things legally, get treated like crap. The piracy option is just a better experience.
These fixes were not available in the original. What you are experiencing is altered and is not at all what people are talking about when it comes to preservation.
For most people this is ok, but when we're talking about preservation it's the ability to play the game as it existed at that time with no barriers, and not something upscaled to 4k with widescreen patches and framerate changes to make it feel like a modern game with blocky aesthetics.
I'm not talking about fixes or alterations. I'm talking about running an exact copy of the ROM, to play exactly as it did on the console it was released for.
Unintended emulation inaccuracies are a different matter, but (1) they are addressed with 1:1 hardware emulation (if you so wish), (2) where you don't want that (for the sake of speed, say) the fixes are only there to make the game run as it did anyway
The problem being that availability is a function of popularity and age. If you want something older that isn't a celebrated classic, it can be a lot more difficult to access...
But that's rarely a case. There are people maintain huge packages with thousands of old games. I can only think about maybe one or two titles that I couldn't find on the internet after some search. Besides, if a game is really obscure, chances for a legal release are close to zero.
In some piracy circles and torrent trackers, sharing rare/obscure titles is a way of gaining rep, so at least there, there is incentive in finding and distributing the un-celebrated classics.
I know there are many people who find this appalling and wish that companies did more to re-release their older titles, but I've frankly just accepted that emulation will be the best and perhaps only way to play a majority of these titles. Unlike movies, where you simply need a method to playback a video and audio stream, getting interactive media to continue working isn't trivial, especially since it needs to run exactly as it did before (otherwise what's the point). I wish rather than taking the effort to port the game themselves, they'd be more receptive to fan preservation efforts, although some companies are more friendly towards this than others. It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. The more people ask for older titles to be re-released, the more developers realize there's a market for it, so rather than release the source or future-compatible files, they instead will port the game to their latest system once a decade to resell it.
> Unlike movies, where you simply need a method to playback a video and audio stream, getting interactive media to continue working isn't trivial, especially since it needs to run exactly as it did before (otherwise what's the point).
Even getting a 20-year-old console (which in the retro gaming world isn't that old) to work with a modern HDMI TV is a headache!
Despite owning the hardware and plenty of games, I had to drop a couple hundred bucks on a RetroTINK scaler to make my PS2 playable again. Which is no hate to the RetroTINK, because it's an amazing little gadget (and its output looks great), just kind of sad that it takes so much money and effort to keep playing a console I've owned since I was a kid.
I got lucky and snagged a 32 inch 720p TV that still had composite video connectors a few years ago. Works great with all of my consoles, as far back as my N64.
I’ve been snagging the smaller/nicer CRT TVs from the dump here and there, there’s now a market for them… besides the problem you’ve highlighted, some old games with screen aiming devices only work on these older tech TVs, and Goodwill no longer accepts them!
Ooh, in my hunt for a good scaler I did see some people working on light gun compatibility gadgets for modern TVs! No idea how well they work now, but hopefully they'll be perfected by the time the last CRT gives out.
The two big ones are the Sinden Lightgun and Gun4ir, the Sinden uses a white box at the corners of the screen and a camera in the lightgun while the Gun4ir is similar to the Wii's sensor bar. No first hand experience but the Gun4IRs seem to be pretty popular and can be DIY-ed with a guncon shell.
There are probably cheaper HDMI adapters, though probably with a weaker picture quality. (And latency will probably always be higher than analog, no matter what.)
Yep, spot on. The rabbit hole I fell down that eventually led me to the RetroTINK started with those cheap $30 HDMI upscaling devices, but they do weird stuff to your picture and add wicked amounts of lag. People who know more than I do have assured me that the RetroTINK in particular minimizes lag compared to other analog-to-digital converters, although I'm sure it's not quite as good as a setup without a converter at all.
I can confirm that the picture quality is phenomenal though. You can tweak about a million different settings and even add fake scanlines!
I tried to plug in a wii the other day only to realize the TV had no RCA inputs, so I hooked the wiimotes up to the laptop for the kids and fired up the emulator...
