New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable
gamehistory.org
gamehistory.org
Copyright, as originally envisioned, should be a temporary privilege instead of a de facto ghost racket for perpetual extortion.
Did you go out of business but you didn't sell the copyright? No rights, unless you personally void the copyright.
Did you die, but did you have (legal) heirs? No rights, because copyright is inherited.
Are you a US citizen and you died without legal heirs? Still no rights, because (and this is the most insane one) your assets become state property and copyright is considered an asset.
The only two ways consumers will be free to distribute that first game is either by the clock running out on the copyright, or by whoever is the copyright holder explicitly legally voiding the copyright before then.
What rights have you got to stop me from doing it?
If your new IP is so similar that it’s threatened by the mere existence of an older IP then it’s probably not innovative enough to deserve protection anyway.
Now it is on the market, so it can't be distributed for free.
You make money off people who think they just want the original. But you also get a copy of the sequel into their hands, and they might try it and like it.
True, it's not absolute freedom to sell things precisely how you want, but it seems like a pretty reasonable compromise to me.
As for the emulation of old games, this article talkes about a pretty commonly understood point, many old games simply can't be played outside emulation. This is importent to the argument as a whole because it changes how we should view these games, as they literally have no value. Art is worthless while it's isolated, it has no meaning to anyone, nothing to provide to anyone. The work of those that made it has essentially been forgotton about, and if it hasn't been forgotten, it will be. Same is true for video games, a video game does not have value until someone knows what it is. Currently these games exist in this state, they have literally no value. You couldn't find people to buy these games outside of speculative reasons because no one gives a flying fuck about these things. So when someone argues that emulation is theft, it's moot in these cases, because there's no value there, nothing to steal.
There's also less altruistic arguments for emulation that are valid too, arguments for emulating games that do still have some value. One may do it as a form of protest, they want to edit the game, they want to play it more easily, or they want to put together a comprehensive list of emulated games that everyone can have access to. There are good arguments for all of these, despite the fact that they're often illegal and sometimes may even harm the original creators. Each argument should be considered on its own merits before the action is judged as something that ought not to happen.
I however agree with you and have no moral concerns if a company doesn't want to sell me a product.
All of this is deliberate, of course. The copyright bargain we currently have today was struck in the 1970s - a time in which much creative work was a collaborative effort that practically had to be capitalistically owned by a for-profit corporation. Self-publishing was entirely a product of counter-culture, fan conventions[0], and vanity presses[1]. The only fig leaf to the notion of these being authors rights rather than just a weird kind of tradeable monopoly is rights reversion - a thing which publishers hate with the passion of God.
[0] Yes, those actually did exist at this time. Remember: San Diego Comic-Con started in 1970 and Comiket in 1975. If you think that's old wait until I tell you about the historical Sherlock Holmes fandom!
[1] I suspect this was a derisive term coined by large book publishers as a reaction to people who aided self-publishing artists.
The only way for a copyright to expire is either by running out its term, or by the current copyright holder voiding it.
It's such a great system.
Even if the company went bust, and the former owners died, and they have no legal heirs, that copyright is STILL active and now lies with the state, whether the state knows that or not.
It might be called an orphan work, and it might take a whole lot of digging to discover it's now owned by the state, but it is owned, and they do have the right to prosecute over infringement if someone at any point goes "hang on, we own this, and we can make close to 50% of our annual budget by prosecuting".
Theres a pretty simple way to deal with that isn't there?
No reasonable argument can be made that licencing is inadequate to provide compensation, can there?
Copyright exists to allow them to turn a tidy profit so they're properly incentivized. It's not there to enable their delusions of control nor their perpetual rent seeking. They've already turned their profit, now it's time for the works to enter the public domain. Nobody cares whether they like it or not, it's human culture and it belongs to us all.
As much as I wish that my meeting notes from my standup this morning were good enough to become a cultural icon, I'm pretty sure the entire planet, including me, will forget about them next week. Mundane creations like this consist the vast majority of copyrighted works.
You don’t get to misuse violent power of the state to control spread of arbitrary information
Also, people may keep works private not because they lack value, but for other reasons.
As a very simple example, a someone might take a racy photo for their own private use, not because it would have no commercial value, but because they prefer not to commercialize it. And there are hundreds of other reasons why someone might choose not to share a work with the world.
And what makes your opinion and rights more important than theirs?
> Culture should belong to us, not them.
Doesn't culture belong to everyone, even those creating it? There is no "them", it's only "us."
All you'll do with your approach is make creators less like to ever create unique works.
You gotta be kidding me. They literally own our culture. In the most capitalistic sense imaginable. Actual government-granted monopolies on ideas, bits of information. Works you grew up with? You and your children will be long dead before they enter the public domain. If they could delete the copy you have stored in your brain, they would.
> All you'll do with your approach is make creators less like to ever create unique works.
Whatever. Let them find another job then.
It is not property like a physical object.
That's the deal.
It's a complete violation of the spirit of the copyright agreement to take advantage of the financially useful period of monopoly over the work, then use the remainder of the exclusive period to try and ensure the work cannot be archived and cannot enter the public domain.
Like, if someone distributes pornography of themselves, and they are now a nurse or something and are out of the industry + don't want their images distributed anymore, I think distributing pornography of them against their permission just because they aren't distributing it themselves sounds extremely heinous.
The idea that you can somehow control your image is insane. You can't forcibly control your reputation, why should you be able to forcibly control photographers who legally photograph you?
Face it, you don't get to control what other people say about you, nor should you want to. (Whether that "saying" is gossip, in print, or photoshopping your face on to unsavory things.)
And the state of mind is important too. I help at kink events sometimes and I don't accept consent forms from drunk people and don't get them photographed. Unless I know they've agreed to it before.
How many of the millions of published photos of recognizable people on the internet do you think have consent forms. Stock photos yes. But I'd be willing to bet that well short of 1% of the photos of people on Flickr, say, have consent forms.
I wouldn't run the risk without it personally. Especially in the kink community where consent is paramount and forms are already an established method for other activities as well.
I know flickr etc is not so strict on consent but I personally would be. Especially when it involves anything remotely risqué.
The thing is that people change and societal values change over time. It's better to have that consent when someone changes their mind and blames you.
> For you to be able to "dictate" literally anything at all would require control over the computer I'm typing this comment on and every other computer on earth.
Crimes are enforced above ring 0, at the physical layer.
Copyright is about controlling distribution of information that already exists and has already been published. It's complete nonsense in the age of information.
> Crimes are enforced above ring 0, at the physical layer.
Surely you're not suggesting throwing in jail anyone who downloads grandparent's photos off of his website.
> Surely you're not suggesting throwing in jail anyone who downloads grandparent's photos off of his website.
Correct, I am not. I am saying that most places around the world do dictate what he does with a computer already, and legal systems don't need a technical solution to enable it. The fact that nobody can electronically prevent them from copying bits is irrelevant. We are discussing the law, and courts use prisons, not bits.
They absolutely do. Without technological solutions, they don't even have a snowball's chance in hell of even so much as identifying perpetrators of copyright infringement. They can't stop it even with technological measures in place. In order to enforce copyright, they literally need to end computing freedom as we know it today. Computers gotta come pwned straight off the factory so we can only run software that they approve, so that they can reject software that copies their bits.
> We are discussing the law, and courts use prisons, not bits.
Let's discuss the law then. I propose that copyright should stop existing altogether. Simply because laws encode the customs of a people and copyright infringement is absolutely one of those customs. It is normal and natural to infringe copyright.
You infringe copyright when you download a picture or video from a website. You infringe copyright when you screenshot some social media post. You infringe copyright when you share something with your friend via messaging app. You infringe copyright when you make some funny meme by editing text into some popular culture picture. You infringe copyright when you download a copy of some blog post so you can read it later. It goes on and on. Pretty much anything you do infringes copyright. I've seen people arguing that fucking memcpy infringes copyright. It's mind boggling and never stops.
People do all of this stuff without even realizing it. How could it possibly be illegal? The only reason I can think of is constant lobbying by trillion dollar corporations.
I say it does.
Copyright was created in the age of printing presses. In order to violate copyright at significant scales, you had to be an industry player. You needed access to the expensive machines. It simply wasn't possible otherwise. Obviously, copyright makes sense in such a world. It's even enforceable since corporations are big targets.
But we are living in the 21st century. Everyone has globally networked general purpose computers in their pockets capable of copying and transmitting information at speeds and scales unimaginable to anyone in the last century. Everyone infringes copyright on a daily basis without even thinking twice about it. Copying is a fundamental computer operation, computers make it easy and natural to copy virtually anything. There's nothing they can do to stop it without literally destroying this wonderful invention.
Copyright is clearly hanging on for dear life. I say let it die.
Do you feel the same way about companies violating open source licenses?
Your medical records are also just bits in an EMH system as are your text messages to your significant others. Is it okay if I share those?
