Hacker News Reader

Comment by telchior | Hacker News Reader

The game industry is so unstable, it can be nearly impossible to even tell who you should pay for something.

An anecdote: Master of Magic is one of my favorite games of all time. The company that made it was acquired; the acquirer, I think, shut down. Anyway, the upshot of all that was that the source code was literally lost. Nobody has ever found it, and people who wanted to mod the game had to do it in bytecode.

Even the license was sort of lost for a couple decades; a known company owned it but they were too large to care about deaing with this old, niche license. A few years ago, someone (Slitherine) finally persuaded them to sell. A remake of the game was then able to be released commercially, and a sequel is in the works. But it took over 20 years for that to happen.

View on HN

Hey Slitherine is also the company where Tyrannosaurus Tex, the Game Boy Color first-person shooter was developed. The main developer left with the source code near the end of development, and it took decades for versions of the game to surface. Now it's commercially available, completed by a somewhat problematic reissuer of old games.

It really should at least be able to protest and prove some IP has been abandoned. Granted the law would have to be carefully written or it’d just be gamed and perverted.

I have long thought that a precondition to the continuation of any IP should be that the rightsholder make the IP available to the public on terms somewhat similar to the IPs original publication. So if a game or other work ever goes out of print, the copyright to it evaporates. I think this would be perfectly fair to ensure creators get their payday without depriving the public of access to good old works.

There should be a yearly filling for each copyrighted work, with a fee starting at a trivial amount and doubling each year...

I agree in principle but I feel a doubling may be a bit too steep.

I actually like this. If you start with 10 cents for the first year, it's $100 by year 10, $100k by year 20, and 100 mil. by year 30, around which it becomes impractical for any IP. So a decade for small projects, two decades for commercially successful stuff, and 3 decades for company-driving IP.

Squatter's rights, for IP. If you notoriously develop a new work based on the license, and nobody sues you for three years, it's your IP now.

That’s more or less how trademarks usually work and people generally seem happy with them.

Nobody knows who owns the rights to the No One Lives Forever series, but something like three or four companies have stated they will fiercely defend it as if they do if someone tries to do anything with the IP.

There s a great documentary of NoClip about GOG where they talk about this subject. As they sell a lot of old games, they need to do the detective work to find the license holders. Highly recommended!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com