Why Games Should Enter The Public Domain
rockpapershotgun.com
rockpapershotgun.com
But the idea that a 20-year limit is too short to encourage authors and musicians and game developers to create new creative work is ludicrous. If anything, the essentially unlimited copyright of today encourages less creative output and less innovation. Why develop any new characters or stories if you've got multiple generations worth of copyright left to go? Keep pumping out the sequels.
For example, when the subject is first copyrighted, it enjoys all the protections we have today, but say at different time periods (6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, etc.) more things become fair use or public domain.
As a simple example, take a copyrighted song. When first registered, it would have all the protections known today. But suppose that after awhile, the allowed cases of fair use are extended.
So at a certain point still within the copyright period, people may be able to use certain bars of the song. And eventually people might be able to do their own covers of the song, perhaps more/earlier fair use is granted for those not earning money on it, e.g. your YouTube fan videos. And at a certain point, people can start using parts of the song in other works that are not wholly dependent on the song, such as use in a background track to a small segment in in a YouTube video like the credits out-tro.
Michael Jackson made billions off the Beatles catalog, for example. The songwriting copyrights, not the recordings.
"Since the Copyright Act of 1909, United States musicians have had the right to record a version of someone else's previously recorded and released tune, whether it's music alone or music with lyrics.[7] A license can be negotiated between representatives of the interpreting artist and the copyright holder, or recording published tunes can fall under a mechanical license whereby the recording artist pays a standard royalty to the original author/copyright holder through an organization such as the Harry Fox Agency, and is safe under copyright law even if they do not have any permission from the original author. Other agents who can facilitate clearance include Limelight, the online mechanical licensing utility powered by RightsFlow. The U.S. Congress introduced the mechanical license to head off an attempt by the Aeolian Company to monopolize the piano roll market.[8]"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#United_Stat...
Any artists who haven't allowed their recordings to make it to electronic distribution are also drowned in poor covers online. AC/DC was a great example of this problem until they finally gave in and released their stuff digitally. There's still a ton of AC/DC cover recordings on iTunes.
But this is really beside the original point. The point is that copyright was intended to promote the progress of science/arts/knowledge and there are a lot of things right now that don't fall into fair use and hinders progress.
Here are some other examples. Many years ago when the Internet was first going mainstream, fan websites of TVs and movies were getting cease and desist letters because they had pictures of the actors in their roles on their websites. Technically this is still a violation, but most companies now at least have the sense to turn a blind eye. You'll see even on Wikipedia, there are a lot of reservations of posting a screenshot of a tv show, movie, or video game because of this.
Another random example is fan fiction. This seems like it would be a good candidate for rules to relax over time. At first, fan fiction may more restricted because the original authors may in fact want to write their own sequels. But over the course of time the work enters the public stream of consciousness and progress via things like fan fiction should be allowed instead of hunted down and destroyed.
Another example comes from an actual case law I can't remember the details from, but a book essentially about 'The most important things you should know when dating a Trekkie'. It made references to episodes in Star Trek so they got sued. Because it didn't directly parody Star Trek, it didn't fall under fair use. If I recall, the book lost the case. Again, since Star Trek has been deeply absorbed into the culture, it makes sense that copyright protection needs to weaken over time to allow more ideas/expression instead of hinder them. (A related topic might be the subtle distinction between parody and satire which is also currently a problem in current copyright law.)
I have worked with public domain material quite a bit. Currently, anything published in the United States prior to 1923 is in the public domain in the United States [1][2]. Some works published after 1923 are also in the public domain if they meet certain conditions (e.g. a work published in 1925 with a copyright notice where the copyright was never renewed), but it can be an extreme headache to work out which post-1923 works are in copyright and which are not.
Although I am in no way a fan of the current system, it at least has the advantage of clarity for pre-1923 works.
In a proposed system of copyright extension, renewal or terms that are in other ways modifiable on a per-work basis, establishing whether or not works are still in copyright would become an absolute nightmare. Consider that, in the US, copyright applies to any eligible creative work at the moment it is "created and fixed in a tangible form" [3]. In the internet age, millions or billions or works are created each day that are protected by copyright. Most of these works do not have a title and will never be registered anywhere, but copyright applies none the less. A central registry of copyrighted works is impossible, much less a registry that records the specific extensions or renewal term on a per-work basis.
