[HN Gopher] New study reveals most classic video games are unava...
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New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable
Author : coldpie
Score : 435 points
Date : 2023-07-10 16:15 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gamehistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (gamehistory.org)
| miga wrote:
| Last call for preservation of our video game history.
|
| Right to preserve our culture should be enshrined in law, because
| otherwise it will disappear due to adverse relation with
| copyright law and novel art production.
| srlowe wrote:
| It's like this with so much media, it drives me crazy. For
| instance, in the country I'm currently in there is no way to
| legally watch a lot of movies - not because of censorship or
| anything, they are simply not distributed, even on google-play,
| amazon etc. No choice but it use torrent. Why?
| tiku wrote:
| "marketplace". Ah ok. Good thing they are all preserved on the
| torrent network then.
| cush wrote:
| The opening thesis of the article is very misleading - that
| endangered video games would be like Titanic only being available
| in the library of congress.
|
| Titanic was a blockbuster released in 1997, so it would be like
| Final Fantasy VII only being available at library of congress,
| which it isn't. In fact FFVII is continuously being rereleased on
| modern consoles
| marcodiego wrote:
| Copyright should adapt to modern world. Currently, what happens
| are a bunch of laws made by politicians under strong lobby from
| giant corporations. This doesn't benefit the public neither the
| artists.
|
| There are lots of new categories where works of art (video games
| included) can fall into which simply didn't exist when copyrights
| were introduced. The worst part: as copyrights evolved it made
| legal access to older works harder.
|
| I like how GoG is running their business but it doesn't include
| everything and laws should get modernized so that hundred of
| similar companies like GoG can flourish and thrive. For the cases
| where getting access to copyrights holder is not viable... well,
| for that users and fans should have the right to use, copy and
| distribute it legally. Nobody is making any money from works
| nobody can get access.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Copyright should adapt to modern world. Currently, what
| happens are a bunch of laws made by politicians under strong
| lobby from giant corporations.
|
| I mean, by what you said, copyright did, just not how we wanted
| it to.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Unfortunately we're seeing a sudden pendulum swing towards
| favoring draconian creator-centric copyright laws as a kneejerk
| to AI. The same artists etc. who would have complained about
| Disney's practices a year ago now think copyright doesn't go
| far enough in forbidding algorithms from learning from their
| publicly visible work, the same way artists have learned from
| looking at each other's work for millenia.
| thfuran wrote:
| Copyright law is notionally intended to benefit society
| (read: people). Artists are people. AI (at least in this
| context) is a pile of computers at some big corporation. It
| doesn't seem weird to suggest that there ought to be
| different rules for different categories of entities.
| zirgs wrote:
| AI can also be a single laptop owned by some random person.
| You only need a big pile of computers if you train a base
| model. Extensions need far less computing power.
| tb_technical wrote:
| This is unironically why emulation is a necessary and moral good.
| We need to preserve these pieces of software so that future
| generations can enjoy them, if they wish.
| farawayzone0019 wrote:
| Wait until they figure out that modern day games are constantly
| evolving and changing so the concept of "unavailable" exists
| today for stuff that's less than a year old. Maps, in-game
| content, in-game characters, etc. It's all short-lived and hardly
| static.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| aquova wrote:
| I know there are many people who find this appalling and wish
| that companies did more to re-release their older titles, but
| I've frankly just accepted that emulation will be the best and
| perhaps only way to play a majority of these titles. Unlike
| movies, where you simply need a method to playback a video and
| audio stream, getting interactive media to continue working isn't
| trivial, especially since it needs to run exactly as it did
| before (otherwise what's the point). I wish rather than taking
| the effort to port the game themselves, they'd be more receptive
| to fan preservation efforts, although some companies are more
| friendly towards this than others. It's a bit of a self
| fulfilling prophecy. The more people ask for older titles to be
| re-released, the more developers realize there's a market for it,
| so rather than release the source or future-compatible files,
| they instead will port the game to their latest system once a
| decade to resell it.
| weare138 wrote:
| _but I 've frankly just accepted that emulation will be the
| best and perhaps only way to play a majority of these titles_
|
| The problem is the roms can't be 'legally' redistributed and
| there's no viable way to even legally purchase a significant
| portion of them anymore.
| amadvance wrote:
| The Internet Archive has all the ROMs you may ever need.
| cubefox wrote:
| Until Nintendo sues them...
