I'm reminded of how trademarks work: If you don't bother to defend them, then you lose them. Maybe copyright should be the same way: If you're not distributing copies any longer, you lose the copyright protection.
Things like video games are much harder to archive than text. Keeping them running 70 years after the death of the author is already a herculean task. Doing that, when no copies are being distributed could make that entirely impossible.
The current copyright system is going to rob the public domain of many of the cultural treasures that we are entitled to.
And apparently the videos are no longer available to download, so it's not an option, anyway.
Barring some change of heart by the copyright holder, these episodes are gone forever.
> Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.
It’s a trade. The default state of affairs is no copyright protection.
Society has decided to trade a limited duration monopoly on the copyright of the work, in order to promote more works being created so that we have more works in the public domain.
The entire purpose of copyright is to generate works for the public domain.
So, when the current copyright system fails to do that, we should change that.
You can’t seriously tell me that if we had a law that said: if you don’t make a video game available commercially for 30 years, it enters the public domain, that would have a meaningful impact on the number of video games created.
Is it? Or do we just think on average, producing more copyrighted works adds to the greatness and happiness of our society?
The writing of Harry Potter has brought joy to hundreds of millions of people. The production of a renowned textbook like SICP helps educate an entire generation of professionals and raise the nation's productivity.
(Same thing with patents, that were intended to help more inventions be published, and not be lost as trade secrets, while also helping to build businesses around them..)
In order to encourage more people to make these works, however, our government grants them a temporary, limited monopoly on the work's reproduction and distribution, but this is a means to an end that we agree to for utilitarian reasons, not some kind of actual inherent right on their part or responsibility on mine.
Copyright protects works at the moment they are created, not when they are reproduced or distributed. Most of the works under copyright protection have never been distributed.
Creative works aren't made in a vacuum, all creators take from the public domain. They have an obligation to give back to it.
Copyright and patent terms were designed to facilitate that. The endless extensions of the former were a cynical, self-serving attack on a public good.
The exclusive ability to copy is granted as a conceit.
The restriction only came about because publishers got mad.
Sounds like Author's Rights to me.
US copyright law took a very different path though.
I mean, after life + 70 years you already are entitled to other people's work. And a purpose of patents was to get people to release ideas so culture as a whole can grow from them, rather than just keeping them as trade secrets or whatever.
I absolutely think people should be able to receive some money for it, maybe even for life + 70 years, and people can always not release things, but I think once it's released it's not just yours any more, as it lives in the public conscious.
The copyright terms are set by lobbyist and corporations in a political process where the public interest has no representation.
More of an obstacle is competition from free past versions - a lot of people would be happy with a 10 year old version of Photoshop or MS Office. That's why I think it should be extendable to 20 years with a hefty fee (but not further, or only with a much heftier fee).
The GPL defines the source as the preferable working format to make changes and updates to the program, but you can see how that definition blows up in your face when there is no published source to begin with. "Your honor, that 50MB binary file that has a signature of a GCC compiled program IS the preferred working format for our company; indeed, it was created from temporary text files, but they were deleted as they were deemed unnecessary for a technically advanced company such ourselves. All further updates will be made in assembly language via binary patching, for maximum efficiency".
Also if the best of your "great number of reasons" is fallacious legal reasoning of the type software engineers tend to be drawn to, then I don't think that's much of an argument.
Also handcrafted assembly isn't sufficient for your argument, but rather one would have to directly write a binary with a hex editor. Show me any binary larger than say 1 MB that was written with a hex editor. So really the burden of proof would be on anyone claiming that a large binary is direct creation.
That's not how any of this works. Once I've submitted my binary to the escrow, then it's an original work worthy of copyright until challenged. If someone breaks my copyright, I simply assert my originality and get an injunction against it by default. If the adversary claims my work is a derivative, then the legal burden is on them to prove it - because they are the ones rising it as defense against infringement. So I've already quashed 90% of adversaries by this point just by legal intimidation.
Also, you are attacking a strawman version of this problem. In practice, what will be submitted to the repository are binary object files for the core proprietary sections that are unlikely to be changed, for example the file format definitions to preclude interoperability. Anything else can be source, the final linker step is automated etc. The market will also offer tools for binary randomization and compiler signature obfuscation.