In my opinion, the only possible system that can work is one based on fixed lengths of time. If copyright is extendable, the large majority of works will fall into a legal grey area where it is unclear whether or not the copyright has been extended and almost impossible to find out. Under such a system, the only safe approach to handling copyrighted works would be to assume each work had had its copyright extended to the maximum term possible under law, unless it was provable that was not the case (which, as I have argued, would be extremely difficult).
Under a fixed-term system, it is simple to work out whether or not most works are still copyrighted, even in cases where the title, author of record or copyright holder are not identifiable.
[1] There may be some obscure exceptions to this rule, but it holds broadly enough that I have never encountered any in practice.
It won't even be a large corpus; the works that anyone would care about after 30 years (or, in better concert with the current system, 70 years) would be rather manageable.
To eliminate "grey area", make the USPTO (or LoC or whatever) the final word on whether something is still registered. Ask 'em, they say "yes" or "no", and you're done. Instruct the registry to provide wide latitude in considering slightly different versions the same work to cut down on combinatorics.
It actually puts more of a book-keeping burden on the copyright owners than the government, but if you have 30 year+ still-producing assets, presumably you can manage such a slow-motion system.
It's not a perfect system, granted, but it's better than the alternative: eternal or eternally-extending copyright, with the original horizon being "Steamboat Willie". With a registered-renewal system, Disney can keep their crap and we can get the rest of the corpus.
(For bonus points, the registration fee increases with each renewal, to make sure you really think it's valuable. Powers of two would be nice.)
Consider a short story published in a literary journal last week. Allow a copyright system to exist that covers each eligible work for 30 years by default, and allows multiple extensions of 5 years at a cost of $1000 per extension per work, up to a total copyright term of 100 years.
Someone in 2047 discovers a copy of this particular journal issue, which has now become obscure. They identify that this short story, though never being given acclaim, has had a subtle yet profound cultural influence. They decide to republish the story in their own commercial magazine, but want to check if the copyright has been extended. If it has not, the story is in the public domain. If is has been extended, the story is still covered by copyright.
They can search the central registry for the title of the short story and the name of the author. But they also have to search for the names of the editors of the journal, because it isn't clear whether or not the copyright stayed with the author or was transferred to the journal as part of the submission process. In fact, the copyright might have been granted to the owner of the journal, which may be an individual or may be an institution. The entry for the copyright might be under the title of the short story, or under the title for the journal, or under the title of that particular issue of the journal.
Furthermore, the author of the story, if they retained the copyright, may have submitted the story under a pen name, and/or may have registered the copyright of the short story under a different title than the title they used to submit to the journal, or the title might have been changed by the editors.
Or, the author, after having the short story accepted by the journal, may have sold it to a publisher who published it in a short fiction anthology, the copyright for which is registered completely separately and is essentially invisible to our hypothetical future researcher.
Any of these agents might have extended the copyright. It would be extremely difficult to prove to a high degree of certainty that the story was or was not covered by copyright.
Violation of a registered copyright only carries punishment if "the" UUID of the work is registered and is contained in the work (byline, front page, whatever as appropriate). Doesn't actually matter if the UUID has any relationship to the work, although it would be nice if it did.
Example, This HN post from 2014 is registered copyright UUID 12345-23-242342 by VLM.
In 2097 simply check https://copyright.example/12345-23-242342 for current status. Instead of copyright.example, I hope they can think of a more intelligent international (interplanetary?) domain name, but the general idea holds.
Don't want copyright enforced on a work created in 2015, simply neglect to list the UUID you got at registration. I see no reason a registration should be expensive other than the usual crooks trying to eliminate competition. No technological reason.
False claim (intentional random numbers instead of valid registration) equals instant public domain.
Essentially this large integer is the title - registration ID - type of concept for this copyrighted media.
Personally I think it would be awesome if the title generator also stored licensing info. My panoramic landscape photo is not only registered to me, but is CC:NC. If you messed with the system you could force all UUID beginning with 0 to be all rights reserved, all UUID beginning with 9 to be CC:SA. Just keep on generating UUIDs until you get ASCII codes for C, C, S, and A as the first 4 bytes for a CC:SA UUID. Or the first 3 bytes being ASCII G, P, and L. Better be a long/wide UUID system.