Of course. There should be no copyright nonsense to begin with. Those licenses shouldn't even exist. Nor should anyone ever be punished for using leaked or decompiled proprietary source code or anything of the sort.
> Your medical records are also just bits in an EMH system as are your text messages to your significant others.
Medical records are collected by healthcare professionals who are ethically and probably legally obligated to keep it secret. This confidentiality exists for obvious reasons, nobody would consult doctors otherwise.
> Is it okay if I share those?
You don't have access to them. You can't share them even if you wanted to. Unlike copyrighted works, those bits shouldn't be and actually aren't distributed to massive audiences worldwide. Everybody understands that once information is out there it's essentially impossible to contain it. That's why they keep it secret.
Only copyright industry is delusional enough to want to sell copies of data to everyone on earth and control what they do with it.
Medical records are covered by separate body of law, so is a conversation with your lawyer, and so are matters of National security. They have no relevance to copyright
It's a difficult topic. Unlike revenge porn which is completely against consent, the actor has signed their distribution rights away. It's really something they should think of very carefully before doing.
And in the cases of porn actors gone mainstream (Sylvester Stallone and Sasha Grey come to mind) it's not really been a big problem for them.
Ok. Past Futurama episodes are now $10,000 per view. That is still available and not an absurd cost (just ask anyone dealing with with patented technology). So we would need some sort of commission to decide what a reasonable cost should be, which would be a quantum leap away from free market principals.
The incentive of exclusivity could be reasonably preserved by making the statutory license valid only after some amount of time has passed since release.
I don't think that's the case. At least, what allows libraries in the US is the "first-sale doctrine." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine , "The doctrine enables the distribution chain of copyrighted products, library lending, giving, video rentals and secondary markets for copyrighted works (for example, enabling individuals to sell their legally purchased books or CDs to others)."
Something similar is why I can place an ad to sell my used Mac without violating Apple's trademark.
I assume Sweden (and the EU) have something similar. If not, that makes second-hand book, magazine, or any product sales rather difficult.
https://lagen.nu/1960:729#P19S1
> 19 § När ett exemplar av ett verk med upphovsmannens samtycke har överlåtits inom Europeiska ekonomiska samarbetsområdet, får exemplaret spridas vidare.
Translated:
> 19 § When a specimen, with the consent of the author, has been transferred within the European economic area, the specimen may be further transferred.
The law goes on to carve out exceptions for computer programs and movies specifically, as well as renting generally -- those kinds of transfers are not allowed without author approval.
However, in combination with Biblioteksersättningen/författarfonden ("the library compensation/author fund"), which collects money based on the amount of lending in public libraries and distributes it to authors, it comes pretty close to statutory licensing in practice. It's not immediately clear to me that the payout is proportionally divided, though, so depending on how that skews, I may be way off.
> as well as renting generally -- those kinds of transfers are not allowed without author approval.
Could you elaborate? If I set up a used car rental service in Sweden, and that car includes a user manual, then do I need permission from the copyright owner to include that manual in the rental?
> in combination with Biblioteksersättningen
On the topic of "technically correct", https://sv-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Biblioteksers... tells me that technically it's not part of copyright:
] This is because it only benefits domestic authors. In the Nordic countries, library compensation has not been part of international copyright but part of national cultural policy. Other consequences of this are that the library compensation has a maximum amount, so that the most borrowed authors do not receive compensation in proportion to the lending and that no compensation is paid for loans from research libraries.
That quote tells me the payout is not proportionally divided.
This should be noncontroversial.
Having a government commission decide what is and isn't a reasonable price does smell of command economy, but creative works already exist in a command economy. The only difference is that you can't Disney Vault your shit anymore. Boo hoo. In my opinion, once you've sold your work, recouped costs, and paid everyone, you shouldn't be able to then pull the coin out of the vending machine and take works off the market. We give monopoly rights in exchange for creative works being made and publicly available, not for them to be made and then thrown into a fire.
My personal opinion as to how to fix this problem would be to authorize the Copyright Office to issue compulsory licenses to reproduce works that are over 10 years old and either are orphan works[1] or whose known owners are unwilling to license[2]. These licenses would only be issued to libraries - i.e. either government-run libraries or non-profit agencies with substantially similar goals to one, such as the Internet Archive. And if someone can actually assert both ownership and a pattern of ongoing licensing then they can cancel the compulsory licenses that the libraries get.
We can actually determine what a 'willing license' would look like by looking at comparable deals in a particular market. If whoever owns Futurama wants to charge $10,000 a view but Disney is licensing The Simpsons and Family Guy out to Netflix for a few pennies per view, then we can safely conclude that the $10,000/view price is there just to keep the work off the market. We don't need the Copyright Office to say "anything more than $X per stream is too much."
[0] This is not the only way that creativity could be funded, of course. But it's the only way that mainstream buyers of creativity are willing to participate in.
[1] Works whose current ownership is unable to be determined. A lot of the games that are legally unavailable in the VGHF study are unavailable because the owners went out of business and the rights are tied up between four different creditors who all don't know what they own.
That would meet the law as "offered for sale".
It's hard to write a law that says "offered for sale for a sensible price, in form the buyer desires, and without excessive hoops to jump through"
No it isn't.
"If the work is not offered in a manner that can be purchased reasonably in a manner conforming to industry standards unless (1) it is A (2) it is not A but is B..."
Have you ever read a law?
1. the right to commercially share it later
2. the right to prevent others from commercially sharing it without my permission
3. the right to share my creations with a limited group of people, commercially or non-commercially
Say for instance, you share a creative work with someone in confidence. They should not have the right to freely copy and publish your work without your permission.
It is very common for people to create works which are private and or shared with small groups of people, and it is important for our laws to protect people's rights to keep those works private or semi-private.
Or to put it another way, a 'leak' of a private work shouldn't be a free pass for the rest of the world to share and/or monetize that breach of privacy.
I half-agree with you on this. On the one had when you share information with others, people should have some kind of right to share with others when you shared with them. On the other hand I don't think that someone has the right to profit off of something you created without your permission.
IMHO, there is no kind of privacy when it comes to sharing something unless there is a meeting-of-the-minds agreement that all parties agree to before hand.
There are many scenarios where people deserve these protections and NDAs wouldn't be possible or practical. For instance:
* An artist improvising in public
* Someone sharing with another party in a situation with a large power imbalance (and so they refuse to sign an NDA with anyone)
* Someone sharing in a social situation where NDAs are not practical (romantic, familial, or personal relationships)
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public.
> * Someone sharing with another party in a situation with a large power imbalance (and so they refuse to sign an NDA with anyone)
Don't share it with them until they sign. If they sign and violate the NDA, you got your payday.
> * Someone sharing in a social situation where NDAs are not practical (romantic, familial, or personal relationships)
If you don't trust your spouse then get a prenup. The other categories aren't special.
That said, if your work is so easy to copy it probably wasn't (or shouldn't have been) valuable to begin with. Implementation matters more than ideas. So most of these concerns are silly to me.
> Don't share it with them until they sign.
Which would be possible in a situation where someone has the power to do so, but this isn't always the case. In industries where there are large negotiating power imbalances between creators and others they work with, you will typically find that creators have little to no negotiation power. There's a reason we have many legal protections in many parts of the law outside of contract law.
> If you don't trust your spouse then get a prenup. The other categories aren't special.
A spouse is the most formal of the examples I listed. And a spouse in many places is someone you've already entered into a formal legal agreement with. But to the contrary, I don't think it is reasonable to expect people bring NDAs to a first date.
> That said, if your work is so easy to copy it probably wasn't (or shouldn't have been) valuable to begin with. Implementation matters more than ideas. So most of these concerns are silly to me.
The concept of privacy isn't predicated on monetary value.
Nah. There's no way for that artist to know if some other artist did the exact same bit a week earlier. If they happened to have done so, tough luck! Doesn't matter that you came up with it independently on your own.
> Which would be possible in a situation where someone has the power to do so, but this isn't always the case. In industries where there are large negotiating power imbalances between creators and others they work with, you will typically find that creators have little to no negotiation power. There's a reason we have many legal protections in many parts of the law outside of contract law.
So don't share it with them if you don't want to take the risk and you also don't want to enter into an agreement.
> A spouse is the most formal of the examples I listed. And a spouse in many places is someone you've already entered into a formal legal agreement with. But to the contrary, I don't think it is reasonable to expect people bring NDAs to a first date.
So don't share it with them if you don't want to take the risk and you also don't want to enter into an agreement.
> The concept of privacy isn't predicated on monetary value.
Indeed, it's predicated on privacy. Don't share what you don't want to share.
If this should happen, this previous artist would be able to claim copyright on his creation. That is what copyright is about, protecting your creative creations. If you write a song and perform it on the streets for free, no one should be able to just take the song and perform it themselves without your permission.
That does not apply to every country.
