Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlienRobot | Hacker News Reader

Whom would you side with?

People whose livelihoods and retirement depend on their copyright.

Or people who want to play old video-games for free.

Show me an actual person whose livelihood or retirement depends on their copyright (and not, say, owning somebody else's copyright). I'm not convinced that the current state of copyright law actually benefits authors and artists.

Nearly all fiction authors own the copyrights to their books. They have an agreement with publisher to publish it and they get the royalties. If that agreement ends, they can find a new publishers. The authors get an advance and if book is popular enough, they get royalties.

Any semi-famous author would do, no? Famous authors everyone's heard of are probably rich enough that they have other investments via money they earned from their copyrights, but arguably that's still a living derived from their owning of copyright. So let's start with hearing why, say, Stephen King, Charlie Stross, and J. K. Rowling aren't actual people who's living (sizable as it may be) doesn't depend on their copyright on the books they wrote, before we look for any lesser known authors. Taylor Swift makes a living off her music, which is dependent on copyright. Or have I missed something somewhere?

Taylor Swift makes a lot of her money from being Taylor Swift (i.e., tours), per https://www.investopedia.com/taylor-swift-earnings-7373918:

> The 12-time Grammy Award winner made more than $780 million on the U.S. leg of the Eras Tour, according to an estimate by Forbes. The total ticket sales from Swift's 2023 Eras Tour could make her the highest-grossing female touring artist of all time, according to Billboard. The Eras Tour could gross over $1 billion, making concert history as the first billion-dollar tour, according to The Wall Street Journal.

J.K. Rowling doesn't have exclusive rights to her books, past the first couple. Lots of copyright-related suits (most?) are made by Warner Bros. She's fully capable of mobilising her fanbase (or, was, at least, before she went off on the deep end) to prevent or restrict what she considers misuse of the Harry Potter brand. (And, as you say, she doesn't need the money.)

Copyright isn't why Toby Fox need never go hungry. His work is trivial to pirate, he doesn't even bother enforcing copyright on his music; and yet he's probably a millionaire, with more works on the way.

Okay so say I write a book. And I go to a publisher and show them the book I wrote.

What is the name of the law that prevents the publisher from kicking me out of the building, printing the book I wrote, and making money off it?

That would be copyright law. Is this a deliberate misinterpretation of my request, or do I need to make GP clearer?

Your request is that I find you someone who has benefited from a law that makes entire professions viable?

Does this help? https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/

Or do you want a list of movie directors? Perhaps of authors of assets in asset stores for game development? Comic artists?

Do you want a Spotify playlist?

Nobody is suggesting throwing out all copyright protections.

But someone IS suggesting that people lose copyright protections over some of their works, and eventually all of them when they don't have 10 thousand dollars to pay to keep their rights per work after just 20 years.

In your analogy with this context, the publishing company can’t print the book for ten years after being approached by the author.

Being able to play old video games for free is not the point though, it's just a nice side effect of an intellectual property regime with a reasonable duration, say something less than 150 years.

With the people that understand that reality isn’t as black and white as you make it out to be and that will hopefully find better compromises going forward.

the people who want to play old videogames for free

Reminds me about how many times I've ended up buying the same game I already own, but on another platform because the original is on something I no longer have reasonable access to anymore. (I don't have a television with a RF modulator handy and getting a proper setup working takes more effort than I'm willing to put in at this age.)

Unfortunately, the other people have more lobbying power...

There are no residuals for game devs. It's work for hire, so holding on to this idea that they will get paid money for every sale (even after it's no longer sold - but maybe somehow once these assholes "resurrect" a game they never bothered to bring back after 30 years, will somehow benefit the actual people who made it is a joke). This has nothing to do "their livelihood and retirement"It's about protecting corporate profits in the very slim case they may discover that bringing something back (ha sure) will benefit the corporation that OWNS the rights.

IP isn't the same across the board it's not like game devs are singers who have ASCAP/BMI etc protections. Game devs are code jockeys who get shit on by the corporations with NO rights to the actual work THEY produced. Why do you act like this is the same as music with perpetual rights to the actual creators? It rarely if ever is.

You can go ahead and "blame" the workers you claim to support for failing to "put that in their employment contract, it is a "free market" for labor, after all" or you can work on changing the system to at least let the past be free and open and history have a chance of being important or just let it all be locked in a vault, in disuse in the "hope" that maybe someday a corporation will "release" it again as a game. Or you can let people who ARE passionate about it work on it and let the public have the right to it.

As the parent comments point out, the LITERAL REASON OF COPYRIGHT IN THE US CONSTITUTION is to benefit the public. It has nothing to do with giant corps getting rich as fuck off other people's labor. Contract law gets in the way and lets these pricks steal the work and wealth, deny people the rights and only THEY get the benefit, this is the precise opposite of the public benefit intended.

Culture happens on faster and faster cycles than ever before, yet instead of admitting the speed of it, these behemoths who own IP, demand continual extensions (well until the most recent time when Disney finally relented and let Steamboat Willy enter the Public Domain recently).

Instead of promoting "innovation" (as phrased in the US Constitution), it promotes lethargy slouch and continued re-use of the same things. It's the exact opposite of the intent. And no, this bullshit about "livelihoods and retirement" mean jackshit in game dev. You shit your game out, you got paid for that work, and that's it. All the excess profits go to the corp, not the actual devs. IP in this case is not about humans owning/making, and it's corporations through and through, and unless you held onto the same corporation for 40 years, as the creator, it's not going to be you getting the supposed benefit of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com