And it's worth considering that every tweet, every photo on Flickr, every video on YouTube, every status update on FB, and so on, constitutes a new copyrightable work. Not everyone will care about the copyrights of their tweets, but some will. How do you copyright something for which you have no control of the identifiers? I assume you don't intend for people to hit up the service for a new UUID before tweeting and embed the token in their tweet?
(Obviously this problem would go away if e.g. Twitter itself signed onto this scheme, automatically registering and UUIDing your tweets on your behalf.)
Is taken care of by
"Violation of a registered copyright only carries punishment"
Or if thats a non-starter just reduce all the penalties by 1e6 or perhaps 1e3 for violation of an untagged work.
Retweeting being a copyright violation, but if a REGEX doesn't find a UUID in there, the legal cost would be a micropayment transaction, so probably ignored.
I would have to re-read Berne to determine if this sneaks by on a technicality, or if Berne is simply culturally and technologically obsolete. Its a copyright treaty, not an economic suicide pact... can be worked around.
It would also be basically impossible for anything more intensive than text.
> you might have a 35-year-old work and have no idea if its copyright has been extended because it was not originally printed with a number
No... if protection is contingent on publication of the number along with the work, then a work printed without a number is unprotected. There is no concept of "extending copyright" on a work that isn't even copyrighted.
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/consultations/2013/copyr...
Even non-complete surveys will be considered and you can be sure your contribution will be read since the number of contributions is always relatively low.
The same goes for any other EU citizens on HN. Now is the time to make yourself heared!
Because it is very easy to suggest this, when there is no downsides to you.
Now, as a developer and game creator, I do have some fish in the boat, but I also agree that a 20 year limit should exist.
The same is true if we had maybe 10,000 Zelda games on the market. Imagining that is kind of weird. But the result is just awesome.
First of all even if copyright was expired it doesn't mean access to source code.
Secondly, do you really think that having access to 20 year old version of Photoshop (source code or not) would be significant factor for anybody to enter the market? Making it work on modern systems would mean essentially a complete rewrite, at which point the original copyright would be irrelevant. Making it competitive would be probably more difficult with the original codebase than with a new clean design.
Maybe it should. Registering a copyright already requires the submission of several copies of the work. Why shouldn't the source code necessary to produce that work be a required part of the submission? If the public is to be expected to take advantage of public domain works, they must have access to high quality versions in useful formats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_registration
> Registration is still required in the US for some benefits, such as awards of statutory damages
When is my work protected? Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
Do I have to register with your office to be protected? No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section “Copyright Registration.”
If I create a story it is automatically copyrighted (unless I specifically license it differently) however if I wanna sue, my copyright must be registered.
And recall, a LOT of these games are only now available, even to the original owners, because of GoG. The original owners just sat on the IP, because the profits weren't enough to justify porting them to a modern OS.
They can easily have an INSANE game store that comes with all windows 8 machines. They also have an advantage in porting old windows games to newer operating systems. Without development costs for game design, they just have to port, and will be able to profit massively. They can easily make it difficult to get a game working that is not from the Microsoft Classic Game Store.
But, at the same time, this would still be GREAT for consumers, because games would be cheap. They could just have a set of old Mario games or Final Fantasy games even for FREE if you create a store account and add your credit card information.
Companies with consoles or distribution (like Amazon) would have a great advantage. Amazon could even provide every game for free if you sign up for Amazon Prime.
I cannot wait for Mario on Xbox. haha. That's going to be weird but seriously awesome.
However there is the trend of "early access" games as well as games that continue to receive updates over time, minecraft or Wow would be examples of these, so there is a more gradual flow of sales.
It's not inconceivable that a game like minecraft could go on for 20 years , even if it's future form bares little resemblance to it's original release.
Of course this point is entirely theoretical at the moment since it will be many many decades before any video game ever created enters the public domain.
This trend, I believe, is partly in response to piracy. One might even argue that some derivative of this model (perhaps in conjunction with crowd-funding à la Kickstarter) could succeed even in the absence of copyright law altogether!
If you allow unlimited redistribution you remove much of that incentive.
