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Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, it's still copyrighted and so cannot be legally displayed or distributed by the internet archive for another ~65 years (95 years from publication for copyright to expire). Many of us won't be alive to see this code legally.

The copyright period could also increase again if the law retroactively increases it again.

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Yea that's what confuses me. Is he even legally allowed to sell this stuff? Should he even still have that stuff?! This gets into sketchy legal ground.

I wish he had contacted the German company he claims currently owns the rights and just asked if he could post it all up for free. It's not like it's going to hurt sales on platforms like GoG if they still have it up. He's already gotten some of the rights back for LSL1 at least when he did that remake (which honestly isn't all that great). He could have posted all the code and then sold the originals too; so it's in the commons and one person gets to be a collector and everyone wins.

So .. EA doesn't own this? I thought Sierra was owned by EA (or got bought by some company that got bought by EA). I know The LSL rights went to some other company for a bit who produced the two PC/PlayStation Larry games (the university and movie one. Honestly I liked the University one; don't know why people hated on it. It was funny).

It’s like selling a copy of a book that you own. Unless you signed some sort of confidentiality agreement, there’s nothing that prohibits you from transferring the physical copy to someone else.

Software is different from books. The EULA that you implicitly sign may prevent you from transferring ownership to someone else.

There could be such a thing about books, it’s just that nobody does it. This guy worked for the company. He is not covered by that sort of license agreement, though definitely something could’ve been in his employment contract about the company’s property. Since he’s not claiming to own the code or the license to it, it’s physical property, not intellectual property. And with software, when it is covered by such a license agreement, typically you can do exactly this – sell your physical copy without claiming that you’re transferring any rights.

I think a better comparison would be owning the original manuscript. I might own the original manuscript to The Hobbit but that doesn't mean I can publish it.

Correct, you couldn’t copy it and re-distribute, but you could sell your original copy.

I'm gonna take a guess that technically these disks were bought with Sierra money and aren't his except for the fact that they were lost to time from company inventory perspective

He has the right to sell the physical artifacts, its the IP laws that complicate everything.

Yeah, I'm not sure where Al Lowe got "German company". Sierra for a long while was owned by French company Vivendi, though. It's Activision Blizzard that bought all of Vivendi's game assets (not EA).

There might be a German Company involved in sublicensing LSL games specifically from Activision Blizzard? Most recent sublicense was Replay Games, I think? I don't think they are (were?) German either, but I'm not sure. There was a lot of weird drama with the LSL sublicense between Kickstarters and Activision Blizzard side projects, and I didn't follow it very well.

One possible German company that was entangled with Sierra IP rights might be the former Deep Silver (Koch Media), because of THQ? Deep Silver bought a lot of IP assets from THQ including possibly some portion of Relic Entertainment's IP, which was a Sierra published studio. Though that German company no longer exists as such, because Deep Silver was recently purchased by THQ Nordic reuniting more of the THQ IP in Scandinavia.

But also, that doesn't hold a lot of water, potentially, because it seems like Gearbox bought Relic's IP in the THQ bankruptcy, not Deep Silver.

Though all of the above does help illustrate why game IP rights are so complicated and byzantine and a lot of classics are languishing because no one properly understands who has the real IP rights.

(The "NOLF Paradox" as some of us call it these days. Which I just realize is funny because Sierra was the original NOLF co-publisher, too.)

I rather somebody has it in some trusted hand even if they can't release it for another 65 years, rather than lost forever. Preservation of human culture/knowledge is more important than copyright, I know a foreign concept most people will be to ignorant about to agree with.

Doesn't IA have an explicit copyright exemption for some purposes? See: their playable copies of some games.

> Many of us won't be alive to see this code legally.

Dunno about you, but for me, it's hard to imagine an 85 year old in the year 2083 even caring about seeing this code legally.

It’s likely akin to an 85 year old today caring about schematics for a Model T.

There are still people who do.

how does it work when the copyright is unknown or what happens if a company/trademark folded (that might have held the copyright) does the company who reastablishes the brand get the ip?!

I mean if the game was published under Sierra Entertainment 19xx and the company folded, is it still legally unforceable, even if the new company is now activision?

If a copyright owner dies (without their IP being inherited) or the company dies (and its ip is not sold or kept by some individual of the company), then the material effectively enters the public domain. Note, this is only 'effectively' because it is still possible someone does have the IP and you were simply not aware. It's also possible the person who owns the copyright isn't even aware they own it, but it can still later be discovered and enforced.

In practice, it is very difficult to verify when either of those events occur. I expect Sierra Entertainment's IP has been kept alive, even if the company itself died at any point in the past.

It's almost always safer to just wait the full duration for copyright to expire and it to enter real public domain.

If you're unable to safely wait around 100 years to legally access the material, well, that sucks I guess. Copyright is meant to ensure the public gets access to such material, and it's not the government's fault people don't live over 100 years to enjoy material made in their lifetimes.

It's just law. There's also a practical side to this. You could go ahead, and then if a copyright holder emerges, you have to settle it with them somehow. That could end really badly or it could end up being not much of an issue.

I mean, the government choose the term. So it actually is their fault if people don't live to see the end of the term, even if the human lifespan itself is not their fault.

> I mean, the government choose the term

I think it's also fair to say that Disney has chosen the term and the government has failed to do its job.

The last bit of my comment was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.

Who gives a shit? Just upload it anonymously. Nobody even knew he had the source code until now.

Except it's not anonymous since Al will know who he sold each game to - won't be that hard to find out who the guilty party is.

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