So you are left with a technological arms race that needs to be settled in court, on a case by case basis, using expert testimony where the burden of proof belongs to the infringer. It's just absurd to think anything like this could ever work in practice to promote source availability, or there would be public benefits to put such a highly litigious system in place.
Are you referring to some existing system? Because otherwise we're discussing in the abstract how this could work. And it would be straightforward for the copyright office to have a rule prima facie rejecting machine-executable binaries being claimed as original works, unless compelling proof were submitted that it had been directly created. Because as I said, show me any substantial executable that has been directly created with a hex editor.
The idea of a company choosing a few critical parts that they then (honestly or dishonestly) claim as original binary works is interesting. But note that this still would go a long way towards making the overall work part of the public domain when it expired - such blobs are highly unlikely to contain references to libraries with API churn and whatnot. And even if they somehow do, since they are small enough to be directly worked on, they can be directly fixed.
Pulling back copyright doesn't necessarily force people to share -- people can also keep secrets. A primary purpose of IP law is to encourage sharing.
And my overall point is that a work that has been compiled/DRMed/etc will never enter (be shared with) the public domain even after the copyright term expires - rather it will still remain subject to the technical protections. And so I don't think it's at all appropriate to use the word "sharing" to describe such works.
> compiled/DRMed/etc will never enter (be shared with) the public domain even after the copyright term expires - rather it will still remain subject to the technical protections.
You could argue da Vinci did the same with his underdrawings. And many other artists have similarly not shared their sources. You're making more of an argument about a right of collaboration, which is not only a completely different argument, it is the opposite of what copyright attempts to do, which is to give rights to the original artist.
If you're making the suggestion that artists should be compelled to share sources, I disagree and think that is extremely shortsighted. Sharing should be done voluntarily by the artist, and if they don't want to share their sources and methods, they shouldn't be required to. In absence of that right, chilling effects on artistic freedom are an obvious outcome. I love FOSS licensing, but those types of arrangements should be voluntarily chosen by authors, not compelled by the force of law.
And no I'm not talking about a right of collaboration. "Collaboration" implies the original author is still alive and even participates with some back and forth. I'm talking about the ability to simply use creative works after they're supposed to have become part of the public domain - not still locked behind the non-expiring technical block of digital restrictions management, not unusable due to API churn, etc.
Even Brood War is still satisfactorily supported 26 years after its release. Though I think that’s definitely long enough to consider the option of public domain.
#1 - It was LAN first, offline, distributed as Shareware. The forgiving netcode and leniency of distribution ended up with it as a standard install on any Internet Cafe on the planet in the early 00s. It also hit Korean culture at exactly the right moment for it to go so popular as to become a cultural touchpoint. There's a Malcolm Gladwell book in there somewhere - it literally became South Korea's unofficial national sport [1]
[1]https://www.wsj.com/video/starcraft-south-korea-unofficial-n...
#2 - It was subject to a high-profile remaster as part of Blizzard's "Classic Games division", who also did rushed and careless remasters of Diablo 3 and Warcraft 3. The post-release monetization here is quite telling, as it was basically all aimed at the Korean market - popular South Korean StarCraft casters and Children's TV hosts providing the available announcer packs, with the main cosmetic being a chibi-'cartoonised' version of the standard asset pack.
The copyright lobby frames that question in a profoundly toxic way: are there any marginal profits that can still be milked for our IP portfolio? Of course there are, you can milk pennies even from "Steamboat Willie" and Chaplin movies, but that doesn't mean we should have perpetual copyright.
What matters is the first few years where 90% of the profits are made, that's what motivates the creator; motivating the creator enough to create and "promoting the useful arts" are the purpose of copyright, there is no "natural" right to one's ideas and creation. It's a social and political compromise for the good of all.
Indeed, Blizzard developer Jason Hall previously revealed that a single cosmetic skin for your horse in WoW made more money than the entirety of sales from Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.
The only reason that Starcraft2 is alive at all is the late-cycle introduction of a co-op mode, with microtransaction gated cosmetics, 'commanders', and commentator voicepacks. The online is all but dead, with almost no moderation and stewardship, and plagued by maphackers at all tiers. Even something as basic as the EU MMR brackets for tier ranking are completely broken for nearly a year.