> Whether orphaned software and video games ("Abandonware") fall under the audiovisual works definition is a matter debated by scholars.[14]
[14] Maier, Henrike (2015). "Games as Cultural Heritage Copyright Challenges for Preserving (Orphan) Video Games in the EU" http://www.hiig.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Maier_JIPITEC-... (PDF). JIPITEC. Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. p. 120. Retrieved 2016-01-18.
What about stuff that's in flight? Or your IP that you've developed that is taken off the market and you are incorporating into another product? Or stuff you put out there and it flops because of timing and you plan to relaunch again in 2 years? There are many situations where this doesn't hold up.
You sentiment makes sense but implementation is tricky.
It's ok for things to die. It's ok for things to be hard to get. The world doesn't need all media available at all times to everyone.
If the work doesn't enter the public domain, then it shouldn't have received a copyright protection.
The world also doesn't need any more media created, the amount of good - no, great - media that I'd like to consume that already exists is vastly greater than the amount of time I have in my life to consume it.
Given that state of affairs, why do we even need any laws that encourage the production of new media?
I mean, I'm highly sympathetic to the situation of the starving artist, but I'm not at all sympathetic to the situation of his publisher. If copyright, and the creative industry, and all of its production of new works disappeared tomorrow, it would have no meaningful impact on my life.
The world doesn't need any more media created.
Art is a reflection of society and culture. We absolutely NEED more art created. It drives humanity forward.
> If copyright, and the creative industry, and all of its production of new works disappeared tomorrow, it would have no meaningful impact on my life.
In relation to my previous point, no new art being created would have a massive negative affect on all of society. Everyone, including you, would be impacted. It also comes off as shortsighted and unsympathetic to the starving artist to say that their lively-hoods being impacted/eliminated would have no impact on your life.
> I mean, I'm highly sympathetic to the situation of the starving artist, but I'm not at all sympathetic to the situation of his publisher.
A publisher offers an artist many benefits, ranging from distribution reach, legal protections, and other benefits that a single artist would have a hard time managing on their own.
Reforming the copyright system and the relationships between artists and publishers requires a very nuanced look at all of the issues to allow art, artists, and society as a whole to flourish.
Maybe, you’re free to let things you care about go die. I don’t.
> It's ok for things to be hard to get.
Not if it’s artificial restriction that prevents me enjoying things I like.
> The world doesn't need all media available at all times to everyone.
Says who?
Your second paragraph could only be written by someone blind or ignorant to historical analysis and it's importance.
The government sets up a website where you can upload the work you want to copyright and register yourself as the owner. If it's something like software, you must upload the code. It wouldn't be visible to anyone, but would be there in case the copyright expires.
If someone wants to use your work, they can contact you though the website.
If you don't reply (edit: this should say acknowledge) in some reasonable amount of time (say three months), then the copyright is considered abandoned and the work enters the public domain.
For existing works, give people say two years to upload and register. Anything not registered (or at least marked as "in dispute") becomes public domain.
This at least solves the abandoned works problem, as well as the archiving problem. After 100ish years, we'd have a copy of every work as it enters the public domain.
I'm not sure why I'm legally required to respond to requests for the use of my copyrighted works. I can simply ignore them. Requiring that I respond to them will create an undue burden on me.
I don't mind as long as I can bill you personally for forcing me to hire someone to respond to such requests, at a reasonable rate for a legal attorney with a specialty in copyright. He can even provide invoices, although the time required to produce the invoice will be included in the invoice.
How about you pay me to respond to you instead? At copyright attorney rates for my region. You send my attorney a request and your billing information, and he'll reply to you on my behalf and send you the invoice for his time.
Otherwise people will be able to cause huge financial impositions by essentially DDOSing people with copyright requests. You want a guaranteed response, you pay for that response in advance, otherwise kick rocks.
I'm talking about works that are distributed, like books or movies or compiled software.
What government? World government? Yours? Mine? Who will pay for it? What will happen is an author is hit by a car and falls into coma? How will authorship be established? Worldwide federated authentication of authors? How will it work of authors in Iran?
Technosolutuonists are funny sometimes. “Just add a little bit of blockchain”.
The US Government, since we are talking about US Copyright.
> How will authorship be established? Worldwide federated authentication of authors? How will it work of authors in Iran?
US copyright doesn't cover worldwide works unless they register in the US.
> Technosolutuonists are funny sometimes. “Just add a little bit of blockchain”.
And I never said blockchain. I said a website where people upload and register their works. You know, like a digital version of how it works today where you mail a copy of your work to the copyright office. But with the added bonus of a contact feature.
> What will happen is an author is hit by a car and falls into coma?
Presumably there would be a dispute process available for these rare edge cases. This is in fact why it would not be a blockchain. So that the legal system still has final say.
Are you sure it works this way now?
I'm not a copyright lawyer, I've just looked into it before. This is my layman's understanding after talking to a lawyer.
So, from creation 0-5 years everything is automatically instantly copyrighted (as it is today). 5-10 years you must manually extend the copyright and it costs $500/work. 10-15 years it should cost $5,000/work. 15-20 years $100,000/work. 20-25 years $500,000/work, etc. By the time we're at 50 years, an additional 5 years registration should cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and would only be done for the _most_ important properties (like The Mouse).
(In my ideal world, these fees would go into an arts fund in the federal government that could be used to encourage the creation of less financially viable arts, like local theatre programs, arts education for children, etc)
In such a scheme if a work is particularly valuable (either because it's being mass distributed, or because it has value in not being mass distributed), then the owner could maintain the copyright, but it would just be totally financially non-viable for these kinds of abandoned games to remain locked up. There'd be absolutely no business case for it.
I think your proposal is a better version of copyright, but I think as a starting point for a legislative discussion it probably doesn't get a conversation off the ground
But I agree about the modern political situation around copyright.
It is a compromise between society and creators that is codified legislatively. We get to decide “for them”, because it’s an agreement between them and us (where the “them” and the “us” are actually both just the body poltic).
It’s a mistake to think of copyright as the natural order of things. It is a legislative creation, with the specific purpose of encouraging works entering the public domain, which is why we get to decide.
I think the goal for the financial cost of the extension to be roughly equal to the "harm" caused to the rest of society for locking it up. So, I think making the scale in some way proportional to revenue could be a rough proxy for "how popular is this thing", which is then a rough proxy for "how much does it harm society to lock it up for 5 more years".
That said, I'm more interested in being equitable to _society_, rather than being equitable to _creator_. Copyright should be just good enough of a deal that it encourages creative works. It doesn't need to do more than that.
Why allow them to extend it at all? Even 5 years is excessive, give them 18 months. Disallow it entirely for any work that was ever released with DRM. And since we're talking video games, I'm not certain that online games count as being DRM-free... if it can't be 100% self-hosted, no copyright for you.
What Blizzard did to bnetd was shameful
Marvel's an interesting choice, because the comic book depiction of Iron Man (for example) came out in the 60's, and almost certainly didn't make anywhere near the kind of money that the movies did. I'm not generally opposed to copyright holders getting some revenue from the later adaption of their work, especially in situations like that.
5 years is cutting it really close for your typical film adaption of a book: the first Twilight and Harry Potter movies came out 4 years after their books, and I could definitely see movie studios just waiting an extra year to cut out the original authors.
My ideal world would see original authors retaining these kinds of royalties for prolonged periods of time (maybe 40 years or the life of the author, whichever's longer), but losing their monopoly rights in a much shorter timespan: basically, for the first 5-10 years copyright works the way it does today, but beyond that anybody's allowed to make derivative works, in exchange for some legally-mandated revenue slice.
So Rowling only gets to be some 8 figure millionaire instead of a 10 figure billionaire? That's so unfair.
> My ideal world would see original authors retaining these kinds of royalties for prolonged periods of time (
The prolonged period of time should be 18 months. I don't think the concept of "royalties for adapting someone else's work" is severable from the concept of copyright. These things are either the same, or royalties are some subset of copyright.
Even just re-typesetting a book is an adaptation as far as these things are concerned.
The way I see it, that's the best of both worlds. If your goal is non-commercial in nature (e.g., game preservationism), then you're free to redistribute for free. If your goal is commercial, you're making money off of someone else's work, pay some token royalties, but, here's the big "but": the original author doesn't get to say "No, you may not adapt my work this way".
It even works for software copyright, with the caveat that you'd need to put some thought into how to deal with multiple claimants of royalties would work (since owing 50% of your revenue to 25 different authors seems excessive). Maybe have a cap of, say, 10% that, after reached gets subdivided based on some criteria.
18 months is flatly too short. Most creative works take longer than that between completion and market. You have to give artists some time to attempt to extract value from their work. Listen: J.K. Rowling is an evil bitch, but the world loved her work, and she was compensated as such. I feel the same way about Notch, of Minecraft fame. Guy's a dick, but it's hard to say he stole much of his fortune.
1. Author publishes a dozen novels over the first 20 years of his/her career. All of them are good, but none of them sell well.