Ps2 works fine, gamecube works fine, xbox works fine - what 20yr old console is having issues with an HDMI tv? Every TV I've seen in the past 2 decades includes RCA and RGB connectors.
S-video is gone, and RF is gone. Coax is still there though, so RF modulators should still work too.
Our relatively new Sony TV doesn't have component or composite input, hence the need for a converter. But you want to use a scaler versus a straight signal converter because HDTVs don't always support 480i input (meaning that you wouldn't get a picture at all), and even fewer support 240p, which is necessary for some PS2 and most PS1 games.
A scaler like the RetroTINK can add visual enhancements, but more crucially it ensures that your TV receives the signal in the first place.
Exactly. Relying on emulation is totally fine. The problem is that it's also illegal. If classic media goes "out of print," there needs to be a practical way to access it that isn't a crime. Old books have libraries and used book stores, but old games that only work with emulators have no legal avenues at all.
They haven't, though. In spite of them distributing this stuff for about a decade with Nintendo's full knowledge. Not to say it couldn't happen, but IA seem to have wrapped themselves up in enough legal tape to discourage Nintendo from taking action so far.
I sometimes wonder if this environment were easier if the emulators involved were very easy to legally integrate onto modern game consoles. For example, Sony's PlayStation Classic used a GPL-licensed emulator [1] to get something out the door. It'd be more challenging to rerelease a GameCube game on PlayStation 5 though, as you'd either need to do a bunch of expensive work either porting or developing your own emulator. Dolphin's GPL license isn't set to work with a proprietary SDK.
It'd be an incredible challenge, but I wonder if the community behind emulators like Dolphin could provide a paid version of the codebase that can be licensed under the MPL. This might help keep older games legally in circulation.
It's cool that we have emulation to quench that "thirst"
I personally prefer when companies do not to elect to squeeze their IPs dry and have a semblance of pride on their work, as much as a for-profit company can have of course, instead of blindly chasing profits.
Copyright should adapt to modern world. Currently, what happens are a bunch of laws made by politicians under strong lobby from giant corporations. This doesn't benefit the public neither the artists.
There are lots of new categories where works of art (video games included) can fall into which simply didn't exist when copyrights were introduced. The worst part: as copyrights evolved it made legal access to older works harder.
I like how GoG is running their business but it doesn't include everything and laws should get modernized so that hundred of similar companies like GoG can flourish and thrive. For the cases where getting access to copyrights holder is not viable... well, for that users and fans should have the right to use, copy and distribute it legally. Nobody is making any money from works nobody can get access.
Unfortunately we're seeing a sudden pendulum swing towards favoring draconian creator-centric copyright laws as a kneejerk to AI. The same artists etc. who would have complained about Disney's practices a year ago now think copyright doesn't go far enough in forbidding algorithms from learning from their publicly visible work, the same way artists have learned from looking at each other's work for millenia.
Copyright law is notionally intended to benefit society (read: people). Artists are people. AI (at least in this context) is a pile of computers at some big corporation. It doesn't seem weird to suggest that there ought to be different rules for different categories of entities.
AI can also be a single laptop owned by some random person. You only need a big pile of computers if you train a base model. Extensions need far less computing power.
It took a couple of reads of this before I realized it was saying the same thing I was going to say. Restated: in 20 years from now, it will be 87% of games won't even start/run even if you have a copy, because they are dependent on servers that aren't running anymore and are closed source.
> dependent on servers that aren't running anymore and are closed source.
Can't do that if it's not your server. Don't we all love "the cloud" :)
I think open sourcing the clients is easier because it's always possible, it takes the dev almost no time at all (compared to newly creating infrastructure documentation), and players don't have to set up their own infrastructure (which would probably require a lot of time as well as skill) to play offline. The downside is that server functionality would need to be recreated.
If the game is open, you can just patch out the server dependency. Is the update, "cloud" saving, or online-friends functionality crashing the whole game on startup? Stuff not actually needed to play in single player? Comment out the line where it calls that function, maybe mock a few variables, and you're all set.