The issue here isn't so much, "Are Blizzard allowed to charge for SC2?", but "What would happen if Blizzard pulled the plug on SC2 servers?" It would very much be a shame if a game like that were suddenly ripped out of the culture.
The recent resurge of interest and player activity based on a wildly unbalanced and broken but fun 'Broodwar Units in SC2' mod is testament to this [1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1cqw7hv/sc1_vs_s...
I agree that there is lock-in with online multiplayer games, but it's more on the game servers than the distributed content. So it's only marginally a copyright issue.
Copyright (and patent) law generally follows the latter in western nations, but there’s nuance because third-party derivative works can easily contain elements which the original IP owners might feel are “derivatives” of newer innovations from subsequent updates, even if the third-party feels they only based their work on the original release.
There’s often a lot of room for reasonable minds to disagree, and it can be difficult to create quality third-party derivatives which avoid any similarities to newer versions of the IP.
Think of creating a modern representation of Mickey Mouse. If you create a new version of Mickey Mouse based on the 1928 version in Steamboat Willy, it is difficult to make something that looks relatively contemporary without creating something that looks arguably derivative of the 1953 work “The Simple Things” or the 1940 work “Fantasia”. You could play it safe by using something that looks like a carbon copy of Steamboat Willy, but if your personal artistic vision involves a more contemporary art style, it is understandably difficult to make it unambiguously not a derivative of more recent depictions that are still under copyright.
For the Starcraft 2 example - in a thought experiment where the 14 year old “Wings of Liberty” version is now public domain but the 11-year old “Heart of the Swarm” expansion pack and current 9-year old “Legacy of the Void” version of StarCraft 2 are both still under copyright. You want to make a new single-player campaign which takes place after LotV and doesn’t retcon any canon events (many of which are still copyrighted). A careful creator would probably understand they couldn’t make any references to Amon being reborn and defeated by Artanis, because that plot is from the still-copyrighted Legacy of the Void. But would you be able to write a storyline that contains any acknowledgements that Zeratul died? (Zeratul died at the hand of his friend, Artanis, due to some of Amon’s mind-control machinations during that same LotV campaign)
I think a creator would have to be careful precisely how their storyline acknowledges Zeratuls death. If its just a few characters generically lamenting the loss of a great/controversial man…probably fine? What if the loss of their friend Zeratul was specified to have occurred “in battle” with no other specifics about the battle? I have no clue. If your storyline includes a tiny quip about Artanis dealing with unspecified guilt/shame over Zeratul’s unspecified death … then that might be technically infringing until LotV falls out of copyright, because some people may feel that it’s specific enough to be definitely derived from the LotV campaign.
Note that all three of these similar examples are where a creator does in fact intend to create a derivation of copyrighted materials to create a sequel campaign to the uncopyrighted work which is still “in-canon” with respect to still-copyrighted works. Its just exploring where is the line of “how much derivation can you morally and/or ethically and/or legally get away with before at least one reasonable person genuinely feels you have elements that are unambiguously derived from still-copyrighted content?”
For “legally” getting away with something you have to consider the costs of successfully defending yourself against lawsuits from notoriously overly-litigious corporations like Disney/Nintendo/Blizzard. Are you so safe that you could get a summary dismissal or is there any reason it could qualify for awards of punitive damages under Anti-SLAPP laws?
However if the goal is to just distribute the original public domain work legally, then that's easy and convenient. That alone would be hugely beneficial for games.
Copyright is a tax on society. It's not an inalienable right. We keep it for the noble purpose of encouraging authors to create. We don't want them to rest on their laurels. So why are we locking up all of our content for life plus 70? It sounds like a prison sentence.
I realize that removing the paperwork saved the Government paying for a bunch of jobs and removed a source of accidental "got ya" style mistakes of subtly misfiled paperwork. But the paperwork was also meant to help archival purposes. There was even a time that everything filed needed to send a full copy to the Library of Congress, guaranteeing at least one archival copy. (But then publishing far outpaced the Library's physical space and ability to actually archive everything.)
We have the technology to automate the jobs out of the paperwork and maybe at least the possibility to build an endowment for digital archives that don't need to worry as much about physical space, so maybe it's also time to think about bringing the paperwork back.