2. Author does not pay the copyright renewal fees because they are too expensive. Anyone can now copy those books and pay nothing.
3. Author's next book is well-received. The author is hailed as a genius and there is suddenly a ton of interest in the author's earlier works.
4. Everyone but the author makes money on the author's older works.
Edit: The point here is that when a work is successful, which is rare, it is unfair for everyone other than the author, who is most responsible for the work, to profit from it.
Under the proposed system, he'd also be more likely to be encouraged to continue creating new works, rather than just retiring because of the one successful book.
They would have long given up, if it was money.
For me, the value of the books is the value they provide to their readers, not the money they provide to the author. We want author to be able to get money because it will incentivize them to write. I don't think it's realistic to think any writer will not write because his work may become famous only after he has published some books and therefore won't be as profitable as some other copyright scenario. That is just not how people think.
I know that some people see copyright as some kind of justice system to ensure creators get their due. I think that view in general leads to copyright maximalism, and is not a good place to start from when discussing the value of copyright
(Edit: Not just republishers of the original work, but also those making derivatives like translations, sequels, or movie/TV adaptations.)
How do the publishers benefit from a work that enters the public domain? They have no more right to use the work than anyone else. I think the margins for publishers would be very low after a work enters the public domain.
Since that new novel would be granted an exclusive monopoly period, and the author now has significant notoriety.
So, since the explicit goal of the system is to incentivize _new_ works, and this system incentivizes _new_ works in that scenario, it seems like an explicit success of the system, rather than a problematic example.
In the current scenario, at step 4. the author can simply retire on the success of those previous books. That _fails_ to incentivize new works. So I'd argue my proposal works _better_ at the goals of copyright in this scenario than the current system.
Also, copyright isn’t just the original work, it’s also derivatives like sequels, translations, and movie adaptations. Should all of them make money while the author and his family get nothing?
In the real world, limiting copyright like you suggest is a non-starter.
any member of the family could also contribute to society by writing new works
remember the goal: to promote new works; not to make the author money, or their family money, or their family's descendants money; and not to enrich or prevent the enriching of any given publisher
allowing the author and family to milk old work in perpetuity, whether independently or through a publisher, would seem to incentivize the opposite of that
The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to write or produce creative works, even when the reality is that most works will not be successful in any way. If you take away the possibility of reward for the few works that are successful, then that will result in fewer works being produced.
if there was data that shows copyrighted works usually earn nothing the first 5 years, and earn significant value after that, or even that annual earnings from copyrighted works usually increase after 5 years, the argument against the proposed reform would be more convincing,
but in any case, the purpose of copyright is to encourage new works, not allow authors to perpetually cash in on old ones like a lottery ticket instead
In that scenario it doesn't sound like there's a lot we can do to encourage the author to create new works. Which is, again, the explicit and primary goal of copyright law and jurisprudence.
Firstly, why would the author ever hand over their book to such a publisher?
Secondly, why wouldn't the author have a contract with their publisher guaranteeing terms?
Thirdly, surely the publisher is incentivised to make as many sales as possible in the 5 years before the copyright expires, when other publishers can then sell copies (assuming it's been successful enough to make it worthwhile).
(if the answer is that yes they would, it implies that it's profitable to publish without copyright, and then why do we even have copyright?)
But, yes, in general, if you want to prevent it from being copied you would have to spend ever larger sums of money to accomplish that.
The entire point of copyright is a deal to encourage author's creating a work *so that it can enter the public domain*. This scheme is designed allow _most_ works to enter the public domain much earlier than they do now, while still allowing the most economically valuable creations to be pushed off for quite a while.
But, you the author wanting to prevent your book from being copied is a _harm_ to society. So, the goal with this scheme is that the extension costs should _roughly mirror_ those harms of continuing to lock a work up. The idea, then, is that when the economic benefit to you the author is _larger_ than those societal harms, then you'll pay for the extension.
But when those economic benefits to you the author is _less_ than those societal harms, then you'll stop paying for the extension.
I take issue with this. You are not harmed just because you don't have free access to something you want. Refusing to buy your kids some candy does not "harm" them.
Using this definition of "harm", you having money in your savings account is a "harm" to "society". Using your logic, the government then ought to force you to donate all your savings and excess possessions to "society" so that harm is reduced.
You guys are using "harm" to mean "slightly suboptimal". It's completely ridiculous.
Yes I am.
Art is the language of our society. It being locked away is absolutely a harm. Art is our culture, and our heritage. To deny it to people is absolutely harmful. It may be a tolerable harm, and one that we think is necessary to endure. But it is a harm
If I download a movie from the internet, the state can force me (with all the power of the state: courts, judgements, guns, etc) to pay $30,000. That is a harm.
Copyright is a legislative restriction put on me by the Government. That is a harm. Now, it can be a harm that's worth it. We may collectively decide that it is worth the trade-off to threaten me with financial ruin for watching a movie, because if it doesn't happen movies wouldn't be made. So, we might all agree that it's a harm that we need to live with.
But to pretend it's not a harm to deny free access to our culture and our art is just flat out wrong.
If you think it's not harmful, then let me ask: why can't we just abolish copyright law entirely. If there is no harm to consumers, then I would argue that there is similarly no harm to creators.
> Using your logic, the government then ought to force you to donate all your savings and excess possessions to "society" so that harm is reduced.
I would argue that governments do a "soft" version of this with redistributive tax schemes and social programs.
Rights exist as heuristics for making the world a better place, full of fulfilled happy people living meaningful lives. We benefit from the works of others and this is a good thing, it is our main advantage over creatures like the octopus.
Copyright is a system designed to encourage the creations of work. It was not designed as a system to allow people to main perpetual control of their own art and work.
The original term of copyright was 14 years (with an optional 14 year extension). Why do you think the founder's believed that people "shouldn't be in control of their own art"?
Say I make an indie game to sell on steam, earning a meager but acceptable income from it, and I want to provide it 15 years of patches and updates (not unseen in indie games).
Does updating it with a new patch adding a few features count as a new work or the same one? Or should I instead not do updates, but make a "part 2" instead since that's a new work? But then it's not the same game anymore and it may be a worse experience for players to have to get two separate games, rather than one improved one!
It's also not clear to me that continued updates wouldn't reset the term.
So, if they wanted to maintain a copyright on the 2006 version of DF (v0.21.93.19a, released August 2006), they would need to pay $500 in 2011, and $5,000 in 2016, and $100k in 2021, for a total payment to the unitd sates treasury of $105,500.
However, even if they paid nothing the latest release (50.09, released June 28, 2023) would remain under copyright automatically and for free until June 28, 2028. So they _could_ choose to let the community have access to the oldest versions of DF under public domain, while retaining copyright on the most recent versions. Or they could choose to pay to keep even the initial versions locked up.
I'd also probably want to make sure that the legislative language ensured that you didn't have to pay the copyright registration on each patch release. So, if the DF team paid for the initial version to remain under copyright, _all_ the patch versions would retain that same copyright status without needing to be individually paid for. That seems like an implementation detail for the legislation that would be important to get right, but I didn't feel it was important to specify in the proposal.
Does that actually matter? Updated versions are derivative works of the original so as long as the original remains copyrighted who cares whether the patches are or not? Unless you're trying to monetize updates individually separate from the main product in which case why not register them?
Maybe? It's why I think it's something that if you got the far the legislative process would need to consider.
It's a detail that I could see being important to address in the actual law, or (as you note) it might be that everything falls out pretty naturally without needing to be addressed.
I think my point is: "if this ever got to the point where it was being drafted into draft legislation, the drafter should make sure this part works sensibly instead of being crazy".
Actually, even if they did, they would likely have proved the market to the founders earlier; maybe lighting a fire under their feet to monetize quicker. The current renaissance of DF via the Steam release could have happened five years earlier -- inspiring five more years' worth of other business-focused indie developers...
You catch the drift. I like the OP's system hah.
With our current system, some players can choose to ignore copyright so its not like we really live under a copyright system.
So, existing law wouldn't be impacted by these questions.
And these prior systems still matter, since there are works like Sherlock Holmes where most of the character has entered the public domain, but certain revisions remain under the copyright of the Conan Doyle Estate.
To more concretely answer your question, if you release version 1.0 of your game today, with “Space Marines” fighting each other with a shooting stat of 10, then in 10 years release an update that gives +5 to the space marines shooting stat, updates the art for the marines, and adds “Firebats”, then the parts no longer under copyright would be the 1.0 binary of the game, the old version of the Space Marines art, and the stats. What would be subject to copyright would be the 1.1 binary, the new space marines art, the new shooting stats, and the firebats art and characters.
For example, much of the DnD kerfluffle is over the open rulebook and monster manual. If you make a game that has a Blue Dragon and operates totally differently from the "Adult Blue Dragon" that's in DnD you're probably OK.
But if you make a game that has an "Blue Dragon" with an Amour Points of 19, a Health of 255, a Speed of 40, but 80 while flying, and a Str 25, Dex 10, Con 23, Int 16, Wis 15, Cha 19...then you're a lot more likely to get into trouble.