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| True but they won't be removed from torrent sites. You
| can download every NES, SNES, Genesis etc game ever
| created in like 5 minutes.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Exactly. Relying on emulation is totally fine. The problem is
| that it's also illegal. If classic media goes "out of print,"
| there needs to be a practical way to access it that isn't a
| crime. Old books have libraries and used book stores, but old
| games that only work with emulators have no legal avenues at
| all.
| kobalsky wrote:
| It's cool that we have emulation to quench that "thirst"
|
| I personally prefer when companies do not to elect to squeeze
| their IPs dry and have a semblance of pride on their work, as
| much as a for-profit company can have of course, instead of
| blindly chasing profits.
|
| The other side of the coin is Ubisoft having 11 Assassin's
| Creed titles in development:
| https://www.gamingbible.com/news/11-new-assassins-creed-game...
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| > Unlike movies, where you simply need a method to playback a
| video and audio stream, getting interactive media to continue
| working isn't trivial, especially since it needs to run exactly
| as it did before (otherwise what's the point).
|
| Even getting a 20-year-old console (which in the retro gaming
| world isn't _that_ old) to work with a modern HDMI TV is a
| headache!
|
| Despite owning the hardware and plenty of games, I had to drop
| a couple hundred bucks on a RetroTINK scaler to make my PS2
| playable again. Which is no hate to the RetroTINK, because it's
| an amazing little gadget (and its output looks great), just
| kind of sad that it takes so much money and effort to keep
| playing a console I've owned since I was a kid.
| kingrazor wrote:
| I got lucky and snagged a 32 inch 720p TV that still had
| composite video connectors a few years ago. Works great with
| all of my consoles, as far back as my N64.
| cubefox wrote:
| There are probably cheaper HDMI adapters, though probably
| with a weaker picture quality. (And latency will probably
| always be higher than analog, no matter what.)
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Yep, spot on. The rabbit hole I fell down that eventually
| led me to the RetroTINK started with those cheap $30 HDMI
| upscaling devices, but they do weird stuff to your picture
| and add wicked amounts of lag. People who know more than I
| do have assured me that the RetroTINK in particular
| minimizes lag compared to other analog-to-digital
| converters, although I'm sure it's not quite as good as a
| setup without a converter at all.
|
| I can confirm that the picture quality is phenomenal
| though. You can tweak about a million different settings
| and even add fake scanlines!
| stevenwoo wrote:
| My somewhat old Sony AV receiver has one RGB input and HDMI
| output and my PS/2 works fine with a LCD screen.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I've been snagging the smaller/nicer CRT TVs from the dump
| here and there, there's now a market for them... besides the
| problem you've highlighted, some old games with screen aiming
| devices only work on these older tech TVs, and Goodwill no
| longer accepts them!
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Ooh, in my hunt for a good scaler I _did_ see some people
| working on light gun compatibility gadgets for modern TVs!
| No idea how well they work now, but hopefully they 'll be
| perfected by the time the last CRT gives out.
| kipchak wrote:
| The two big ones are the Sinden Lightgun and Gun4ir, the
| Sinden uses a white box at the corners of the screen and
| a camera in the lightgun while the Gun4ir is similar to
| the Wii's sensor bar. No first hand experience but the
| Gun4IRs seem to be pretty popular and can be DIY-ed with
| a guncon shell.
|
| https://rpegelectronics.com/products/gun4ir-diy-mod-kit
| rootsudo wrote:
| Ps2 works fine, gamecube works fine, xbox works fine - what
| 20yr old console is having issues with an HDMI tv? Every TV
| I've seen in the past 2 decades includes RCA and RGB
| connectors.
|
| S-video is gone, and RF is gone. Coax is still there though,
| so RF modulators should still work too.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Our relatively new Sony TV doesn't have component or
| composite input, hence the need for a converter. But you
| want to use a scaler versus a straight signal converter
| because HDTVs don't always support 480i input (meaning that
| you wouldn't get a picture at all), and even fewer support
| 240p, which is necessary for some PS2 and most PS1 games.
|
| A scaler like the RetroTINK can add visual enhancements,
| but more crucially it ensures that your TV receives the
| signal in the first place.
| philistine wrote:
| Those inputs are at the bottom of the pile for QA. So they
| usually have dreadful amounts of lag. It makes a surprising
| amount of games unplayable.
| danbolt wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if this environment were easier if the
| emulators involved were very easy to legally integrate onto
| modern game consoles. For example, Sony's _PlayStation Classic_
| used a GPL-licensed emulator [1] to get something out the door.
| It 'd be more challenging to rerelease a GameCube game on
| PlayStation 5 though, as you'd either need to do a bunch of
| expensive work either porting or developing your own emulator.
| Dolphin's GPL license isn't set to work with a proprietary SDK.
|
| It'd be an incredible challenge, but I wonder if the community
| behind emulators like Dolphin could provide a paid version of
| the codebase that can be licensed under the MPL. This might
| help keep older games legally in circulation.