A friend of mine makes a game with offline play being possible, but the main value is in the community: custom levels and online play. It's all cloud magic with google cloud this and google cloud that. Good luck pulling up that infrastructure in 20 years (having to set up a mini google datacenter, even if the components are open sourced by google in the first place, which they're almost certainly not when "sun set"). The game tries to reach the server on startup and should detect when you're offline (for me that doesn't work reliably, but firewalling google play services has weird effects on many apps), but if you just remove those calls from the game altogether, the offline parts will work with no dependencies and you can just exchange level files instead of having an online browser. Everything but realtime multiplayer would still be possible. Customizing the client code to work with much simpler infrastructure is also likely faster than trying to replicate the "cloud" setup.
For what it's worth—the Library of Congress published a DMCA exemption for video games that require a use of a no-longer-available verification server.
A painful example in this context is the Philips P2000T home computer.
It was hugely popular in The Netherlands in the early 1980s, but not so much in other countries. Because the market was so small, there were nearly no commercial games. Almost all games for it were written by hobbyists, and were copied freely, using Mini-Cassette tapes.
I have been working on an emulator for it, but it seems near impossible to redistribute the original games. Most of the games do not have a copyright message, and it is often not clear who the original author was. Ironically, these games were _meant_ to be copied, but as of 1993 this is now prohibited by law, and (as far as I understand it) I can only make copies for my own use.
Note that there is a GitHub repository [1] that preserves a lot of games and information about the machine, but I wonder if this is even legal?
(An even bigger problem I face is redistribution of the P2305 Basic Interpreter ROM, which is copyrighted by both Philips and Microsoft. If anyone at Microsoft is reading this -- could you please assist me in getting a license to reverse engineer and ship the original Basic ROM with my emulator?)
Another thing I noticed lately is a lot of iPhone games that were built in the early days like 2008 to 2014 and beyond even, get removed from the app store once the developer cannot maintain enough resources to update the code to the latest iOS version. I tried downloading a lot of games I fell in love with with in the early days of the app store but cannot. This is sad too.
Another thing I noticed lately is a lot of iPhone games that were built in the early days like 2008 to 2014 and beyond even, get removed from the app store once the developer cannot maintain enough resources to update the code to the latest iOS version.
I was surprised nobody cared when Google announced they'd be pulling every app from their repository that hasn't been updated in, what was it, 2 years or so?
Things that are functional and complete don't need updating. Why require a subscription model rather than a finished product in a frozen state?
From f-droid I have a few apps that were last updated 11 years ago or something, works just fine. Just tried to find an example, e.g. pizza cost calculator is an app mostly for amusement that had its last real update in 2015 (then in 2021 and 2022 there were updates to support more recent android versions) but I used it literally two hours ago and found that the smaller pizza is cheaper per cm². On my previous phone (2018--2021) I used a 'share to clipboard' app from f-droid, which installs itself as a sharing target. It only ever released v1.0.0 in 2011. Super simple functionality that indeed doesn't need updating; would still use it today if my new phone didn't have that built in. Google would have removed that from their store a decade ago.
> Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it.
Well, maybe not for "Titanic" but there are tons of movies for which the process is pretty much exactly like that.
Video games as a broadly consumed medium are a relatively young feature - let's say some 40 to 50 years. Now, try to easily access most films from the first 40-50 years of cinema!
And even for newer films, if it wasn't for streaming, you would find yourself in the situation that you either watch your favorite movies on outdated technology, or that you have to keep on rebuying the same movies over and over again. And even streaming services provide a fraction what e.g. the original Netflix DVD rental had to offer.
This is unironically why emulation is a necessary and moral good. We need to preserve these pieces of software so that future generations can enjoy them, if they wish.
I used to pay for Nintendo's Switch account (or whatever that was called) I was kinda frustrated with how limited the collection of NES and SNES games are available there. Played through all the Zeldas, which is great, but I wish a lot more was available. I am wondering if, for the most part, the license holder is Nintendo, it's a lot easier for them to make it available, but as soon as you get into third party developers, I imagine the people that owned the copyrights are either non findable or dead now.