So you make make a knock-off DnD that has pretty much the same _mechanics_ its true that you're probably fine. But once you start borrowing all the of stats of things from another work that fit into those same mechanics... well, I Am Not A Lawyer, but that's definitely the kind of thing that you'd want to start running past a lawyer.
under this proposal, if you only copyrighted part 2 or your patch, then people would be free to copy the original version and make derivative works of it
Like, some retired Grandma who writes popular mysteries is going to have to pay the government regularly to keep amazon from selling thousands of copies of her work without having to pay her?
Everyone who makes a side project game on itch.io has to keep it online forever, or they lose rights to it forever?
Grandma can make money from her new mysteries and get some from the first five years without needing to charge.
As it is, many works are being irreparably lost to time.
And by their proposal, the first couple extensions would be extremely cheap. It could be a simple form on some copyright.gov website to register your work.
5k/work is not cheap. That's how much publishers may pay for a book. 15k/work is prohibitively expensive for books.
Ok but what if the author had not written a successful book but still needed money for cancer treatment. Maybe we should handle social security and healthcare separately from copyright.
So any work for hire, or other aspect would be expensive to renew. Anything owned by a corporation, LLC, or other non humane entity would be expensive.
But if the original author has maintained control of the copyright since it’s inception, I’d be fine giving them a much cheaper renewal price.
The same thing that happens if grandma worked in a knitting factory and got disabled. Most likely: state pension
Well, for the first 5 years after publication, no. She would need to do nothing exactly as the world exists today. She would have an exclusive period of 5 years to monetize the book exclusively without having to register it, pay anyone, or talk to anyone.
After 5 years, she would have to pay $500 (again, exact value for discussion purposes, not a final proposal) and register it with a government website (with her contact information, and attesting that she still owns the work). After 10 years, she would have to pay again, and update the registration. Or, if the works are no longer valuable, she could simply not do that, and let the works enter the public domain.
The _entire point_ is that works that _aren't financially viable_ enter the public domain rapidly, and works that are continuing to produce financial value would be worth registration. >99% of works produced would likely never be registered (since every comment on a website counts as a separate "work"), and would enter the public domain after 5 years. Only a small fraction would be extended for 5 years.
But, yes, if you want exclusive rights to your game for 10 years, you'd have to pay a small amount of money and fill out a form on a website (my goal would be about the same difficulty as updating your whois information for a registered domain name). If it's not worth that amount of trouble, then the work enters the public domain.
> Everyone who makes a side project game on itch.io has to keep it online forever
My proposal had no _online_ requirement. So, no, that wouldn't be part of my proposal. Don't know where you got that requirement from.
People wait for steam sales of just released games and that can take 2 years and you still pay. If they were sure it is free after 5, they gonna wait.
Every game that experiences even a moderate success would probably be locked up for 15 years in this scenario, and every game that experiences even a hint of success would be locked up for 10 years.
I cannot imagine that the number of people who are willing to wait 10-15 years to play a game instead of spending $20 now will materially harm the same of a game.
This would hit the small and niche companies hardest.
Okay, I've probably just been waiting since katamari damacy came out...
Your scheme would make writing children's stories less attractive.
In general, overly clever schemes like this often do not work as anticipated.
Honestly, this is fine.
We already have tens of thousands of good children's stories, let those who do it for love of the art or the exceptional ones (like Rowlin make more if they want.
In general, judging which categories don't need the protection of copyright amounts to deciding which categories of readers don't matter. It's elitist and unhelpful.
Another thing to note also is that kids had stories long before Disney was making VHS tapes and before we had Scholastic pumping out picture books. It’s not like we as humans are incapable of creating without a monetary incentive.
I agree if you say "don't need protection", though I think that's a harsher criticism of my proposal than is warranted. Maybe there are categories which need stronger protection that what I proposed, which is fine.
But I think you're also not considering the fact that _entry into the public domain_ is also a huge positive value to the reader.
So, we need to have a balance between adequately incentivizing works, and works entering the public domain. I'd argue the current balance we've struck is totally fucking broken, and gravely harming readers of all types.
But, I'm open to the criticism that we would run the risk of this scheme of not adequately incentivizing certain works. I think that's good feedback.
Equating retaining ownership by copyright to protection, is an example of reasoning used to abuse copyright. The products still exist when they enter the public domain and need no additional protection, that copyright offers. It's really disturbing to see commenters repeat the attitudes that left copyright in such a degenerate state.
Children's stories have been made since time immemorial.
That's fine, it's a parenthetical because I don't think it would survive the actual proposal because of concerns like yours. I think the US government is able to do a decent job of funding the arts, but I'm aware a lot of people don't agree, so I'd definitely expect that in the end the funds would just pay for the administration of the program itself, and the excess would go into the treasury and general fund.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36671647
> I'd also probably want to make sure that the legislative language ensured that you didn't have to pay the copyright registration on each patch release. So, if the DF team paid for the initial version to remain under copyright, _all_ the patch versions would retain that same copyright status without needing to be individually paid for. That seems like an implementation detail for the legislation that would be important to get right, but I didn't feel it was important to specify in the proposal.
To make sure they dont put a low X, have anyone be able to buy the copyright from the author for X. If someone wants to buy, author can raise X to keep their copyright.
This is a nice system because it is naturally progressive and balanced, huge corps with billion $ IP will finally start paying a ton to have the gov keep enforcing their copyrights.
Let’s say I make a web comic that’s basically worthless for 5 years. Then, after 8 years Jimmy Fallon or some other late night show sees it and shows it on the air. Overnight, my old comics, which I have implicitly valued at $0.00 or close to $0.00, become incredibly popular. Disney or an IP troll or whoever can come along and then buy my early comics for pennies before I realize what happened and I get nothing.
The only way this would be a nice system is that it would icentivise everyone to make everything free and open source, or don't create anything at all, since if you create siomething with the intention to get value from it, anyone else can decide to take it from you simply because they are Apple and you don't have the 100k to stop them. It's already bad enough that big companies can buy smaller companies just by waving the cash at the owners, and all the Figma, Centos, etc users get to suck it.
Except that it wouldn't even be nice in that sarcastic way, because what happens to copyleft in that world? I think it's critically important that the "you may have but not steal this" in GPL doesn't expire in a mere 5 years, and no one has to pay hundreds of thousands to prevent a big for-profit company from stealing something that they could have had for free anyway.
Value is in they eye of the beholder. If someone makes $30/month from an indie game they developed 30 years ago, is it ok to take those 30 because they ain't 3 million?
I genuinely like the idea of regularly having to renew the claim to copyright, though.
I don't think this is a fair stating of what would be happening.
We aren't _taking_ anything from them. We are no longer _granting_ them exclusive control of the work.
But copyright isn't the default state of existence. It's an agreement between author's and society. The _purpose_ of the agreement is to encourage new works entering the public domain.
The current copyright term is fundamentally broken. It's _far_ longer than it needs to be to encourage the creation of new works.
Answer me this: would be the person who developed their indie game 30 years ago not have developed it because they knew that it would no longer be producing $30/month 30 years hence? I sincerely doubt it.
The term should be _just_ long enough to encourage the creation of new works *and not longer*.
Further, the author could...release a sequel to the game, which might make $30/month for another 30 years. Perhaps this might also encourage the creation of new works
> they developed 30 years ago
Interestingly, the original copyright law written by the founders was 14 years, with an optional 14 year extension. So the founding father's response would've been: "Yes! Of course! They already had 28 years to profit off their work! It's time for the public to get to enjoy this...indie game? What's an indie game?"
Becoming an artist that makes it big is like winning the lottery. It almost never happens in the modern era because we are flooded with extremely talented artists that have no differentiation between them.
But further, those "make it late" artists are almost certainly making the majority of their money on their later works. And if we get into the nitty gritty of art, it's super common that the rights to those early works are long sold for $.10. It's unlikely the original artist could see any sort of monetary benefit.
On the flip side, media protection is a huge racket that is primarily a detriment to society. It stops media companies from innovating (just keep making mice videos), encourages nasty behavior (Like Disney's vault, where they purposefully lock away media so they can re-release it every n years, for a limited time only), and ultimately limits creativity. Consider how often we hear the story of a youtube video getting taken down because someone hummed something that sounded too close to copyrighted material. That is an active harm to art that is very common.
That's why I prefer a flat tax.
15% goes to the copyright/patent distribution system. Anyone can copy and profit off anything, but just pays 15% into the system.
The system then pays out based on the rules and registration information.
Public domain is then redefined as whatever is tax free.
And, you can also buy anything directly from the government.
Prices are determined by market value if it's a physical product. For digital goods, some rules may have to be defined, and maybe rules to define rules defined. Copies of songs could all just be 25 cents, etc. Books 2.99. But this is to own a copy (defined as having a copy on your system plus having paid for it). Just listening to a copy could be free.