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/sony-using-open-
| sourc...
| coreyp_1 wrote:
| This is a thorny subject.
|
| Copyrite is, by definition, the control of the rights to copy. It
| is not a mandate that copying must be done, but rather an
| acknowledgement of the right to control the copies. And that must
| also, then, include the right to _not_ distribute the work.
|
| This must be balanced with the notion of fair use, though.
| However, "but I want to access it" does not justify fair use. "I
| bought a copy and therefore will make backups so that I may enjoy
| it in the future" does, in my opinion.
|
| Libraries have exceptions codified in copyrite law. Technology
| has blurred the line as to what constitutes a library (just as it
| has for journalists, publishers, etc.).
|
| Some advocate for an escalating fee in order to protect copyrite
| for more and more time. I don't know if that is appropriate,
| since it seems to me as a form of extortion of rights. Not quite
| compelled speech, but similar.
|
| I don't know the solution, but I do feel as though our laws are
| broken and dysfunctional in this regard. I don't have a solution,
| though, because I honestly don't know enough of the problem
| domain. Then again, maybe that's the problem... One should not
| need to be a legal expert in order to keep from breaking the law!
| costanzaDynasty wrote:
| It's actually infuriating. This video game generation has offered
| very little major releases. However it's still worth being apart
| of for the great collected editions. But the amount of games,
| many that were of major importance that are simply gone.
| bollos wrote:
| Luckily on the XBOX you could at least play some older titles
| you might've never played pretty easily. PlayStation in that
| regard is, as far as I know, still lacking. The only console
| I've considered worthwhile for this generation is the Switch.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| johncessna wrote:
| I really wish the study matched the headline. It should be 'most
| classic video games are commercially unavailable' To their
| credit, they don't try to hide it, but the sentiment in the
| headline is the actual problem, in my mind.
|
| I'm less concerned about a gameboy game that you can't buy, but
| you can easily play via emulators or the physical cartridges,
| which still exist (for now), than I am with the class of games
| that are truly gone/unplayable.
|
| Your online only games primarily fall into this bag, but without
| something like an internet archive or something similar to
| preserve them, we're in danger of losing the digital copies of
| old games as well.
|
| Personally, I'd like to see the study expanded and then some sort
| of index that tracks true loss of media over time.
| crtified wrote:
| It may also be pertinent to note that it's an entirely USA-
| centric article and study. A distinction the article makes in
| it's first paragraph: "87% of classic video games released in
| the United States are critically endangered".
|
| Not to unduly belittle that metric! - nobody would argue that
| the USA is not a major player (the biggest, in _some_ respects)
| - but it 's still a significant distinction. The articles
| nuance of copyright laws, and its figures, and its proposed
| activism, are all specific to that one national jurisdiction.
| bearjaws wrote:
| It's going to shift to 87% don't even start due to connectivity
| requirements to servers that are not running anymore.
| freedomben wrote:
| It took a couple of reads of this before I realized it was
| saying the same thing I was going to say. Restated: in 20 years
| from now, it will be 87% of games won't even start/run even if
| you have a copy, because they are dependent on servers that
| aren't running anymore and are closed source.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > dependent on servers that aren't running anymore and are
| closed source.
|
| Can't do that if it's not your server. Don't we all love "the
| cloud" :)
|
| I think open sourcing the clients is easier because it's
| always possible, it takes the dev almost no time at all
| (compared to newly creating infrastructure documentation),
| and players don't have to set up their own infrastructure
| (which would probably require a lot of time as well as skill)
| to play offline. The downside is that server functionality
| would need to be recreated.
|
| If the game is open, you can just patch out the server
| dependency. Is the update, "cloud" saving, or online-friends
| functionality crashing the whole game on startup? Stuff not
| actually needed to play in single player? Comment out the
| line where it calls that function, maybe mock a few
| variables, and you're all set.
|
| A friend of mine makes a game with offline play being
| possible, but the main value is in the community: custom
| levels and online play. It's all cloud magic with google
| cloud this and google cloud that. Good luck pulling up that
| infrastructure in 20 years (having to set up a mini google
| datacenter, even if the components are open sourced by google
| in the first place, which they're almost certainly not when
| "sun set"). The game tries to reach the server on startup and
| _should_ detect when you 're offline (for me that doesn't
| work reliably, but firewalling google play services has weird
| effects on many apps), but if you just remove those calls
| from the game altogether, the offline parts will work with no
| dependencies and you can just exchange level files instead of
| having an online browser. Everything but realtime multiplayer
| would still be possible. Customizing the client code to work
| with much simpler infrastructure is also likely faster than
| trying to replicate the "cloud" setup.
| mrbabbage wrote:
| For what it's worth--the Library of Congress published a DMCA
| exemption for video games that require a use of a no-longer-
| available verification server.