The NES isn't that old. 1985-1993 was when it being produced in the U.S. SNES was 1991 through 1996 or 1997. I bet both systems' Japanese counterparts were produced at least twice as long.
Entities that produced the games and likely were assigned the copyright are game companies, which should be trackable, and in some cases, still exist (like Capcom or Konami). You might have problems hunting down copyright owners for unlicensed games like the Wisdom Tree games, but those all sucked anyway.
It's not like an 8-bit computer platform where individuals produced a lot of content and are hard to find.
The thing that's so disappointing to me is that the library was _so_ much large for the Virtual Console on the Wii, and the Wii launched in '05 I think. They create artificial scarcity of the games so they can slowly roll them out or do a remaster.
It's a real shame since I _love_ old Nintendo games, they really did a fantastic job, but the limited access is sad.
The ESA's main thrust is incredibly stupid. What if we decide to re-license that content but everyone can already get it for free from the library? Think of our profit losses!
That hasn't stopped book publishers from publishing the classics over and over.
Preservation is super important. Just look at the Shoah Foundation's effort at preserving the video testimonies of survivors: preservation of digital media is complex, difficult and ever-evolving. Preserving video games is even harder: emulators that run on an ever-evolving set of target hardware have to be maintained just to play them. Current trends in video game design almost guarantee that some games are impossible to preserve: they exist as a moment in time, a memory, the articles and blog posts that were written about them.
Shame really that profit is more important than the art and medium. Not surprising. But shameful.
It's bizarre that companies aren't just selling the roms for classic arcade games that are otherwise completely unmonetized. There's an audience that would happily pay money just to be able to legally do what they are already doing with emulators and homemade arcade cabinets.
Copyrite is, by definition, the control of the rights to copy. It is not a mandate that copying must be done, but rather an acknowledgement of the right to control the copies. And that must also, then, include the right to not distribute the work.
This must be balanced with the notion of fair use, though. However, "but I want to access it" does not justify fair use. "I bought a copy and therefore will make backups so that I may enjoy it in the future" does, in my opinion.
Libraries have exceptions codified in copyrite law. Technology has blurred the line as to what constitutes a library (just as it has for journalists, publishers, etc.).
Some advocate for an escalating fee in order to protect copyrite for more and more time. I don't know if that is appropriate, since it seems to me as a form of extortion of rights. Not quite compelled speech, but similar.
I don't know the solution, but I do feel as though our laws are broken and dysfunctional in this regard. I don't have a solution, though, because I honestly don't know enough of the problem domain. Then again, maybe that's the problem... One should not need to be a legal expert in order to keep from breaking the law!
Yeah, I know "abandonware" sounds like a euphemism (and maybe it is), but I really don't have a problem with people keeping these older things available.
(And I have written a few games in the past that are now on abandonware sites, ha ha.)
I really wish the study matched the headline. It should be 'most classic video games are commercially unavailable' To their credit, they don't try to hide it, but the sentiment in the headline is the actual problem, in my mind.
I'm less concerned about a gameboy game that you can't buy, but you can easily play via emulators or the physical cartridges, which still exist (for now), than I am with the class of games that are truly gone/unplayable.
Your online only games primarily fall into this bag, but without something like an internet archive or something similar to preserve them, we're in danger of losing the digital copies of old games as well.
Personally, I'd like to see the study expanded and then some sort of index that tracks true loss of media over time.
It may also be pertinent to note that it's an entirely USA-centric article and study. A distinction the article makes in it's first paragraph: "87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered".
Not to unduly belittle that metric! - nobody would argue that the USA is not a major player (the biggest, in some respects) - but it's still a significant distinction. The articles nuance of copyright laws, and its figures, and its proposed activism, are all specific to that one national jurisdiction.
It’s actually infuriating. This video game generation has offered very little major releases. However it’s still worth being apart of for the great collected editions.
But the amount of games, many that were of major importance that are simply gone.
