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Comment by Pet_Ant | Hacker News Reader

I've felt that properties that earn a certain threshold should become public domain. You've made enough money, and now you are part of the culture. The heft of having created a cultural landmark or cornerstone ought to be enough weight to ensure their other projects get enough of a boost.

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My thought has been a 20- or 30-year term, with one or two renewals at a nominal fee, would work wonders. Orphaned works basically disappear overnight, and the vast majority of works will have exhausted their useful commercial life within those 20-30 years.

I'd also argue that works eligible for copyright must submit a modifiable edition (eg: source code or a DRM-free copy) that is made available to archivists immediately and the general public once the copyright term expires.

20 to 30 years would ensure that abandoned media that was formative to a person growing up will enter the public domain within their lifetimes which would be a nice thing to have in my opinion. It would also ensure that any work done by an artist during the early phase of their career (the phase where artists are most likely to agree to lopsided contract terms) would stand a chance of reverting back to the public domain before the end of that artist's career. Very very few works are making any significant revenue after 30 years. I think a system where initial copyright is free for 20 years, with the option of renewing for an additional 10 years for some fee, and then the option to renew annually after that would be fair. For the very small number of works that are still commercially viable after 30 years, the publishers can figure out how long it makes sense to keep renewing the copyright. Otherwise it really is in the public's best interest to have a robust public domain. Many fewer works would go missing that way.

The way the copyright is structured right now is the result of regulatory capture. The cost of these long terms of copyright is the loss of books, movies, music, games, etc. Millions upon millions of hours of creative labor have been lost. These costs are born by everybody that will never have to chance to have access to that media. The benefits of these long copyright terms are only the publishers. Having an annual renewal fee for copyrighted works published 30 or more years ago would be something that would be a visible cost in the books of large publishers. As it is it is too easy for them to ignore the downsides of long terms of copyright. I am not claiming that no media would be lost if we had no copyright, but the efforts of archivists are difficult enough as it is. Media that is no longer being copied is destroyed eventually. Obviously making it a felony to copy something will reduce the number of people making copies of it. That's the whole point after all.

I keep hoping they'll release Cyberpunk 2077 for open development. They abandoned the RedEngine and the city is really well built.

Did they really abandon it after all that work? The engine itself was basically the only interesting part of that game! (ignoring gameplay-oriented engine stuff).

Given how lackluster most everything was (beyond the visual design of the city) — e.g. physics, crowd interaction, scripted events — maybe the engine was what held their creative vision back?

It took them nearly 2 years, but the game has advanced a lot since it's launch. The Phantom Liberty DLC plus the 2.0 update/rebalancing made it more fun (even if it made it more 'console' and less PC)

They moved devlopment to Unreal 5

Much better

I don't agree with respect to games that are still being worked on by the dev studio, but I would like this for abandoned games, where the studio no longer exists.

Absolutely. I was just reminiscing about a '97 game called "Claw". The studio that made it shut down earlier this year and I wish I could make a sort-of remake of it, but you legally can't. It's not even clear who owns the rights to it anymore.

This Claw?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claw_(video_game)

I mean it's 2D platformer, you should be able to reverse engineer the engine and reuse the assets. I mean the have bit perfect decompiles of N64 games to C now. It's doable.

I feel it should be twofold. The release itself should be 20 years, after which non-commercial things can legally happen - mods, remakes, etc

The ip itself should be 10 years after the last release before its pretty much a non-commercial free for all...with a more complex requirement for third party commercial products.

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