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/expanded-dmca-exemptio...
| pkaye wrote:
| How have other countries (Japan, EU countries) handled this issue
| of preserving access to classic video games?
| yason wrote:
| If something is not legally available then copyright law ought to
| make it eligible for free distribution. The authors nor the
| rights owners certainly don't see the content making money
| anymore (or they'd be selling it) and thus they can't lose money
| (that they never meant to charge in the first place).
|
| Copyright, as originally envisioned, should be a temporary
| privilege instead of a de facto ghost racket for perpetual
| extortion.
| mertd wrote:
| Just playing the devil's advocate here but what if the
| copyright owner does not want the content distributed anymore?
| Maybe now they find the content distasteful or embarrassing.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The original term on copyright was 28 years maximum; under
| that rule, most copyrighted works would already be in the
| public domain. I think 28 years is probably closer to the
| "right value" than 95 years, but I'd be okay with a bit
| longer.
| ncallaway wrote:
| That's too bad! The entire bargain with copyright is that
| creators are granted an exclusive period with their work in
| exchange for the work entering the public domain.
|
| That's the deal.
|
| It's a complete violation of the spirit of the copyright
| agreement to take advantage of the financially useful period
| of monopoly over the work, then use the remainder of the
| exclusive period to try and ensure the work cannot be
| archived and cannot enter the public domain.
| morsch wrote:
| Maybe we should make it illegal to retell embarrassing
| stories without consent from the people involved.
| stcroixx wrote:
| Temporary problem that will work itself out with time once
| the last creators die. After one generation under this
| system, nobody will create anything that isn't useless free
| garbage.
| criddell wrote:
| Wu Tang Clan recorded an album and sold it to Martin Shkreli
| for $2 million (he no longer owns it). If I manage to get a
| copy of it, should I be able to distribute it freely?
| xNeil wrote:
| Yes. In fact, Shkreli promised to release the full album if
| Trump won 2016. I think he ended up releasing two tracks.
| criddell wrote:
| Depending on the contract, Shkreli may have those rights.
| I'm talking about if I managed to record a copy of the
| record would there be anything wrong with me distributing
| it?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Who cares what they want? I don't. Culture should belong to
| us, not them.
|
| Copyright exists to allow them to turn a tidy profit so
| they're properly incentivized. It's not there to enable their
| delusions of control nor their perpetual rent seeking.
| They've already turned their profit, now it's time for the
| works to enter the public domain. Nobody cares whether they
| like it or not, it's human culture and it belongs to us all.
| kube-system wrote:
| Vanishingly little copyrighted material is culturally
| relevant. It seems silly to paint all copyrighted material
| with that brush.
| dTal wrote:
| Who are you, or anyone else, to decide what is and isn't
| "culturally relevant"?
| kube-system wrote:
| Culture itself does. I am referring to the fact that most
| things that people create are not published, do not
| become popular, and don't become culturally relevant.
|
| As much as I wish that my meeting notes from my standup
| this morning were good enough to become a cultural icon,
| I'm pretty sure the entire planet, including me, will
| forget about them next week. Mundane creations like this
| consist the _vast_ majority of copyrighted works.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Culture is everything produced by humans. Doesn't matter
| if it's "relevant" or not.
| kube-system wrote:
| No, there are many copyrighted works which are not a part
| of culture, by definition. For example, private creative
| works.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I see what you mean now. If creators don't publish their
| creations, they won't be experienced by anyone. They
| don't matter to anyone, we don't even know they exist. I
| suppose it's sad in an existential way that their works
| could be lost without anyone experiencing them or any
| preservation efforts being made but what can you do?
| kube-system wrote:
| I think it's also important to consider that the sharing
| of creative works is also not so boolean. Works don't
| always fall into neat categories of "100% publicly
| published to the world" or "100% completely private and
| irrelevant to anyone". There's a lot of grey area in the
| middle.
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| Yes, but it's not up to the copyright holder to decide
| whether a work is culturally relevant.
| kube-system wrote:
| I didn't suggest that it was. I'm suggesting that this
| perspective on copyright is very myopic. Regulating
| copyright as if they are all culturally significant works
| is like regulating haystacks as if they consist only of
| needles.
| jdbernard wrote:
| The analogy doesn't hold. Not all copyrighted works are
| or will be culturally significant, but all have the
| potential to be culturally significant. We have no way of
| knowing ahead of time. It's regulating haystacks as if
| any individual straw may actually be a needle.
| kube-system wrote:
| A work that is not publicly shared has no potential to be
| culturally significant.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| A work that's not publicly shared will not be copied and
| doesn't need protection against copying to begin with.
