Hacker News Reader

Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

Companies are hypocrites about this. On the one hand they say “we need to shut this down because we’re losing money on it.” On the other hand, asking them to release aspects of the game to self-host the infrastructure: “but that’s our IP and it’s valuable to us.” You shouldn’t be able to have it both ways. Sitting pretty on unprofitable IP in the hopes that it might someday make you money again is a net loss to society.

View on HN

In my personal opinion, the actual problem there relating to "that's our IP" is the length of copyright.

20 years max will provide plenty of reward for creators. Some work on making copyright protect creators first, preferencing them over later owners, would also be good.

We also need works to be free to use, legislated so, after copyright expires. That would be to prevent, for example, Trade Marks being leveraged against users of works on which copyright has expired.

An example here is that Quake was released in 1996 and the source code released in 1999. Quake 2: 1997->2001, Quake 3 Arena: 1999->2005.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue that these releases were negative to ID or the game series.

That's what makes "It's our IP" an excuse and not a reason to not release game source, once the game is commercially irrelevant.

I'd like to see an example of just one game that failed commercially due to a company releasing the source code to an older game.

Our society was designed from the foundations to benefit the owning class, and this is a prime, easily observed example of that. You're completely correct and it doesn't matter, because the point of IP law is to allow people who know nothing to sit on assets they own and make money for doing no work.

If someone wants to argue this position, I would challenge them to explain why anything around IP law exists as it does now if that was not the explicit goal.

The good faith interpretation is that innovation is spurred by having some guarantees that your innovation isn't immediately ripped off. It allows for investing more into R&D.

I'm not saying the current system achieves that, but it is part of the justification.

A good faith interpretation at this point is voluntarily sticking your head in the sand to feign centrism. The purpose of a system is what it does, and ours, too predictably to be mere coincidence, permits capital to endlessly extract value from those actually creating it, to the detriment of those value creators, the people they create value for, and even if they're too dead inside to perceive it, the capital holders themselves.

Initially, copyright and patents were a counter-response to the European guild system.

Early on, you also had to prove your patrnt with a physical thing. Couldnt write the patent to deceive. And for making plain language, you got protection for 17 years.

Now, theres shit like 'business process patents', genetic patents, and other horrible. And patents are now writtten to confuse and hide, unlike plain language.

Copyrights were basically bought by Disney. Theyve been grossly perverted due to money interests.

Im mostly OK with trademarks. It comes from Heraldry and family coat of arms. Trademarked colors are quite bullshit however.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com