A dead PC game that can't come back
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
I've heard rumor that the person at Take-Two is fairly tight-fisted with old IP and not interested in anyone outside the company getting access to it, but that might be unfounded.
(If you work at Take-Two/2K Games publishing and are interested in licensing the distribution rights, shoot me a message. From what I know of the source, it should be an easy port to modern systems, and you'd make a lot of people very happy. It _should_ be profitable to do so. I'd be opening to setting up a small studio to do so. I have the time and the cash right now.)
This is a proof that copyright terms are too long IMO.
Unless someone is actively selling a work, ie you can buy it, then the work should lapse in to the public domain. The appropriate IP office could issue a decision, on request and payment of a fee, saying who the current seller is or that no seller was found and so the work is PD. Indications could then be presented in the relevant countries IP journals saying "work X" will fall into PD on $DATE which would allow interested parties to intervene before the certificate was issued (ie saving their copyright) by saying where the work was available. Test purchases could be carried out to ensure companies don't hide their saleable works.
This is the first time I've heard this theory. In general I don't think this is the case - game development is risky and expensive. Economically it makes sense to milk every old game for all it is worth, if people will still buy it and there aren't any ongoing costs (servers, etc). Porting a game to a new platform is usually much cheaper. You don't need a full art and engineering team, nor do you need much in the way of design (some might be needed in cases of a UI refresh or additions to gameplay).
See: Nintendo. The original Super Mario Bros has been ported to nearly every system they've put out. And people keep paying for it. Other publishers will do this, too. There's https://www.gog.com/ which is pretty much dedicated to republishing old games.
If you have a product that has brand value, it makes sense to reuse that value to market other products.
Also see JavaScript (used the (perceived) value of Java) and USB and Bluetooth (pivoted to completely different ways to shove data over a wire/the air a few times, reusing the brand to become popular)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
Games companies are constantly and ruthlessly competing with each other for gamer focus over modern games. You don't avoid that competition by simply not releasing your own stuff.
But even assuming you still have the original source code and assets for a title, spending a good chunk of $$$ to modernize a title to run decently on modern operating systems (lest you be flooded with time/$$$ consuming support requests), updating assets to to look like they're from the current decade (so it's marketable beyond an extremely niche nostalgic audience), all to maybe get a fraction of the original sales when second hand sales and piracy have likely saturated the market for the original, as sought out by the nostalgic - it's simply not a great time investment.
You can drive down the costs by just throwing DOSBox at the problem in some cases, like GOG has done for many titles. Or maybe it's been so long that your remaster is effectively a new game, ala FF7, and you can sell it to a whole new generation of gamers. Or maybe you had a subscription based game ala WOW, and maybe third party reverse engineered servers didn't already completely moot the interest in a re-release. Maybe.
But even then, a re-release is probably not going to be your next genre-defining blockbuster title.
Guilty as charged! But there's a sliding scale and blurred lines, so I think it's warranted.
There are "remasters" that vary from basically untouched originals, to entirely new games. And while old-PC to new-PC is rarely thought of as a port per se, in extreme cases it effectively is.
> Remasters are significantly more expensive, yes.
Some are, some aren't. Porting can be plenty expensive as well.
Edit: the modding tools exist already, but it's likely that the creators of them [myself included ;)] could come to an agreement for distribution.
I'd argue that pirating games that aren't available anywhere should not be illegal. I had the same problem with the original Metro Exodus. I couldn't find it anywhere, only the Redux version. It's sad to see older games neglected.
Do you think a creator has no right to control their work?
Copyright exists for the sole reason of -promoting- the creation of works (by allowing the creator to have a monopoly on it long enough to extract profit).
If a creator no longer wishes to sell those copies...the copyright's very purpose is undermined. Obviously the law as written allows them to do so, but the law as explicitly intended should not do so.