| kube-system wrote:
| A work that isn't publicly shared by the author could be
| shared by someone else without permission. Copyright law
| does and should continue to criminalize this.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| A work that is not shared has no value and there should
| be no criminal sanctions to protect something of no
| value.
|
| You don't get to misuse violent power of the state to
| control spread of arbitrary information
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| > Who cares what they want? I don't.
|
| And what makes your opinion and rights more important than
| theirs?
|
| > Culture should belong to us, not them.
|
| Doesn't culture belong to everyone, even those creating it?
| There is no "them", it's only "us."
|
| All you'll do with your approach is make creators less like
| to ever create unique works.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > There is no "them", it's only "us."
|
| You gotta be kidding me. _They literally own our
| culture_. In the most capitalistic sense imaginable.
| Actual government-granted monopolies on ideas, bits of
| information. Works you grew up with? You and your
| children will be long dead before they enter the public
| domain. If they could delete the copy you have stored in
| your brain, they would.
|
| > All you'll do with your approach is make creators less
| like to ever create unique works.
|
| Whatever. Let them find another job then.
| bc_programming wrote:
| Copyright means the copyright owner owns the rights to
| distribute the work. Which includes not distributing it at
| all.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Copyright is a privilege, not a right, backed by criminal
| law and state violence. With numerous exceptions, like
| public interest and fair use.
|
| It is not property like a physical object.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| I would agree except for a few things.
|
| Like, if someone distributes pornography of themselves, and
| they are now a nurse or something and are out of the industry +
| don't want their images distributed anymore, I think
| distributing pornography of them against their permission just
| because they aren't distributing it themselves sounds extremely
| heinous.
| zirgs wrote:
| What if some actor no longer wants a movie where they're
| portraying the main character to be distributed? Should they
| be allowed to do that? Should the studio be forced to stop
| its distribution or edit the actor out of the scenes that
| they appear in?
| lamontcg wrote:
| That could be handled through entirely non-voidable
| personality/likeness rights instead of needing to be handled
| through copyright law.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| True, copyright is purely about monetization. And in fact
| it doesn't even help in most cases around professional
| pornography because the actor is not the copyright holder.
| The studio is.
|
| It's a difficult topic. Unlike revenge porn which is
| completely against consent, the actor has signed their
| distribution rights away. It's really something they should
| think of very carefully before doing.
|
| And in the cases of porn actors gone mainstream (Sylvester
| Stallone and Sasha Grey come to mind) it's not really been
| a big problem for them.
| sneak wrote:
| As a photographer, I think I and I alone should be able to
| dictate what happens to the photos that I take.
|
| The idea that you can somehow control your image is insane.
| You can't forcibly control your reputation, why should you
| be able to forcibly control photographers who legally
| photograph you?
| the-smug-one wrote:
| I don't think it's insane. We can control our reputation
| slightly, through libel laws.
| sneak wrote:
| In the US, being factually accurate is an airtight
| defense against libel.
|
| Face it, you don't get to control what other people say
| about you, nor should you want to. (Whether that "saying"
| is gossip, in print, or photoshopping your face on to
| unsavory things.)
| the-smug-one wrote:
| In Sweden, it's not. I do think that it's reasonable to
| have certain expectations about what can be spread about
| you as a private person, regardless if the things said
| are true or not.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I agree but only if you have a consent form of the
| persons depicted of course.
|
| And the state of mind is important too. I help at kink
| events sometimes and I don't accept consent forms from
| drunk people and don't get them photographed. Unless I
| know they've agreed to it before.
| ghaff wrote:
| >I agree but only if you have a consent form of the
| persons depicted of course.
|
| How many of the millions of published photos of
| recognizable people on the internet do you think have
| consent forms. Stock photos yes. But I'd be willing to
| bet that well short of 1% of the photos of people on
| Flickr, say, have consent forms.
| [deleted]
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Well yes, but in the environment I would take photos this
| is a much bigger concern obviously. I know even there not
| every photographer takes a form. But they always ask for
| consent verbally.
|
| I wouldn't run the risk without it personally. Especially
| in the kink community where consent is paramount and
| forms are already an established method for other
| activities as well.
|
| I know flickr etc is not so strict on consent but I
| personally would be. Especially when it involves anything
| remotely risque.
|
| The thing is that people change and societal values
| change over time. It's better to have that consent when
| someone changes their mind and blames you.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Your idea of somehow "dictating" what happens to the
| photos you take is equally insane if not more so. Your
| photos are just bits, information. Trivially copied. For
| you to be able to "dictate" literally anything at all
| would require control over the computer I'm typing this
| comment on and every other computer on earth.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > Your photos are just bits, information. Trivially
| copied. For you to be able to "dictate" literally
| anything at all would require control over the computer
| I'm typing this comment on and every other computer on
| earth
|
| Do you feel the same way about companies violating open
| source licenses?