At least this is the direction I wish the world were headed.
Monetization does not need to happen every year though. Think Disney vault and how they would keep classic movies out of distribution intentionally to keep them valuable. This complicates the “legally available” test somewhat. Charging a nominal fee to maintain copyright is a good test though. It makes sure that “somebody” still considers themselves the owner and makes sure they care more than zero.
I also think this should apply to derived works. For instance, if a film or a book is changed and only sold in the edited form, this should void the copyright on the original version.
It does provide some much-needed to protections for rights holders, but it provides very little protection for consumers. Fair use is something at least, but doesn’t help when rights holders engage in predatory practices that only serve to harm consumers (e.g. the hell that is video streaming today)
Idk what a better copyright law would look like, but I do know that we can do better, and believe it can be done in a way that benefits everyone fairly.
Trade secrets, privacy laws, what have you. Copyright was never intended to cover that case; if it does it's purely accidental, and if we want to address it well then dedicated laws are a better approach.
The only thing giving me the right to stop somoene from distributing it without my approval is copyright.
And these people have chosen to make it available. If you want to create something and keep it all to yourself, fine, do that, nobody will force you to release it to the public. But once you have released it to the public, you shouldn't be able to take it back.
Copyright as originally envisioned was a way of preventing books from being published if the crown didn't approve of them.
I don't get less enjoyment out of a video game because somebody else played it. In fact I might get even more enjoyment because of that since we could play it together or discuss it!
So that means the value stays the same or even goes up in my book!
Of course no-one will do, but we can claim that the game is available legally
Streaming and on-demand content delivery, rather than purchased physical copies, does the same damage to other content as to games. Per internet traditions, the porn industry is leading the way. No doubt the copyrights to millions of porn films belong to long-defunct studios, leaving no legal access. Today is it porn, tomorrow it will be the older Futurama episodes.
But industries want this state of affairs. Any time spent with old content is time not purchasing the new content. To keep the content creation industry going consumers need to forget past material. Want to watch old Simpsons episodes? Want to play the original Civilization? No. Those are dead. Here are some new versions.
Because digital books are horrible. A have a self of work-related books full of reference images (military equipment). I budget about 100/month for book purchases as many of them are 200+ each. There is no plausible replacement. Just ask anyone who collects painting or movie posters. A digital file is no replacement for a reference copy on a shelf.
One book that I purchased new only two years ago for <100$ is now out of print and apparently going for 500+ on ebay/amazon.
Completely subjective.
> A have a self of work-related books full of reference images (military equipment). I budget about 100/month for book purchases as many of them are 200+ each. There is no plausible replacement.
Er yes there is. A large tablet. Which would allow you to zoom in on those images in high resolution if the book was formatted properly by the publisher. Connect some AR glasses and now you've got a massive book you can read comfortably anywhere without strain.
> A digital file is no replacement for a reference copy on a shelf.
It absolutely is, particularly if your book is primarily text and you want to search that text on a regular basis. Or if you're out in the field and you don't have space to carry an entire library of maintenance books with you. Which might actually be quite a common scenario in the military. Unless you know the book back to front (and even then it's debatable) searching via a computer is going to be faster than flipping through pages manually.
The digital file will not decay (unless the underlying hard drive decays) and it can be available, theoretically, forever. It can be shipped around the globe in the blink of an eye, and doesn't require anywhere near the same carbon footprint to do so. It can be easily replicated and the potential market is anyone, anywhere, on the entire planet rather than anyone with access to a book store or living in a location where a bookstore will ship to.
No-one is trying to take your paper books away. But presumably a digital file of that book was sent to the printers. So why is that digital file not readily available for consumers to purchase to consume in the manner that best suits them?
Nope. No tablets allowed anywhere near where I work, certainly not some random device that wants to just connect to the public internet to download some random pdfs from a defunct book subscription service.
>> The digital file will not decay
Yes they do. The chances that a tablet with a digital file, or a subscription service, will still be accessible in 10/20 years are not good. A physical book will last centuries.
>> Or if you're out in the field and you don't have space to carry an entire library of maintenance books with you. Which might actually be quite a common scenario in the military.
Nope. That is a very rare circumstance in the modern military. What is not rare is someone wanting a specific question answered about an old bit of equipment or place, something nobody has touched in a decade. Someone in the field needs info and calls back to the support unit. Suddenly that old paper book on the shelf about some forgotten topic or place is a literal lifesaver.
And in the real military, one cannot assume network connectivity. We have to keep working even when the lights go out, especially when they lights are out. Paper books can do that.
Cool bro, good for you. Not everyone works where you do.
> Yes they do. The chances that a tablet with a digital file, or a subscription service, will still be accessible in 10/20 years are not good. A physical book will last centuries.
If you're making a point about the file being in a proprietary format and unavailable for corporate reasons then yes. But otherwise, no. We have been copying digital files between devices for decades now.
> Nope. That is a very rare circumstance in the modern military. What is not rare is someone wanting a specific question answered about an old bit of equipment or place, something nobody has touched in a decade. Someone in the field needs info and calls back to the support unit.
A call they wouldn't actually need to make in the first place if they had the book in digital format on their person. But we can assume that's an intelligence risk if it goes missing so we'd rather keep the info safe on base. That is understandable. But it doesn't change the fact that one of the pros of ebooks are their portability.
> Suddenly that old paper book on the shelf about some forgotten topic or place is a literal lifesaver.
There's literally no reason why that old paper book couldn't have a digital copy in an archive somewhere and probably does.
> And in the real military, one cannot assume network connectivity. We have to keep working even when the lights go out, especially when they lights are out. Paper books can do that.
It's almost as if both formats have different pros and cons and the consumer should be able to decide which work best for them and their own needs rather than having that dictated to them by the publishing industry or the needs of the military. I don't really consider having a copy of the "Crime Writer's Guide To Police Practice and Procedure" by Michael O'Byrne on my tablet whilst I'm backpacking to be a national security risk.
Any other kind of book I do much rather prefer the paper version though.
I saw they have it on Hulu, but the app itself seems like a nightmare.
As I'm writing this post, if I try to log in Hulu I get a message "Something went wrong. Please try again later."
I guess my parents pay for a delivery service here that gives us access to Disney and Star+, but I don't know for sure if Hulu is included in the package. There are so many streaming services now a days that I can't keep track of the ones I have access to anymore.
I've been thinking about going back to torrents sites and trying to get it unofficially;
There are advantages to getting owned DVDs, like the fact that they can't mess with the content later. Music licensing problems are fairly common. For Scrubs Season 1 in particular, they had to change all the music around for Netflix's streamed version. The DVD version, as far as I know, has the original music.
Dark Skies. It was x-files if set in the 1960s. But as it used music from the time, the classic music licenses have since expired and nobody is willing to pay enough to renew them.
You can select your country and see if it's legally available anywhere.
A lot of shows have been hit by this, with even DVD releases poisoned by changes. In this case the only way to access the original works is through piracy.
If it was dissolved while still owning the copyright then it becomes bona vacantia. What happens to that depends on the country, in the UK it technically becomes property of the King, and you can buy the rights from the government.
Or if they are, they've been changed to remove material that can't be distributed. WKRP in Cincinnati is an example of this.
From the Wikipedia page for the show:
> WKRP was videotaped rather than filmed because at the time, music-licensing fees were lower for videotaped programs, a loophole that was intended to accommodate variety shows. Music licensing deals that were cut at the time of production covered only a limited number of years, but when the show entered syndication shortly after its 1982 cancellation, most of the original music remained intact because the licensing deals were still active. After the licenses had expired, later syndicated versions of the show did not feature the music as first broadcast, with stock production music inserted in place of the original songs to avoid paying additional royalties.
Many older works are permanently lost, or the few film copies remaining are rotting in vaults.
Hundreds. Probably thousands.
A few years ago I started watching noir films. Once you get past the Criterion Collection, it gets harder and harder to find the good stuff.
A lot of it never made it to VHS. Even fewer made it to DVD. Compared with the number that were made, hardly any made it to streaming.
It's even worse for television. One example among many: 77 Sunset Strip.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/12/04/silent...
"The Library of Congress conducted the first comprehensive survey of silent films over the past two years and found 70% are believed to be lost. Of the nearly 11,000 silent feature films made in America between 1912 and 1930, the survey found only 14% still exist in their original format. About 11% of the films that survive only exist as foreign versions or on lower-quality formats."
It's too sad that we as a species are allowing our culture and history to be lost ... for some temporal profit of a minority of people. Any IP that is 20+ year old should be automatically free to copy.
Do you think our grandchildren’s grandchildren in 2196 will still want to watch a B- level movie produced in the 1980’’s?
I'm totally willing to pay full price, but there's simply no offer.
Edit: I just learned about justwatch.com (thanks HN!) There's one streaming service listed which offers at least two seasons for 7 € per month - including commercials :/ it became so hard to buy stuff legally.
