Comment by ooobit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ooobit | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

So, they're renting games that aren't widely available for purchase anymore? At what point do we sit back and agree that it makes no sense to extend protections to IP that isn't being sold anymore? Forgive my possible naivety here, but we grant patents/copyrights/trademarks to mitigate opportunity costs in markets, not to stop someone else from taking credit for an idea. So, if there's no continuous market, the risk of lost capital would be immaterial to the IP holder's interests, right?

I might sound radical here, so feedback is welcome. But this reads to me like anti-free-market: Invent a product, sell product with protections to limit theft of the idea, market evolves and the product and derivatives stop being profitable, no active market for product but protections continue... There's a logic break in the logistics there.

Maybe some protections allow them to transform the original product for a current market, but if that does nothing about the market for the original product, unauthorized distribution is immaterial to the holder. They can't lose revenue on a product they weren't exercising due diligence to earn revenue on at that time.

The problem is that for game ROMs specifically, opening them to the public domain devalues potential opportunities for re-releases and remasters. The Nintendo virtual console service and S/NES classic are prominent examples. So it isn't so simple that there is "no harm done" by forcing game ROMs to fall into public domain.

That all being said, I still agree with you. I really don't care how much money Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony wants to make on decades-old games, at a certain point it becomes a cultural artifact. Snow White and other century-old movie properties should be public domain nowadays as well. At this point we're debating about the core values of trademark law though, and I'm not sure you wanted to do that.

A similar debate revolves around what the law should say about "dead" games. These are games that, for example, rely on a central server that has been shut down. Many of these games were incredibly popular in their day, and some "radicals" (like myself, lol) argue that game companies should be compelled to release the server source code in an effort to preserve the game. Here's a great overview/rant on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

> I really don't care how much money Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony wants to make on decades-old games, at a certain point it becomes a cultural artifact.

Why does time need to pass for that to be true?

Fair, perhaps a better phrasing of my idea is "at a certain point cultural artifacts should have a guarantee of preservation".

That idea isn't radical, it's laughably naive.

Devil's advocate- if I fall on hard times and stop distributing my game do I lose my right to it? How do I reserve my right to sell it again in the future or sell my rights to it to someone else to distribute?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com