|
| Your medical records are also just bits in an EMH system
| as are your text messages to your significant others. Is
| it okay if I share those?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Do you feel the same way about companies violating open
| source licenses?
|
| Of course. There should be no copyright nonsense to begin
| with. Those licenses shouldn't even exist. Nor should
| anyone ever be punished for using leaked or decompiled
| proprietary source code or anything of the sort.
|
| > Your medical records are also just bits in an EMH
| system as are your text messages to your significant
| others.
|
| Medical records are collected by healthcare professionals
| who are ethically and probably legally obligated to keep
| it secret. This confidentiality exists for obvious
| reasons, nobody would consult doctors otherwise.
|
| > Is it okay if I share those?
|
| You don't have access to them. You can't share them even
| if you wanted to. Unlike copyrighted works, those bits
| shouldn't be and actually aren't distributed to massive
| audiences worldwide. Everybody understands that once
| information is out there it's essentially impossible to
| contain it. That's why they keep it secret.
|
| Only copyright industry is delusional enough to want to
| sell copies of data to everyone on earth _and_ control
| what they do with it.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Your medical records are also just bits in an EMH
| system as are your text messages to your significant
| others. Is it okay if I share those?
|
| Medical records are covered by separate body of law, so
| is a conversation with your lawyer, and so are matters of
| National security. They have no relevance to copyright
| concordDance wrote:
| Yes and yes. (But also, it's trivially easy to state why
| that type of information should not be shareable in a way
| that wouldn't apply to commercial photography, you can
| assuredly come up with these yourself with a minutes
| thought)
| kube-system wrote:
| Privacy rights are a thing, and they _should_ be.
|
| > For you to be able to "dictate" literally anything at
| all would require control over the computer I'm typing
| this comment on and every other computer on earth.
|
| Crimes are enforced above ring 0, at the physical layer.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Privacy rights are about stopping information from coming
| into existence in the first place. We want corporations
| to not collect data about us at all.
|
| Copyright is about controlling distribution of
| information that already exists and has already been
| published. It's complete nonsense in the age of
| information.
|
| > Crimes are enforced above ring 0, at the physical
| layer.
|
| Surely you're not suggesting throwing in jail anyone who
| downloads grandparent's photos off of his website.
| kube-system wrote:
| There are other ways that privacy rights are enforced,
| but the right to _not_ distribute a creative work (and
| prevent others from doing it) is also a right that people
| have under copyright, and I believe they should continue
| to have.
|
| > Surely you're not suggesting throwing in jail anyone
| who downloads grandparent's photos off of his website.
|
| Correct, I am not. I am saying that most places around
| the world _do_ dictate what he does with a computer
| already, and legal systems don 't need a technical
| solution to enable it. The fact that nobody can
| electronically prevent them from copying bits is
| irrelevant. We are discussing the law, and courts use
| prisons, not bits.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > legal systems don't need a technical solution to enable
| it
|
| They absolutely do. Without technological solutions, they
| don't even have a snowball's chance in hell of even so
| much as identifying perpetrators of copyright
| infringement. They can't stop it even with technological
| measures in place. In order to enforce copyright, they
| literally need to end computing freedom as we know it
| today. Computers gotta come pwned straight off the
| factory so we can only run software that they approve, so
| that they can reject software that copies their bits.
|
| > We are discussing the law, and courts use prisons, not
| bits.
|
| Let's discuss the law then. I propose that copyright
| should stop existing altogether. Simply because laws
| encode the customs of a people and copyright infringement
| is absolutely one of those customs. It is _normal and
| natural_ to infringe copyright.
|
| You infringe copyright when you download a picture or
| video from a website. You infringe copyright when you
| screenshot some social media post. You infringe copyright
| when you share something with your friend via messaging
| app. You infringe copyright when you make some funny meme
| by editing text into some popular culture picture. You
| infringe copyright when you download a copy of some blog
| post so you can read it later. It goes on and on. Pretty
| much anything you do infringes copyright. I've seen
| people arguing that fucking memcpy infringes copyright.
| It's mind boggling and never stops.
|
| People do all of this stuff without even realizing it.
| How could it possibly be illegal? The only reason I can
| think of is constant lobbying by trillion dollar
| corporations.