“The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.“
Curiously, this also happens today. Grocery stores dump a lot of perfectly good food and other goods, and some of them figure that it can't be that someone dumpster-dives instead of buying, therefore they instruct employees to make the trash unusable. Example I've seen first-hand was when throwing away a perfectly good box of laundry detergent, they would open it and spill it into a container of perfectly good fruits and veggies, to make both unusable.
I'm not a freegan, but I knew a few at some point, and the stories I heard even in my local area, makes the quote feel 100% believable.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/feb/02/johnsteinbeck....
Farmers were going bankrupt because there was so much food that they couldn't sell. It was the time when people developed the habit of eating meat daily, as people were buying out the food, and fed it to animals. There wasn't at any point a famine.
It's a tall tale.
And the originally-quoted passage is about farmers destroying crops as part of price controls due to overproduction.
Could you provide any kind of evidence that the supply of food was evenly shared? Steinbeck spent a lot of time with impoverished farm workers before writing the Grapes of Wrath, so I'm inclined to believe his description of them.
I'm not obligated to find a proof against fiction, when all real accounts show food prices almost halving in a decade, in fact I would be willing to speculate that the dust storms that came were in fact caused by the abandonment and large areas being left unsown, with no cover to hold the soil together.
Wealthy farmers destroyed crops that weren't worth the money to sell, yes, and poor farmers went under. That's not a surprising idea, given that it continues to happen in our modern farming system all the time during periods of overproduction.
>I'm not obligated to find a proof against fiction
But you might be compelled to give some counterproof to Steinbeck's non-fiction reporting, which was also linked above.
All first hand accounts of the dust bowl talk about sandstorms bringing sand, everything getting burried in sand. No first hand accounts seem to talk about fields getting stripped of soil, that was documented after the fact. This suggests that the source of the dust were fields that had been abandoned.
It doesn't even make sense, Oklahoma isn't dry, the American south is very humid.
Sure you can. Food supply is not just a question of production, you also need logistics and will to distribute. There is currently a global food surplus, but areas of the world are still undergoing famine.
>in fact food prices were dropping
Up to 1931. If you look at the data into the actual Dust Bowl years, 1932 to 1936, prices go back up significantly.
>It doesn't even make sense, Oklahoma isn't dry, the American south is very humid.
But the Dust Bowl occurred in an extended drought period when Oklahoma was incredibly dry. And while it's true that topsoil was lost from fields that weren't farmed, those fields were fallow because of the drought - crops couldn't be grown in the dry conditions.
The fields were abandoned because the prices were so low that cultivating them wasn't profitable. This in fact could have caused the drought as well, as much of the rain in such climates is recycled - the water that evaporated rains back down. And, it can't evaporate well without plants to bring it up from the soil, but only the surface dries out. This might have lead to the dried out top layes getting repeatedly blown away, until the fields got successfully overgrown, and the rains returned.
The irony is that the soviet socialist society failed way, way harder and that average soviet family was far more impoverished than the evicted farmers from the book: those gringos had a car!
Copyright also protects work that people wish to keep private, or work that people want to share at some times, with some people, but not all people.
(Also depending on how that idea might be implemented, it could cause some strange situations for copyleft software)
And also, the copyleft complication too: If Bob writes a FOSS app with a GPL license, and it becomes popular, but then Bob retires and stops distributing it, does the copyright expire?
I don't think the problem being discussed here is insurmountable to solve, I just think the proposed solution opens a whole new can of worms. I think a good start at a solution is to first shorten the duration of copyright.
Any content, once published/distributed/broadcast in the US, that is not made readily available to the public going forward loses copyright protection. This includes revisions.
* A film, TV show, sound recording, book, or any other copyrighted content must, once made available for public purchase, always remain available. If the only streaming service willing to pay to stream your movie has the smallest market share, too bad; the market has spoken on the value of your content. An ebook can fulfill this purpose for a print book; streaming can fulfill this purpose for a theatrical or physical-media film. But it must be available to maintain copyright.
* Compulsory licensing should apply; if Netflix wants to pay the same amount of money as the above-mentioned small market-share streaming service for the film, Netflix must be allowed to do so. The film's rights owner can demand more, raising the price for all, but if every outlet refuses, the film immediately goes into public domain. This process is reversible, but it would set a ceiling to prevent the owner from setting a ridiculously high price to prevent its availability.