Luckily on the XBOX you could at least play some older titles you might've never played pretty easily. PlayStation in that regard is, as far as I know, still lacking. The only console I've considered worthwhile for this generation is the Switch.
Circa 1980 there was a panic over color movies fading that was spearheaded by people like Richard Scorsese who saw it as a huge cultural loss, but a major factor was that home video could turn movies like the old Wizard of Oz into gold.
At the time they tried bad preservation idea such as dividing the colors up into separate reels before they realized even relatively fugitive dyes would hold up for centuries if you keep them in a dry freezer.
You could just have a land tax, as copyright is land.
Let companies value their copyright, and let them pay the cost to maintain that copyright (say a 2% per year cost), and let someone buy that copyright from them at the price they value it at.
Copyright, unlike the land comparison, is not physically limited in nearly the same way. There is a limited amount of land, but ideas are nearly infinite.
I genuinely think if a company has piece of media X that they make a decision to not distribute, it shouldn't be piracy. Things like Nintendo sitting on titles teasing a fat "maybe" of bringing a subscription based access model to on limited hardware isn't cool.
These games sold their last physical copy decades ago, long before an online store. They took them off the market, so fair game. There's zero difference from Nintendo's perspective, of buying a used game vs playing a rom on an emulator.
Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when the only way to see an old movie was if it showed up on TV or in a repertory theatre, if there was one nearby. And if a TV show wasn't in syndicated reruns, it just didn't exist.
Article reminded me that Phil Spencer from Microsoft Gaming about two years ago did advocate for legal emulation[1] to preserve games. He seemed to be pretty passionate about it, does anyone know if they're still pursuing this or lobbying for it? Microsoft got to have at least some weight.
25-30 years ago, there was a game studio called 2am Games that made a series of strategy-type Java games that allowed online multiplayer. All the games were monetized with ad clicks. Click on an add, get 15 more minutes of play time.
Their most popular game was an RTS called Chain of Command. You had a squad of four soldiers that you could position on an isometric board designed to look like a farm. 5-10 players would each run their four-man squads into a firefight and play some scenario - seek and destroy, capture the flag, etc.
The other two games I enjoyed were a business strategy game called The Invisible Hand and another RTS where each player took a European country and conquered cities using robot-like walking tanks.
All of the content from 2am Games is lost to history. Chain of Command has some clones out there, but I've never been able to find anything - roms, source code, clones, for the other games. It's a part of my childhood I'll never be able to re-experience.
Piracy to the rescue! The companies with the endangered IP should make a deal to forgive key piracy hubs in exchange for archiving their games into perpetuity. Earthbound is a great example of an incredibly influential game that is very expensive in its original form but widely available illegally, having inspired multiple generations of game developers that played it this way that otherwise would not have. How can we simply call this “theft”?
It's kinda funny how GameCube emulation is still notoriously poor (remember how badly even the official Switch port of Mario Sunshine ran?) but every Nintendo console since then lends itself so well to emulation. And that's even accounting for the Wii and (3)DS's hardware gimmicks!
Not to pile on, but to agree with the sibling comment: Dolphin (the GameCube and Wii emulator) is insanely good. It seems like Sunshine has weird issues but I've never had a negative experience with anything else and it works out of the box everywhere, even on Linux.
As a tangent just because of how impressed I was, I installed Dolphin on Linux via a Apt (I believe) and it just worked. I already had the GameCube USB adapter drivers installed and those just worked out of the box. I don't know how drivers work for selectively compiling with them from the kernel tree, but it appeared that they were part of the main kernel tree and they were just there for me.
I don't understand what you're talking about. GameCube emulation is excellent. You can use the same emulator responsible for Wii, Dolphin, and it has great compatibility.
Aren't GameCube games prone to weird issues and artefacts though?
For example, most emulated versions of Mario Sunshine (including the official Switch release!) show these little grey debug cubes in certain levels: https://tcrf.net/Super_Mario_Sunshine#Debug_Cubes
Mario Sunshine is a game where doing anything beyond the original (Running at high resolution, Widescreen mode, 60FPS mode) will break the game. I wouldn't blame Dolphin for bugs that only show up when you exceed the capabilities of the base hardware.