| kube-system wrote:
| There are always unanswered questions, legal FUD, and a
| lack of case law when a new technology brings up
| previously unanswered legal questions. This is just how
| law works. It doesn't necessarily mean that all of those
| things _are_ illegal, or that the foundational law is
| fundamentally flawed. Yes, more case law is needed. Yes,
| some small tweaks could be necessary to clarify what
| 'copying' really means on the internet. But no, the
| underlying concept of copyright is still very necessary
| to protect creators from those with the power to exploit
| them.
| mormegil wrote:
| A similar (albeit weaker) regime already exists in the EU for
| "orphan works", i.e. works for which copyright holder(s) cannot
| be found or contacted. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work
| moomin wrote:
| Then there's the hilarious case of No One Lives Forever, a
| well regarded game from 2000, where the ownership rights are
| murky with several organisations willing to say on the record
| that they have no idea if they own it, that they have no
| intention of finding out, but that if anyone attempts to
| resurrect the games they will find out and sue.
| cubefox wrote:
| Interesting:
|
| > Whether orphaned software and video games ("Abandonware")
| fall under the audiovisual works definition is a matter
| debated by scholars.[14]
|
| [14] Maier, Henrike (2015). "Games as Cultural Heritage
| Copyright Challenges for Preserving (Orphan) Video Games in
| the EU" http://www.hiig.de/wp-
| content/uploads/2015/10/Maier_JIPITEC-... (PDF). JIPITEC.
| Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin. p. 120. Retrieved 2016-01-18.
| rewgs wrote:
| I think that makes complete sense. After all, something similar
| already happens with trademarks: if you don't use it, it
| lapses. Presumably companies only invest time and money on
| using the trademarks they expect to yield a return on that
| investment; if they aren't making money off of it, why should
| they get to keep others from doing so?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> If something is not legally available then copyright law
| ought to make it eligible for free distribution.
|
| Ok. Past Futurama episodes are now $10,000 per view. That is
| still available and not an absurd cost (just ask anyone dealing
| with with patented technology). So we would need some sort of
| commission to decide what a reasonable cost should be, which
| would be a quantum leap away from free market principals.
| Snild wrote:
| Compulsory/statutory licensing would be one solution. As I
| understand it, that's what allows libraries to exist. Music
| on the radio (at least here in Sweden) is handled through
| collective licensing, which is nominally optional, but
| practically impossible to avoid if you want any radio money.
|
| The incentive of exclusivity could be reasonably preserved by
| making the statutory license valid only after some amount of
| time has passed since release.
| eesmith wrote:
| > Compulsory/statutory licensing would be one solution. As
| I understand it, that's what allows libraries to exist.
|
| I don't think that's the case. At least, what allows
| libraries in the US is the "first-sale doctrine." From
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine , "The
| doctrine enables the distribution chain of copyrighted
| products, library lending, giving, video rentals and
| secondary markets for copyrighted works (for example,
| enabling individuals to sell their legally purchased books
| or CDs to others)."
|
| Something similar is why I can place an ad to sell my used
| Mac without violating Apple's trademark.
|
| I assume Sweden (and the EU) have something similar. If
| not, that makes second-hand book, magazine, or any product
| sales rather difficult.
| Snild wrote:
| I looked it up, and you are technically correct ("the
| best kind of correct").
|
| https://lagen.nu/1960:729#P19S1
|
| > 19 SS Nar ett exemplar av ett verk med upphovsmannens
| samtycke har overlatits inom Europeiska ekonomiska
| samarbetsomradet, far exemplaret spridas vidare.
|
| Translated:
|
| > 19 SS When a specimen, with the consent of the author,
| has been transferred within the European economic area,
| the specimen may be further transferred.
|
| The law goes on to carve out exceptions for computer
| programs and movies specifically, as well as renting
| generally -- those kinds of transfers are not allowed
| without author approval.
|
| However, in combination with
| Biblioteksersattningen/forfattarfonden ("the library
| compensation/author fund"), which collects money based on
| the amount of lending in public libraries and distributes
| it to authors, it comes pretty close to statutory
| licensing in practice. It's not immediately clear to me
| that the payout is proportionally divided, though, so
| depending on how that skews, I may be way off.
| mordae wrote:
| I would be pretty OK with capping the price of old games at
| 2x median sale price during the period they were on market or
| $40 adjusted for average inflation since the year they were
| released. Applicable no sooner than 10 years since their
| initial release.
|
| This should be noncontroversial.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| We jumped away from "free market principles" the moment we
| forbade copying of those past Futurama episodes for 90 years.
| There is nothing naturally scarce about copies of creative
| works; we impose artificial scarcity through a government-
| granted monopoly in order to allow the creation of those
| works to be funded through the sale of copies[0].