Certainly, outside of the particulars of the law they have no such right. It's not a 'god given' one, or any such thing; preventing people from making copies of something is in fact extremely unnatural and goes against what has allowed our species' cultures to flourish.
For hundreds of thousands of years of human history, nothing. Copyright is a fairly new invention. It doesn't take a law to allow me to distribute works I have a copy of that are not my creation; it takes a law to stop me.
The law was created to stop me so that you, the creator, -could- control how it was distributed, for your profit. For a limited time. Those are the key bits; it was to allow you to profit from it, and it was to be a limited time. Mickey Mouse lawyers and "forever minus a day" notwithstanding, that was the goal.
If a work is no longer sold not because the original creator(s) decided it should be 'limited', but because the original creator is no longer determinable, i.e., an orphaned work, it's perfectly reasonable to put it into the public domain, as quite clearly, the goal of allowing the creator to make money from it no longer applies. It's also why extending copyright makes no sense.
But that's neither here nor there; my point was simply that copyright is an unnatural thing, one created by society with the idea that it better society, and in instances like this that breaks down.
It seems obvious that you can refuse to sell your work, but if you don't exercise an exclusive right to distribute content, should you lose that exclusivity?
I don't understand why this is controversial.
Say you release a volume of experimental poetry, in a small print run of 100 copies.
You decline to do any further printing.
Should anyone who wants just be able to make bootleg copies?
Copyright is intended to ensure that the creators of works of art are able to profit from their work.
Perhaps some modification that if a copyrighted product is offered for sale, and then some time later is withdrawn from sale/no longer generally available - then the copyrights in that work should revert to the public domain after some period of time.
We have a similar problem with books, movies and music - things that were once available have become not. Certainly it was a genuine excuse previously that the costs were too high to keep every book/movie/album in-print, but now that digital copies are incredibly cheap that excuse is going away.
Moral rights are quite distinct from copy rights.
The only reason that I can see that this would be illegal would be due to copyrights.
I don't think they're arguing that the original author/publisher shouldn't recieve attribution and credit for the original work.
If someone was originally selling a product openly, and they now no longer choose to do so - then they're effectively abandoning their interest in those copyrights. Sharing those abandoned items shouldn't be illegal.
If they aren't going to make it available, then no, we have no obligation to protect their work with our money and our legal system and enforcement officers that we're funding.
Otherwise, they get a lot from us, and we get nothing from them.
I suspect the huge majority would not care and that most of the things falling into this category would be orphaned works due to byzantine ownership issues.
Okay. I don't care if they have that incentive, and I don't think many other people do either.
Now, if they're going to create AND distribute things, that's another story. Then I'm on board.
To any Myth 2 fans by the way, there is still a small and loyal community who play online together. (see: http://gateofstorms.net/)
I'm personally waiting for GOG to sort out the situation with The Neverhood, so it could be re-released. It works in ScummVM.
And it's typical for those greedy publishers to refuse to deal with such cases. They think that spending any effort on it would cost them more than potential benefits from re-releases. So they prefer to let them be pirated instead.
I was thinking that the cost of filing a motion to dismiss unless the plaintiff could prove they had standing would be relatively inexpensive. (say $50K - $100K in legal fees). Seems like one way to clear up the rights issue.
No that's not what standing is. They have to establish a legally cognizable claim to harm to establish standing; actual harm is what an actual trial exists to establish. A dispute of fact over who holds rights at issue would be a perfectly normal issue for trial.
> I was thinking that the cost of filing a motion to dismiss unless the plaintiff could prove they had standing would be relatively inexpensive
A defense motion to dismiss necessarily must state that the plaintiff has no legally cognizable claim as a matter of law; if there is anything relevant that might potentially be proven, it is automatically viewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiff. You can't make a motion to dismiss unless the plaintiff proves something, the very idea of that acknowledges that there is a disputes issue of fact necessary to resolve the case, calling for a trial.
There is a guy running a pirate server but hardly anybody plays on it.