I disagree. The vast majority of games developed today do not have a hope of paying for their own development, copyrighted or otherwise. It's only a very small proportion of games (so-called AAA) that are developed with the expectation of profit.
In particular, making a significant change to a work creates a new copyright for the changed work. If you boot up windows it will say something like "Copyright (C) Microsoft 1983-2013", meaning that the earliest code was written in 1983 and the last significant change was in 2013. That means that this version of Windows will enter the public domain in the year 2014+95. But you can start making copies of the original 1983 version of DOS already in 1983+95.
Personally, I would be mostly happy with current copyright, with an extension that items must be reregistered every 5 years, and available for sale. That would deal with the huge amount of items (games are a good example) where the original owners don't care enough to release the game as public domain, or often can't even be traced.
I would personally love to buy all video games made in 1993 on a set of discs sold by Microsoft for $5 that plays on an xbox.
The answer is, it is in the common interests to have these rights expire at some point, since after a certain period of time the utility of having everyone be able to do what they want with the work is greater than the expected value the content creator would be able to extract. But if you believe that copyright should be valid for any period of time at all, don't act like it is a given that it should expire after some arbitrary period of time. You are taking away a right from somebody in the interests of the public good, and there is always going to be discussion when that happens because you are taking away from one group of people specifically to benefit society as a whole.
That is backwards. We set up an arbitrary restriction saying people can't reproduce it, and that is the only reason this artificially created business exists. There is no reason for this arbitrary restriction to extend indefinitely. The business would exist just fine with 20 year copyright, so we should do that.
THE 1993 COLLECTION
It would just be a simple box with a 1993-strength processor on it. And it would have a controller and a huge hard disk on it that has every game created from 1993. I think that would be a great idea for gamers. Something else Microsoft could do is release an XBOX ONE disc with the top games from 1993. That could be a huge hit and I bet a lot of the classic games would make a big comeback and get popular again.
Sigh, perpetual copyright...
a) moronic
b) completely tangental to the point under discussion
The list of "things that people could do" is quite long. You, for example, could go live in a hole far, far away where there is no internet. To qualify for this list, things do not have to be: profitable, rational or feasible. However, when a company like Microsoft creates a product, they consider all of those things, likely in that order. Thus when you propose that "a thing Microsoft could do" is to find every game created within every calendar year, then, at great expense, replicate the antiquated equipment on which that software ran, then market and sell it very cheaply despite the costs of research, licensing and quality assurance, I think that is a thing which Microsoft is very unlikely to do. I don't think it would be a very clever thing for Microsoft to do, nor would it be good for gamers, because after the inaugural release of a million games from 1993 nobody cares about Microsoft would cease to exist as a commercial entity, having wasted all of it's resources on this terrible, terrible idea.
On the other hand, why were you even compelled to write this? The most imaginative, creative scenario you could imagine was that if software copyrights expired very quickly, you would like to pay someone for that software? Which is totally already a thing you can do, and the proceeds (in reality) would go to the creator of the software?
In conclusion, the internet has broken me. I have no more will to live, and I can only hope in the distant future a giant, faceless corporation will populate different planets with clones of all the people born in each year, so that my clone can go and live happily on the planet 1991 forever. Hopefully your clone will not be present.
It's just another example of pirates being more interested and/or capable of preserving history than the creators of history itself are: If fans weren't circulating this in the usual channels, we'd have lost such masterpieces as "BRO IT OUT YOUR ASS" to time forever.
This means that a cover version of a song performed by some tribute band is not really a substitute in any way for a performance by the real artist even if the cover band can reproduce the original with very high accuracy.
Game developers don't really have the same halo and fame surrounding them, so perhaps customers would be happy with a cheaper clone of a game provided that the assets etc were of at least a similar quality to the original even if not identical.
http://www.businessinsider.com/17-cover-songs-better-than-th...
http://mentalfloss.com/article/53336/20-songs-you-might-not-...
The graphics, the text, etc. are copyrightable/trademarkable.
Duke Nukem is about as original as beans on toast. I don't see the point in making a cover of a caricature whose cultural origins could be traced back to the Second World War.
Nintendo would still be able to make tons of Zelda games, it's just that there would be good competition with several hundred other studios making Zelda games. They would probably even do a better job than Nintendo and make the top-selling Zelda games.