* the available DVD are incomplete. I could fill some gaps in English.
It's been delisted from Steam, Good Old Games, and any other storefront I could find online. People resell genuine retail keys that can get the game activated on Steam for ridiculous sums. Reposted hearsay online is that the original source code is lost so there will never be a remaster. There's a copy up on Archive.org, and without it from what I can tell this title would just be lost to time.
There's so many cool, weird, obscure games from the 90s and 00s and its their weirdness and obscurity that puts them most at risk for disappearing and becoming unattainable.
You don't pour years of manpower and creativity into a game like this and then .... not even save a single .ZIP file to your personal HD.
It just casts such a nihilistic ephemeral shadow on all of this.
It reminds me of how old television shows (like Doctor Who) are often missing good chunks of the early runs because they recorded over the tapes. Television was seen as ephemeral and if they never intended to broadcast it again then there was no need to store thousands of feet of tapes for episodes that (they believed) would never be wanted again.
I can imagine something similar happening with video games—they put in the work, shipped the product, and didn't think what they had done was important enough to preserve for posterity, because who actually thinks that about their own work?
A lot of big band music was lost because the band leaders were against recording music, whether for phonograph or radio.
It was supposed to be a a philosophical objection, but I suspect they also didn't want to put themselves out of business.
It's a good game and historically important too, being a technical progenitor to modern MS Flight Simulator 2020. It sucks that it's become so buried.
Want to play the original Tomb Raider? Well it's for sale, in many stores, and for many platforms. Trouble is they're all glitchy. Meanwhile, download a PS1 emulator and the ISO, and it works perfectly.
Saw something on Netflix a while ago that you're only now getting round to have time for? Woosh, it's gone. Meanwhile, download it from BitTorrent and it's yours forever, no internet needed. Same with Spotify and songs.
Pay for things legally, get treated like crap. The piracy option is just a better experience.
For most people this is ok, but when we're talking about preservation it's the ability to play the game as it existed at that time with no barriers, and not something upscaled to 4k with widescreen patches and framerate changes to make it feel like a modern game with blocky aesthetics.
People are making cycle-accurate emulators for exactly this purpose! Not all emulation is focused on "enhancements"
Unintended emulation inaccuracies are a different matter, but (1) they are addressed with 1:1 hardware emulation (if you so wish), (2) where you don't want that (for the sake of speed, say) the fixes are only there to make the game run as it did anyway
If you didn't buy the original copy of something from 20 years ago and can't get it from eBay, you're SOL in most cases.
Lots of punk albums from small bands made in the 00s fall into this trap.
If you do find it, it's unlikely to be the original mix and might sound louder/have some content missing.
Even getting a 20-year-old console (which in the retro gaming world isn't that old) to work with a modern HDMI TV is a headache!
Despite owning the hardware and plenty of games, I had to drop a couple hundred bucks on a RetroTINK scaler to make my PS2 playable again. Which is no hate to the RetroTINK, because it's an amazing little gadget (and its output looks great), just kind of sad that it takes so much money and effort to keep playing a console I've owned since I was a kid.
I can confirm that the picture quality is phenomenal though. You can tweak about a million different settings and even add fake scanlines!
S-video is gone, and RF is gone. Coax is still there though, so RF modulators should still work too.
A scaler like the RetroTINK can add visual enhancements, but more crucially it ensures that your TV receives the signal in the first place.
The problem is the roms can't be 'legally' redistributed and there's no viable way to even legally purchase a significant portion of them anymore.
I personally prefer when companies do not to elect to squeeze their IPs dry and have a semblance of pride on their work, as much as a for-profit company can have of course, instead of blindly chasing profits.
The other side of the coin is Ubisoft having 11 Assassin's Creed titles in development: https://www.gamingbible.com/news/11-new-assassins-creed-game...
It'd be an incredible challenge, but I wonder if the community behind emulators like Dolphin could provide a paid version of the codebase that can be licensed under the MPL. This might help keep older games legally in circulation.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/sony-using-open-sourc...
Sony could always stop being overly protective and make the SDK publicly available under a suitable license.
There are lots of new categories where works of art (video games included) can fall into which simply didn't exist when copyrights were introduced. The worst part: as copyrights evolved it made legal access to older works harder.
I like how GoG is running their business but it doesn't include everything and laws should get modernized so that hundred of similar companies like GoG can flourish and thrive. For the cases where getting access to copyrights holder is not viable... well, for that users and fans should have the right to use, copy and distribute it legally. Nobody is making any money from works nobody can get access.
I mean, by what you said, copyright did, just not how we wanted it to.
Can't do that if it's not your server. Don't we all love "the cloud" :)
I think open sourcing the clients is easier because it's always possible, it takes the dev almost no time at all (compared to newly creating infrastructure documentation), and players don't have to set up their own infrastructure (which would probably require a lot of time as well as skill) to play offline. The downside is that server functionality would need to be recreated.
If the game is open, you can just patch out the server dependency. Is the update, "cloud" saving, or online-friends functionality crashing the whole game on startup? Stuff not actually needed to play in single player? Comment out the line where it calls that function, maybe mock a few variables, and you're all set.
A friend of mine makes a game with offline play being possible, but the main value is in the community: custom levels and online play. It's all cloud magic with google cloud this and google cloud that. Good luck pulling up that infrastructure in 20 years (having to set up a mini google datacenter, even if the components are open sourced by google in the first place, which they're almost certainly not when "sun set"). The game tries to reach the server on startup and should detect when you're offline (for me that doesn't work reliably, but firewalling google play services has weird effects on many apps), but if you just remove those calls from the game altogether, the offline parts will work with no dependencies and you can just exchange level files instead of having an online browser. Everything but realtime multiplayer would still be possible. Customizing the client code to work with much simpler infrastructure is also likely faster than trying to replicate the "cloud" setup.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/expanded-dmca-exemptio...
It was hugely popular in The Netherlands in the early 1980s, but not so much in other countries. Because the market was so small, there were nearly no commercial games. Almost all games for it were written by hobbyists, and were copied freely, using Mini-Cassette tapes.
I have been working on an emulator for it, but it seems near impossible to redistribute the original games. Most of the games do not have a copyright message, and it is often not clear who the original author was. Ironically, these games were _meant_ to be copied, but as of 1993 this is now prohibited by law, and (as far as I understand it) I can only make copies for my own use.
Note that there is a GitHub repository [1] that preserves a lot of games and information about the machine, but I wonder if this is even legal?
(An even bigger problem I face is redistribution of the P2305 Basic Interpreter ROM, which is copyrighted by both Philips and Microsoft. If anyone at Microsoft is reading this -- could you please assist me in getting a license to reverse engineer and ship the original Basic ROM with my emulator?)
Croc 2 - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/croc-2-cj0. The only 3D colour videogame we had in our school's computer lab.
Claw - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/claw-a39
The thing - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-thing-bfm
Aurora Feint
I Love Katamari
Things that are functional and complete don't need updating. Why require a subscription model rather than a finished product in a frozen state?
From f-droid I have a few apps that were last updated 11 years ago or something, works just fine. Just tried to find an example, e.g. pizza cost calculator is an app mostly for amusement that had its last real update in 2015 (then in 2021 and 2022 there were updates to support more recent android versions) but I used it literally two hours ago and found that the smaller pizza is cheaper per cm². On my previous phone (2018--2021) I used a 'share to clipboard' app from f-droid, which installs itself as a sharing target. It only ever released v1.0.0 in 2011. Super simple functionality that indeed doesn't need updating; would still use it today if my new phone didn't have that built in. Google would have removed that from their store a decade ago.
Well, maybe not for "Titanic" but there are tons of movies for which the process is pretty much exactly like that.
Video games as a broadly consumed medium are a relatively young feature - let's say some 40 to 50 years. Now, try to easily access most films from the first 40-50 years of cinema!
And even for newer films, if it wasn't for streaming, you would find yourself in the situation that you either watch your favorite movies on outdated technology, or that you have to keep on rebuying the same movies over and over again. And even streaming services provide a fraction what e.g. the original Netflix DVD rental had to offer.
Not in print.
Entities that produced the games and likely were assigned the copyright are game companies, which should be trackable, and in some cases, still exist (like Capcom or Konami). You might have problems hunting down copyright owners for unlicensed games like the Wisdom Tree games, but those all sucked anyway.
It's not like an 8-bit computer platform where individuals produced a lot of content and are hard to find.
It's a real shame since I _love_ old Nintendo games, they really did a fantastic job, but the limited access is sad.
That hasn't stopped book publishers from publishing the classics over and over.
Preservation is super important. Just look at the Shoah Foundation's effort at preserving the video testimonies of survivors: preservation of digital media is complex, difficult and ever-evolving. Preserving video games is even harder: emulators that run on an ever-evolving set of target hardware have to be maintained just to play them. Current trends in video game design almost guarantee that some games are impossible to preserve: they exist as a moment in time, a memory, the articles and blog posts that were written about them.