I'd say almost all, maybe 80-90%. WINE is a pretty great compatibility layer for anything Windows and there's large emulation community for the majority of consoles going pretty far back.
luckily the older and more obscure the game also means it's 'easier' to emulate.
Ever drive a model T? Can you find a 64 Mustang convertible? 1800s vintage tea cups?
Lots of old things are scarce. Arcade games are in the same boat, but you've got MAME and I've got a bit-slice coprocessor and rasterizer ASIC controlled by a 6809 in I,Robot.
Not sure how games are different from other antiques other than the possibility of emulation.
The main difference is that creating a 100% perfect copy of a game costs next to nothing, and creating a new 100% perfect copy of model T is almost impossible, even if you have one to copy it from.
Wait until they figure out that modern day games are constantly evolving and changing so the concept of "unavailable" exists today for stuff that's less than a year old. Maps, in-game content, in-game characters, etc. It's all short-lived and hardly static.
You can’t expect to hold on to stuff through the decades, but I do miss my old consoles and sometimes I wish I still had one or two them to experience playing a game on the original hardware versus an emulator.
And most old games are run within emulators (even something like dosbox) anyway. All you can do is infect that.
But in those days viruses were truly rampant. I have many Amiga disks with viruses on them. As my Amiga had no hard drive and only 1 floppy there wasn't many places for them to go though.
Many movies are locked the same way because their owner think they're not worth publishing again and after all, it's their stuff, they do/don't do whatever they want with it.
It'd be so much better if copyright was limited for say, 30 years. So that you could pay when you're young and get it for free when you're old... So you'd pay for novelty, not for content. Dunno...
The opening thesis of the article is very misleading - that endangered video games would be like Titanic only being available in the library of congress.
Titanic was a blockbuster released in 1997, so it would be like Final Fantasy VII only being available at library of congress, which it isn’t. In fact FFVII is continuously being rereleased on modern consoles
Probably because 76% of them sucked. Well, maybe that's a bit strong but having lived through most the history of video games, a lot of mediocrity out there. From a preservation and historical standpoint I could see this as a problem but as a large store of video games that most people would want to play, not so much.
It's like this with so much media, it drives me crazy. For instance, in the country I'm currently in there is no way to legally watch a lot of movies - not because of censorship or anything, they are simply not distributed, even on google-play, amazon etc. No choice but it use torrent. Why?
One thing not mentioned in the article or comments here is how open source enriches the historical significance of a piece of software. No game will stand the test of time like Doom has, thanks to its source being available (and of course, elegant).
Last call for preservation of our video game history.
Right to preserve our culture should be enshrined in law, because otherwise it will disappear due to adverse relation with copyright law and novel art production.
> It’s hard to define exactly what a “classic game” is, but for the sake of this study, we looked at all games released before 2010, which is roughly the year when digital game distribution started to take off.
Retroemulation people have been preserving the classics since decades, even more with libre (FLOSS) implementations made with SDL/SDL2 making these games ultraportable and eternal.
Not my lovely NFT at all.
Imagine the retro game and emulation required to run it forever preserved in a standard format. That's what a concept like NFT SHOULD be addressing. I'm lamenting that it's not doing so.
jeez guys, please read before dumping on me :)
I'm saying ideally, NFTs SHOULD prevent obsolescence of digital assets
They don't.
But if you think about it, it ought to be one of the primary purposes of a concept like NFT, right?
That's all I'm saying.
Sorry to use the trigger word :P
All the emulators, etc., work has had its merits, both for cultural preservation effects and for the hacker-y craft achievement, but...
Business-wise, had that bootleg environment not happened, I suspect someone could've made a killing by re-releasing vintage games on current devices.
Now I suspect most of the nostalgia/familiarity demand is satisfied, and won't return even if you were able to delete every existing emulator, unlicensed ROM image and AV assets, etc.