This is reasonable as a design goal, if you're taking into account risk (I make 10 games, only one meets any success - is the cost of development the money invested only in the one game or also in the other attempts that - for whatever reason - didn't catch on?). I'm leery of it as a hard and fast rule, because it is way to hard to say what costs actually are (/ should be).
Someone could easily take Myst, (maybe Microsoft or Sony?) and put a good, updated version for ps4 or xbox one or even wii u and sell it for maybe $9.99.
Do you know how cheap classic books are at the bookstore? You can get books by Charles Dickens for like 5.99. If prices go down for video games, an Xbox one compatible set of classic games like Myst from that era would be insanely cheap. I'd buy instantly. I wouldn't have to buy another game for like 10 years, I'd be so busy.
http://www.gog.com/game/myst_masterpiece_edition
Or you could just Google "no-intro $game_console_of_choice" and get the entire library in minutes that way...
I wish someone would make a realRiven, etc.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/37
of course the library also has tons of free literature for you too.
Maybe. I trying to argue that this meant copyright should be longer, I was trying to make sure our discussion was fully informed.
Although he's against the idea of entering the public domain outright, he's not resistant to openness and giving to the community.
Good on George for GPLing the engine, but his "openness to giving to the community" seems to stop short of anything that the mainstream public would benefit from.
And on a snarkier and less philosophical note: maybe Duke Nukem should be given over to the public domain. After DNF maybe someone else should have a shot. It, after all, would not stop Broussard from pursuing his own new Duke Nukem game, and might allow someone else to salvage a pretty influential part of 90s culture.
[edit] Thought about this some more. The return of a work into the public domain is less about the ability to redistribute it verbatim and more about the ability to extend and derive from it.
The cultural impact of public domain for Shakespeare are the million spinoffs, reimaginings, and new productions. The freedom to redistribute the original text is only a tiny part of the intent of public domain. This is the public good that comes from the work being in the public domain.
So GPLing the engine, or even opening up the assets, does not even begin to address the intent of public domain. Until someone (anyone!) can make a new Duke Nukem game, or a Duke Nukem movie, or a Duke Nukem novel (Prohibition-era Duke?), or incorporate Duke into some other work, the core intent of the public domain isn't being met.
That doesn't sound like the grounds of creative control. That sounds like indefinite copyright absolutism.
https://twitter.com/georgeb3dr/statuses/428717219724288000
Also, don't read that Twitter discussion I linked to. A lot of people are being just terrible to each other.
Hm. Reading over the source (Facebook, not Twitter, but it's not substantially different as sentiments go), I agree. Perhaps I was being too generous with my interpretation.
“But the prisoner is still in prison!” he’d cry, as he left the police station, his pockets out-turned, not having done any other work in the thirty-five years since and bemused as to why he wasn’t living in a castle.
Dude complains about people exaggerating his opinion and then proceeds to completely exaggerate the opposing opinion (a policeman deserves to live in a castle for arresting one criminal 35 years ago).
See the regular launching of "Sherlock" shows, and the multiple on-air concurrently.
Edit: Though Sherlock does have some limitations. Elements of the Sherlock stories introduced after 1922 are still copyrighted, but things from the vast majority of Doyle's stories are public domain and usable by anyone.
There's actually companies who create "Mockbusters" - movies with similar titles to the latest hits, to con people into buying them. They tend to walk a fine line, but they do OK (although they piss off a lot of customers).
I consider this practice just as unethical as hosting adult content on squatted domain misspellings of common sites.
Most mockbusters are made by 1-5 young animators, and they do the scripts and voice acting themselves. Pirates was notable for being one of the most expensive pieces of porn ever made (since it a real boat).
You're right, of course.
I'm not sure MAD is really the way to world peace, but the idea that owning nuclear weapons is inherently bad for any government in the world... I'm not sure how right that is, either. If you are sure that you will be destroyed as soon as you attack, no matter whether you attack first, there is suddenly a lot less incentive to attack.
You don't need a game to enter the public domain to deconstruct ideas and craftsmanship either. You DO need it to legally play the majority of games for free, or to resell without paying royalties.
How about these developers spend their efforts on something that has actual value to society?