Shame really that profit is more important than the art and medium. Not surprising. But shameful.
Update: fixed some sentences for clarity.
Copyrite is, by definition, the control of the rights to copy. It is not a mandate that copying must be done, but rather an acknowledgement of the right to control the copies. And that must also, then, include the right to not distribute the work.
This must be balanced with the notion of fair use, though. However, "but I want to access it" does not justify fair use. "I bought a copy and therefore will make backups so that I may enjoy it in the future" does, in my opinion.
Libraries have exceptions codified in copyrite law. Technology has blurred the line as to what constitutes a library (just as it has for journalists, publishers, etc.).
Some advocate for an escalating fee in order to protect copyrite for more and more time. I don't know if that is appropriate, since it seems to me as a form of extortion of rights. Not quite compelled speech, but similar.
I don't know the solution, but I do feel as though our laws are broken and dysfunctional in this regard. I don't have a solution, though, because I honestly don't know enough of the problem domain. Then again, maybe that's the problem... One should not need to be a legal expert in order to keep from breaking the law!
:)
(And I have written a few games in the past that are now on abandonware sites, ha ha.)
I'm less concerned about a gameboy game that you can't buy, but you can easily play via emulators or the physical cartridges, which still exist (for now), than I am with the class of games that are truly gone/unplayable.
Your online only games primarily fall into this bag, but without something like an internet archive or something similar to preserve them, we're in danger of losing the digital copies of old games as well.
Personally, I'd like to see the study expanded and then some sort of index that tracks true loss of media over time.
Not to unduly belittle that metric! - nobody would argue that the USA is not a major player (the biggest, in some respects) - but it's still a significant distinction. The articles nuance of copyright laws, and its figures, and its proposed activism, are all specific to that one national jurisdiction.
Ultimately an intellectual property based economy leads to this without proactive measures limiting IP.
At the time they tried bad preservation idea such as dividing the colors up into separate reels before they realized even relatively fugitive dyes would hold up for centuries if you keep them in a dry freezer.
Let companies value their copyright, and let them pay the cost to maintain that copyright (say a 2% per year cost), and let someone buy that copyright from them at the price they value it at.
I genuinely think if a company has piece of media X that they make a decision to not distribute, it shouldn't be piracy. Things like Nintendo sitting on titles teasing a fat "maybe" of bringing a subscription based access model to on limited hardware isn't cool.
These games sold their last physical copy decades ago, long before an online store. They took them off the market, so fair game. There's zero difference from Nintendo's perspective, of buying a used game vs playing a rom on an emulator.
[1]https://www.axios.com/2021/11/17/microsoft-old-games-preserv...
Their most popular game was an RTS called Chain of Command. You had a squad of four soldiers that you could position on an isometric board designed to look like a farm. 5-10 players would each run their four-man squads into a firefight and play some scenario - seek and destroy, capture the flag, etc.
The other two games I enjoyed were a business strategy game called The Invisible Hand and another RTS where each player took a European country and conquered cities using robot-like walking tanks.
All of the content from 2am Games is lost to history. Chain of Command has some clones out there, but I've never been able to find anything - roms, source code, clones, for the other games. It's a part of my childhood I'll never be able to re-experience.
Edit: I got curious again and did some investigating. Here's their archived home page from 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970707215116/http://www.2am.co...
And those that are for older consoles can usually be emulated just fine.
The ugly spot is the 2000s, but the ps3 and 360 emulator are quickly improving.
Wii/DS/3DS/Switch emulation is basically perfect.
For example, most emulated versions of Mario Sunshine (including the official Switch release!) show these little grey debug cubes in certain levels: https://tcrf.net/Super_Mario_Sunshine#Debug_Cubes
Current Dolphin doesn't show those debug cubes.
As a tangent just because of how impressed I was, I installed Dolphin on Linux via a Apt (I believe) and it just worked. I already had the GameCube USB adapter drivers installed and those just worked out of the box. I don't know how drivers work for selectively compiling with them from the kernel tree, but it appeared that they were part of the main kernel tree and they were just there for me.
luckily the older and more obscure the game also means it's 'easier' to emulate.
Lots of old things are scarce. Arcade games are in the same boat, but you've got MAME and I've got a bit-slice coprocessor and rasterizer ASIC controlled by a 6809 in I,Robot.
Not sure how games are different from other antiques other than the possibility of emulation.
But in those days viruses were truly rampant. I have many Amiga disks with viruses on them. As my Amiga had no hard drive and only 1 floppy there wasn't many places for them to go though.
Hello kernel-level anti cheat developers :)
It'd be so much better if copyright was limited for say, 30 years. So that you could pay when you're young and get it for free when you're old... So you'd pay for novelty, not for content. Dunno...
Titanic was a blockbuster released in 1997, so it would be like Final Fantasy VII only being available at library of congress, which it isn’t. In fact FFVII is continuously being rereleased on modern consoles
Right to preserve our culture should be enshrined in law, because otherwise it will disappear due to adverse relation with copyright law and novel art production.
And at what point do we tell the authors to fuck off - they’re not getting paid any more! Because that is what you are advocating.
They analysed a dataset of ~4,000 video games released in the US before 2010.
Global Warming ?
NFT.
Inflation ?
NFT
Retroemulation people have been preserving the classics since decades, even more with libre (FLOSS) implementations made with SDL/SDL2 making these games ultraportable and eternal.
What does your lovely NFT solve here? Explain.
Business-wise, had that bootleg environment not happened, I suspect someone could've made a killing by re-releasing vintage games on current devices.
Now I suspect most of the nostalgia/familiarity demand is satisfied, and won't return even if you were able to delete every existing emulator, unlicensed ROM image and AV assets, etc.
In many cases, the "legal re-release" is leveraging the technology that was used to emulated the games in "less than legal" situations. For example, GOG wraps DOS games with DOSBox, which is how we in the (illegal) abandonware community used to run them anyway.
Another thing to consider: back in the 2000's or so when I discovered abandonware, almost nobody was legally wrapping the games I wanted to play. I wanted to play them back then; now I have no interest. So the illegal abandonware way was the right way for me. Who cares what would eventually happen 10 or 20 years later? I wanted to play the games then.
IIUC, you're saying that a commercial effort couldn't/didn't offer the vintage games at the time that you wanted to play them, and now you no longer want to play them?
You're also saying that, although you played the games then (with abandonware), the reason you no longer want to play the games now isn't because the abandonware satisfied the desire?
(You think the nostalgia was time-limited, or something else changed for you? Is this generalizable to the rest of the market for vintage games?)
Let me clarify: there was a time in my life, almost two decades ago, where I had no family obligations and lots of spare time, and I went through a nostalgia thing where I played lots of DOS games from my youth. Nowadays this thing holds no interest for me, except more abstractly: I want old games to be preserved, as curious artifacts of an ancient time. I'm sad when a game "dies" of neglect. But playing them? Not for me anymore.
Back then there were "sub-communities" in abandonware. Most abandonware groups were keen to make a difference between them and the so-called "warez kiddies", i.e. people who just downloaded games because they didn't want to pay for them, often recent games but usually whatever. Abandonware in contrast was about preservation, i.e. "how can I play this game? Is there a legal way, or must I pirate it?". There were different degrees of compliance with this "line", but almost everyone understood that Abandonware was about preserving old games, not about piracy just because. Legally there was no difference, piracy is piracy -- but for people in the abandonware community, there was a world of difference.
One of the biggest abandonware websites back then was Home of the Underdogs. The webmaster (a Thai woman who was an investment banker in her country) made a big deal about legality: if she received a takedown notice, she promptly took the download down. And if she found a way to link to a legal way to buy the game, she did so. She provided reviews of the games, so HOTU wasn't just a link farm. If people requested game downloads for games that were obviously available commercially, they got banned promptly.
So let me get back to your final question:
> You think the nostalgia was time-limited, or something else changed for you? Is this generalizable to the rest of the market for vintage games?
- Yes, nostalgia was definitely time-limited for me. I seldom buy DOSBox-wrapped games in GOG anymore; I prefer newer indie games (that I end up not playing because I lack the time, anyway).
- Yes, something changed in me: I grew older, my interests changed, and my spare time became more limited.
- Yes, this is generalizable to all vintage games: if copyright owners don't make an artifact of the digital past available for playing -- and games "want" to be played, they are not static webpages -- then I have the moral right to download them. Within reason, I'm talking about games neglected for decades, not a game temporarily unavailable. Common sense applies.
Would I want to play those oldies now if I hadn't played them back then, thanks to abandonware websites? I dunno. I doubt it, but everything is possible in the realm of "what ifs". Who really cares though? Publishers didn't care back when I had the time and inclination to play them, and that's all that matters ultimately.
So it's not even true that abandonware always translates to lost sales :)
There was always a market there, it just wasn't big enough for the copyright holders to want to bother with.