Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea

Consider whose fault that could be...not a match or a torch in your inventory!

I refuse to believe that there are any non-gamers on HN.

I don't remember turtles in Zork

Originator sells online to customer without transferring copyright: originator gets the longest protection.

Originator sells online to customer and transfers copyright: shorter protection applies, since the originator no longer owns it.

Originator transfers work to LLC: shorter protection applies. You gain LLC benefits for a shorter copyright term.

Corporations cannot be originators.

If you assign work to a different entity, it is no longer owned by the originator, and subject to a shorter copyright term.

OK, but the question is, since Infocom's text adventures weren't particularly punishing, why the sudden change of philosophy in RTZ?

Lucasfilm was already doing very well with no-failure-state graphical adventure games in 1992.

Except for Spellbreaker, which had an early path in the game that seemed like an easy solution but would break the game until the very end and you had NO idea what went wrong. (Incorrectly using Girgol to solve the ragweed problem, when you need it for the VERY LAST PUZZLE in the game to freeze shadow you before he jumps into the tesseract). I think Starcross had a path like this too, but I don't recall. And Infidel never allowed you to get the full score because you were ... an infidel. But that irony was lost on 15 year old me.

My reasoning is:

The original thing has already been created, and proceeds benefit whoever created it (or who they sold rights to).

Whether they choose to continue to actively market it or not, while under copyright, can't be influenced by copyright. Abandonware under copyright is still abandonware.

But! There's a class of derivative works, built on top of the original, that currently can't get made.

If they were, we'd all be better off.

Arguably, I can even see an aggressive sunsetting for derivative works being net positive for the original work's commercial value ("See the original").

> royalties

Debatable. Some sort of FRAND-level payment, for a limited period, seems fair? Not enough to torpedo the economics of anyone using a property. But enough so an originator has a revenue stream for wildly-popular IP.

> slapping popular names

Would this be that bad? If there were Harry Potter crap... how would that be different? Expect there'd be more stuff out there.

It's nice to make works that no longer have commercial value enter the public domain by default.

Another justification: if the harms increase for giving an author exclusivity for a longer time, society should demand a larger payback. This may only be justified for the most prominent works

It feels a little out of calibration. How about free for 20 years; $500 for 10 more, and then 100x for every 10 additional years. Everyone gets 30 years to exploit a work for a reasonable price, and then the price ramps steeply so that very few works are registered beyond 40 years.

A tiny proportion of works will be worth the $50k step, let alone the $5M one. Even Disney will not pay $5M for most things.

And, of course, things that are forgotten or devoid of commercial value will lapse at 20.

Numbers can be tweaked but it adds up quickly.

Protect for 40 years for a million? Sure. Probably worth it for mega IPs

50 years for $100m? Still doable but it really starts to hurt.

60 for $10B? Maybe Pokemon and Mikey mouse can justify it, but very very few.

By 70 years it's simply not worth it.

>This scheme seems to protect the largest companies with the largest bank accounts the most. Why would we want a system like that?

Because the small time authors really won't care in 20 years anyway. Even if the cost to renew is a pittance. Are there authors trying to sell the copyright to a failed IP in 30 years?

They’re not protected—they’re made to pay to keep the work out of public domain. The deepest pockets will likely pay the most.

It's realistic to be adopted cause it acknowledges the takeover of democracy by buisness. What good is a policy, when it in implementation a maiden pure but has no chance in hell to become real? Purity signals are useless, when constructing the signal network that runs society.

Exactly. Works that generate massive amounts of commercial value are therefore more culturally important and should fall out of copyright faster, to maximize the amount of creative derivatives that can be produced while it's culturally relevant.

Works with little to no commercial activity should be protected longer to provide more opportunity to do so and give more protection to unknowns.

Large corporations won't bother to protect something that can't pay the 100x increase - Do you think Activision would have paid for Infocom rights if it cost 200K at this point? Maybe yes, but quite possibly not. But Harry Potter and Lord of Ring owners likely would, no matter whether they are small or large. This money could go to other services, such as education.

For small-time authors, why should they enjoy the intellectual property rights for the rest of their life? The vast majority of people need to keep working to keep generating money.

> Once the free period expires, start at $1, then double each year.