> "Business-wise, had that bootleg environment not happened, I suspect someone could've made a killing by re-releasing vintage games on current devices."
In many cases, the "legal re-release" is leveraging the technology that was used to emulated the games in "less than legal" situations. For example, GOG wraps DOS games with DOSBox, which is how we in the (illegal) abandonware community used to run them anyway.
Another thing to consider: back in the 2000's or so when I discovered abandonware, almost nobody was legally wrapping the games I wanted to play. I wanted to play them back then; now I have no interest. So the illegal abandonware way was the right way for me. Who cares what would eventually happen 10 or 20 years later? I wanted to play the games then.
> I wanted to play them back then; now I have no interest.
IIUC, you're saying that a commercial effort couldn't/didn't offer the vintage games at the time that you wanted to play them, and now you no longer want to play them?
You're also saying that, although you played the games then (with abandonware), the reason you no longer want to play the games now isn't because the abandonware satisfied the desire?
(You think the nostalgia was time-limited, or something else changed for you? Is this generalizable to the rest of the market for vintage games?)
Let me clarify: there was a time in my life, almost two decades ago, where I had no family obligations and lots of spare time, and I went through a nostalgia thing where I played lots of DOS games from my youth. Nowadays this thing holds no interest for me, except more abstractly: I want old games to be preserved, as curious artifacts of an ancient time. I'm sad when a game "dies" of neglect. But playing them? Not for me anymore.
Back then there were "sub-communities" in abandonware. Most abandonware groups were keen to make a difference between them and the so-called "warez kiddies", i.e. people who just downloaded games because they didn't want to pay for them, often recent games but usually whatever. Abandonware in contrast was about preservation, i.e. "how can I play this game? Is there a legal way, or must I pirate it?". There were different degrees of compliance with this "line", but almost everyone understood that Abandonware was about preserving old games, not about piracy just because. Legally there was no difference, piracy is piracy -- but for people in the abandonware community, there was a world of difference.
One of the biggest abandonware websites back then was Home of the Underdogs. The webmaster (a Thai woman who was an investment banker in her country) made a big deal about legality: if she received a takedown notice, she promptly took the download down. And if she found a way to link to a legal way to buy the game, she did so. She provided reviews of the games, so HOTU wasn't just a link farm. If people requested game downloads for games that were obviously available commercially, they got banned promptly.
So let me get back to your final question:
> You think the nostalgia was time-limited, or something else changed for you? Is this generalizable to the rest of the market for vintage games?
- Yes, nostalgia was definitely time-limited for me. I seldom buy DOSBox-wrapped games in GOG anymore; I prefer newer indie games (that I end up not playing because I lack the time, anyway).
- Yes, something changed in me: I grew older, my interests changed, and my spare time became more limited.
- Yes, this is generalizable to all vintage games: if copyright owners don't make an artifact of the digital past available for playing -- and games "want" to be played, they are not static webpages -- then I have the moral right to download them. Within reason, I'm talking about games neglected for decades, not a game temporarily unavailable. Common sense applies.
Would I want to play those oldies now if I hadn't played them back then, thanks to abandonware websites? I dunno. I doubt it, but everything is possible in the realm of "what ifs". Who really cares though? Publishers didn't care back when I had the time and inclination to play them, and that's all that matters ultimately.
And one last thing: some games I downloaded from HOTU that I played the heck out of, like "Sword of the Samurai" [1], which I consider a masterpiece, I later bought from GOG. Why? I dunno, I think I won't ever play it ever again. I simply bought it legally from GOG out of a misguided sense of duty, since the game provided me so many hours of enjoyment almost 20 years ago, when it was abandonware.
So it's not even true that abandonware always translates to lost sales :)
I disagree. Getting MAME running with the ROM you are interested in on modern, consumer hardware might be easy for you and me but I suspect the majority of your target audience for retro games do not know how.
There was always a market there, it just wasn't big enough for the copyright holders to want to bother with.
Copyright, as originally envisioned, should be a temporary privilege instead of a de facto ghost racket for perpetual extortion.