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Comment by ydnaclementine | Hacker News Reader

At some point, these older games should be open source. They can follow the doom/quake model where textures/art aren't included, and Nintendo can also still sell the games on newer consoles for convenience because not everyone will want to compile it themselves

I guess you could argue a mario 64 custom levels mod competes directly with a new mario game. But halo and cod sell fine. Maybe I have a bias that thinks Nintendo is fearful that custom mods for old games will be more popular than anything new and official

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I think about my fundamentalist feelings about copyright (between complete abolition and say 20 years like you suggest) and the practical reality of how that would fundamentally change content industries today. For example, I'm thinking of anime franchises, also Disney, etc, who essentially create whole industries out of remakes and repackaging their old IP. Essentially, millions of workers hired to maintain the less creative recreation/maintenance of these IPs would be reshuffled and or lost. Btw, this isn't just creative workers like writers, animators, and the like, but things like merchandise creation, manufacturing, live events, and so on, they'd all be much less of an incentive to maintain a franchise over the mere creation of works that might be separate from each other.

Apart from the business/worker side, the ability for an IP holder to release continuing sequels to works (like manga, movie installments, etc) and the legal force against fan works essentially gives more power essentially to the original creator to shape what is "canon" in their work. Perhaps fans could still decide the original creator's later installments are canon, but the extra legal force sort of makes this defacto, while a world of limited copyright the power of the original creator is less so. Thus, the way fans consume media and experience it will change completely as well.

It would just be a completely different world, one where a lot of these ills are addressed (like the ones mentioned by GP), and things will be very different. It's hard to say from my vantage point whether the differences would also be "ills" or not (and that might be my bias), but it would certainly be a different world with different rules and different expectations from fans and audiences.

I'm not sure copyright protects you much against someone continuing a story. Trademark protection might.

At any rate, fan-fiction is nothing new and while it might be a bit iffy to do commercially I see nobody even trying something remotely similar without at least the blessing of the original author.

So really I think society has decided who is allowed to continue a story and as far as I can tell it has little to do with copyright and everything to do with public perception.

I actually think we would see Disney remaking some of their old IP more often if copyright was only 20 years, or at least the popular ones.

If they released remakes at 20 year mark, anyone trying to take advantage of the now expired copyrights would have to compete with the new "official" versions of the IP.

> Essentially, millions of workers hired to maintain the less creative recreation/maintenance of these IPs would be reshuffled and or lost.

The other side of that coin is millions of workers now available for new and original projects that have to take real chances and break new ground to get off the ground.

> Thus, the way fans consume media and experience it will change completely as well.

Should we prevent creators from selling their copyrights as well, or do we simply make the "canonical" rights non transferable in that case?

> but it would certainly be a different world with different rules and different expectations from fans and audiences.

Vaudeville and burlesque operated under those rules. Audiences didn't seem to mind. "Who's on first" was not an original act.

You are confusing copyright with trademarks. You can't release another official harry potter movie just because it would be legal to copy the old ones.

My controversial opinion is, that everything that cannot be bought for reasonable amount of money, also cannot be "pirated" (the act of copying should not be considered as illegal piracy).

The main reason why piracy is illegal is, that studios/producers/writers lose money, because people pirate instead of buy. If I cannot buy eg. Super Mario 64 from nintendo in my country, and if I copy the game (and emulate it or whatever), I never actually caused any monetary loss for Nintendo by doing that.

You can still buy Super Mario 64. It’s part of the paid subscription virtual console service on Nintendo Switch

So, no copying SuperMario64 then.

But my opinion stands for things that are not available this way.

For a long time Super Mario 64 was not available this way, but now is. How to handle this case? It’s a hell of a lot easier to just have a time duration of copyright expiry.

If someone sells nude photographs of themselves to a rich person for $1 million, does that mean you deserve to have them for free?

Under current law, you absolutely can get them for free after the copyright expires (if copies are still around). And you can make as many copies as you want.

If you already saw them... and had a chance to photocopy them... why not? How much money did the artist/model lose by you doing that (assuming a normal person would never pay 1 mio for that)?

nintendo games have much higher replay value than the others you mentioned. they are mostly off line. they have different mechanics beyond graphics. people will buy them on multiple consoles happily. they are not rotting, these are active revenue streams.

nintendo isn’t afraid of mods, they would rather just sell you mario maker and create an experience.

quake and cod are mostly online, and there’s no community anymore. there’s over 30 cod games, no scarcity on the experience since they’re so similar. the one mostly offline game series you mentioned, halo, is closed source and still sold today. it is far less likely quake 3 is going to be bought and played today vs mario64. those games are not active revenue streams and don’t have a good path to become one again

I'm not sure what Nintendo "thinks" but they've always been protective since the NES days, which arguably allowed them to pick the video game industry out of the funk that befell all the other 8-bit consoles. I'm not sure if there is any philosophy around why they do it vs. it just seems like a corporate culture to them to be controlling of their consoles and their IP. I think a while back, the switch removed a game from the nintendo store that had an interpreter in it, even this with sanctioned basic interpreters around there. They've always been control freaks to the point where it doesn't really even make much dollar sense for it.

Btw, that video game crash was limited to the US - it didn't happen in Japan or European markets. I remember complaints that other language Wikipedias covered it as a global thing anyway because they were translated from English.

Interesting piece of history! I am too young to have experienced it, I mostly just know about it from reading video game history, and yes the only cited makers were atari, commodore, and other American companies.

This reminds me, a little bit, of this fact about Encarta: https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1999/07/19/encarta-differen... (first link I found)

In my opinion the by far biggest mistake with copyright is that it shouldn't depend on the age of the author, it should be dependent on the release date.

The whole 70 years after death nonsense is just an ugly hack to equalize the fact that copyright will last fewer years if you are older. It doesn't even solve the original problem! If you are younger you still get more copyright years.

Only under an economic system that abolishes private property. Won't ever happen under capitalist governments, unfortunately.

Intellectual property is imaginary property, private or not. it's not a real thing until committed to a medium.

Upkeep of the fiction that intellectual property is real property has societal benefits for a limited time insofar as works of art - and the original idea of copyright was reasonably limited. Over 100 years is inhumane.

No it has benefits only for the private property owner, never for society at large. All private property is this way. Capitalism is a system that deifies private property, so it will only ever get more and more 'private'

If capitalism is the nail, private property is the hammer. Quite a lot of development that the United States wanted to see happen in the west (which enriched it immensely) was done because it was willing to make grants of private property to the companies (largely railroads) doing the development.

You can debate whether capitalism is (or should have been) the only method for getting things done, but the use of private property as a viable incentive for driving innovation within that system is not really debatable.

This is pretty much the take you get right outta american high school: full of propaganda. This is extremely simplified, ignores mass amounts of genocide and slavery, and ignores historical events to compare it to. The development of america as a nation is built on the corpses of hundreds of millions of africans, chinese and native americans which notably were stripped of their 'right' to private property so that someone else's 'right' to private property could exist.

You do not in any way need to enslave people in order to develop land; only to develop land AND enrich a bourgeois class of people.

I never said any of that. I think you need to take a step back and re-read my comment. I'm not endorsing capitalism, I'm merely saying that so long as capitalism is the one way you can think of to get things done, giving people property is exchange for development is almost always the way that development happens.

This somehow didn't work for ISPs at all.

One might argue that enforcement of traditional property rights is inhumane in many cases too.

I certainly would :)

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