That's going to create a lot of paperwork for not much value. Much better to have 10 year extensions. Your pricing scheme is functionally equivalent to starting at $2000 for 10 years, and increasing the cost by 1000x for each additional 10 years.

> But on the other side, there's still a registration system.

This a thing in the US? It isn't in my country, you just need to be able to prove you own the copyright, a stamped letter or certified document is good enough.

You cannot make blank statements about the US on a platform that has an international audience.

Copyright law is cross border and the US does respect other countries Copyright acts just like other countries respect the US

It is a fundamental truism of American "capitalism" that, if there is a law for something, it was written to protect established "capital" from competition. There are no free markets in the US.

The proportion of books that make money 20 years after publication, after languishing in obscurity for that time, is a rounding error.

Like, how many such books can you actually name?

I think it’s a little different for music, where people sometimes sample fairly obscure old songs and turn them into hits. But then, a lot of those old songs shamelessly ripped off even older works…

> Writing books can be a pretty risky proposition from a financial point of view. Copyright should at least span an authors lifetime in my opinion.

Why is it accepted that patents can last only 20 years then? Like, do you think creating new inventions is easy? Why for one and not the other?

But the bigger thing is that books making significant amounts of money after twenty years is an extreme exception. That's not the motivating thing. It's a "maybe that'd be nice" on top of the desire for revenue in the immediate future, in the first few years of the book coming out.

> If his rights to the IP had expired after 20 years then not only would Netflix been able to rip his work off for free, but he wouldn't have benefitted at all from the resurgence in popularity that his novels garnered. It would've just been gravy for some publishing company -- how would that be fair?

Presumably in the same way that if you sell the mineral rights on a plot of land to someone else, and then they find oil or rubies there, it's thought of as fair that they get the money from that and you don't.

Or how if you sell someone a stock, and it goes up, they get the money from the appreciation and you don't.

Or how if your neighbor finds buried treasure on his land, and you find none on yours, he gets a big finder's fee and you don't get anything. (Indeed, in this case, there are commonly accusations of unfairness, but those tend to focus on the treatment of the neighbor being unfair. You deserved the nothing that you got.)

What's a scenario where this kind of event wouldn't be called fair?

You seem to have missed what I said. I didn't say nobody gets money 25 years down the line, I said people don't write because of the profits they might get 25 years down the line.

Yes, Netflix might've been able to make The Witcher without paying him, and also random Youtubers, complete nobodies, would've been able to make derivative works as well. That's the whole point of expiring copyright.

Does that favor big corporations? Well, it also means anybody and everybody can make Mickey Mouse content, or use the popular Marvel and DC characters, etc. Do you think Disney is a fan of that idea?

So while corporations would take advantage of it, so would random people, including indie artists.

For yhe most part, Code-wise I would not be harmed by that. (We supply source code anyway so there are no secrets there.)

Market-wise I could see a fair bit of confusion as an old (now public domain) version floats around with the same name (but different version number) to the commercial version.

Of course this is likely immaterial anyway. Unless someone bothered to archive the version at the time, that version no longer exists. We can date it (from the release notes) but I no longer have that build in the archive.

So maybe my wariness is unfounded.

At the end of the day, yes. It's all arbitrary and art's monetization came from diferent historical contexts. There could be a timeline where artists are highly respected and well compensated positions while tech is just some nerdy hobby being used for exposure.

But I feel it's more interesting to understand why and how we came to those contexts. e.g. for tech, the big money came from the explosion of tech in the U.S. during the 90's and the vast amounts of money being invested into up and coming companies to take advantage of it. Getting to a point where the biggest companies would give the biggest money to the biggest talent simply to keep them away from competition, or from becoming future competitors themselves. Companies paid for labor and time, so compensation worked accordingly.

I don't have an intimate history in art but I imagine a part of its monetization history comes from the fact that the primary delivery doesn't make that much money on its own; i.e. you don't become rich broadcasting Mickey Mouse on public cable to millions. You get rich selling Mickey Mouse merch and making deals to slap Mickey Mouse on whatever wants the advertising boost. So how do you determine how much to pay the creator in that case, which may make $100 or 1 billion? some sort of rev/profit sharing system makes sense. If it fails they get a pittance and if it becomes huge success the creator retires for life while the IP holder still gets the bulk of the money.