* If a Blu-ray of a film or TV show has excised or modified scenes for whatever reason, and the original isn't also made available (whether on a different "theatrical cut" release, or as a different cut on the same disc), the entire original version immediately goes into public domain.
* If NBC posts Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube that have removed "problematic" scenes[1] without explaining the differences—a diff file, basically—the entire original skit loses copyright protection.
Separate issue, but also very worthwhile:
* Streaming services must make all data regarding their content available in some standardized format. Consumers should be able to use one application to access all content they have access to. The creator of SmartTube (a very nice YouTube-compatible player) should be able to add the appropriate API support to search for and play Netflix/Prime Video/Disney+/Paramount+ content.
The above applies to software, too. Legalize abandonware!
[1] Something I understand already happens
Then you own that physical painting.
> Do I lose the copyright then
Yes
> and someone is permitted to come to my home and take it away?
No, but if you gave your friend Bob a copy of the painting, he's allowed to copy that copy as much as he wants once you lose the copyright.
The original copyright system-- you could only get the full term by extending 14 years in. That's maybe a little early. But making you pay a fee to keep the exclusivity and/or show recent use in trade makes sense.
Wouldn't this require Bob to outlive the artist by many, many years? My understanding was that copyright extends well past the death of the original creator.
EDIT: I'm curious why this is downvoted. Am I incorrect about the length of copyright being decades past the death of the creator? A quick google shows that it extends to 70 years past the life of the creator, [1] which means that it would be quite unlikely that an adult who receives artwork from the creator would live to see the time when it's not under copyright. That is, even if the artist died the next day, it would be 70 years before the copyright expires.
1: https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...
A. Someone proposed making copyright "use it or lose it"
B. Someone else said this could have unintended consequences, like people breaking into your house to take a copy of a work where copyright has lapsed.
C. I pointed out that's not how copyright works: it has nothing to do with control of physical artifacts.
D. You then presumed that the copyright runs for a long time, which contradicts the premise we're talking about in "A", and is completely out of left field. (In any case, it's irrelevant to the question in B-C; if I have the one of the only extant copies of something from a century ago, you still can't come take it to make a copy).
Let me give you some examples of why these laws are actually good:
* Adverse possession: Imagine someone has been living and maintaining a property for 30 years. They have a single family home, and a driveway. They have a fence around all of their property, and they pay taxes on all of the area. The footprint of the property is exactly as they bought it 30 years ago. Their property is beside a piece of undeveloped, unoccupied, unmaintained land. Today, a land developer purchases the undeveloped land, and they come up with a 100 yr old document that shows that the part of the lot where their driveway is should be part of their lot. The developer then demands that the fence be torn down, and the driveway be given to them, despite the fact that the homeowner bought the property that way, has paid taxes on and maintained that property for 30 years, and nobody has brought this up as an issue in the past 100 years.
* "Squatters" (really, tenants) rights: Imagine someone rented a home in 2020. They've been paying rent every month since then, on a month-to-month basis, without a written lease. In 2024, the home was sold to an investor who wants to renovate the home and flip it. The investor wants to flip the home as quickly as possible, so they tell the tenant to leave immediately with no notice. They call the police and tell them that someone is squatting in their home. The police tell the owner that they must file for eviction, because they are not capable of determining whether the person living in the home is a "squatter" or a tenant. Only a court can do this.
Adverse possession is really just a recognition that mistakes made a long time ago shouldn't undo current realities. And "squatters rights" are really just a recognition that tenants don't have to defend their own property rights in front of a cop on their front porch at 2am on a Tuesday, they get to defend their rights to their leased property in court.
If you paint something, show to a few people, then decide to put it in the drawer, nobody cares. However, if you displayed that painting in galleries for the past 20 years, became semi-famous for it, and then decide to destroy your work, I'd say the public has a stake and a right to say "no", to at least make and preserve some copies. On top it being an asshole move to destroy well-known work, even if you have the right to do it.
> And copyright is not forever.
It effectively is if you destroy the work before your copyright on it expires.
I could see how this might make sense for things that can be perfectly copied, but not so much for anything that is even slightly 3D.