|
| Having a government commission decide what is and isn't a
| reasonable price does smell of command economy, but creative
| works already exist in a command economy. The only difference
| is that you can't Disney Vault your shit anymore. Boo hoo. In
| my opinion, once you've sold your work, recouped costs, and
| paid everyone, you shouldn't be able to then pull the coin
| out of the vending machine and take works off the market. We
| give monopoly rights in exchange for creative works being
| made and publicly available, not for them to be made and then
| thrown into a fire.
|
| My personal opinion as to how to fix this problem would be to
| authorize the Copyright Office to issue compulsory licenses
| to reproduce works that are over 10 years old and either are
| orphan works[1] or whose known owners are unwilling to
| license[2]. These licenses would _only_ be issued to
| libraries - i.e. either government-run libraries or non-
| profit agencies with substantially similar goals to one, such
| as the Internet Archive. And if someone can actually assert
| both ownership and a pattern of ongoing licensing then they
| can cancel the compulsory licenses that the libraries get.
|
| We can actually determine what a 'willing license' would look
| like by looking at comparable deals in a particular market.
| If whoever owns Futurama wants to charge $10,000 a view but
| Disney is licensing The Simpsons and Family Guy out to
| Netflix for a few pennies per view, then we can safely
| conclude that the $10,000/view price is there just to keep
| the work off the market. We don't need the Copyright Office
| to say "anything more than $X per stream is too much."
|
| [0] This is not the only way that creativity could be funded,
| of course. But it's the only way that mainstream buyers of
| creativity are willing to participate in.
|
| [1] Works whose current ownership is unable to be determined.
| A _lot_ of the games that are legally unavailable in the VGHF
| study are unavailable because the owners went out of business
| and the rights are tied up between four different creditors
| who all don 't know what they own.
| rvba wrote:
| welcome to IPpreservationshop.com where you can buy a copy of
| our game for 20 million dollars
|
| Of course no-one will do, but we can claim that the game is
| available legally
| lmm wrote:
| My imaginary approach is that you'd have to submit an actual
| copy to the Library of Congress or equivalent every year /
| every 5 years / .... So it forces you to at least track what
| you're copyrighting and have a working "production line". You
| could still refuse to sell it to anyone, but that would be
| essentially pique.
| soligern wrote:
| There would just be loopholes that can't realistically be
| closed. Like they sell only physical copies out of one location
| in a rural place that is basically inaccessible. I'm also not
| for forcing people/companies to maintain an online marketplace
| of their goods.
| vel0city wrote:
| If I write in my journal it is copyrighted. I may not wish for
| you to have a copy of my journal. The law should then _require_
| me to let you take a copy of it despite me not wanting you to
| have it?
| lmm wrote:
| Copyright is about whether I can make and distribute copies
| of something I've legitimately acquired; for private material
| like a journal it's irrelevant whether it's copyrighted.
| vel0city wrote:
| Copyright applies whether or not the origin was
| "legitimately" acquired or not. Its what makes that journal
| continue to be private. If you stumble upon my data
| accidentally, what then stops you from republishing it
| however you want if not copyright?
| rullelito wrote:
| It could also be that I make a game, then a somewhat similar
| sequal, and I only want to sell the sequel. What right as a
| consumer do you have to distribute the first one for free then?
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > What right as a consumer do you have to distribute the
| first one for free then?
|
| What rights have you got to stop me from doing it?
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| The purpose of copyright and patent law is to promote
| innovation.
|
| If your new IP is so similar that it's threatened by the mere
| existence of an older IP then it's probably not innovative
| enough to deserve protection anyway.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Solution: bundle a license for the original with purchases of
| the sequel.
|
| Now it is on the market, so it can't be distributed for free.
|
| You make money off people who think they just want the
| original. But you also get a copy of the sequel into their
| hands, and they might try it and like it.
|
| True, it's not absolute freedom to sell things precisely how
| you want, but it seems like a pretty reasonable compromise to
| me.
| lincon127 wrote:
| Well, no legal rights, obviously. But that doesn't mean
| that's not what ought to be the case. Laws aren't infallible,
| especially copyright law. If you have to break them to do
| something, that's hardly a reason not to do it, it's a reason
| to think about what you're doing.
|
| As for the emulation of old games, this article talkes about
| a pretty commonly understood point, many old games simply
| can't be played outside emulation. This is importent to the
| argument as a whole because it changes how we should view
| these games, as they literally have no value. Art is
| worthless while it's isolated, it has no meaning to anyone,
| nothing to provide to anyone. The work of those that made it
| has essentially been forgotton about, and if it hasn't been
| forgotten, it will be. Same is true for video games, a video
| game does not have value until someone knows what it is.
| Currently these games exist in this state, they have
| literally no value. You couldn't find people to buy these
| games outside of speculative reasons because no one gives a
| flying fuck about these things. So when someone argues that
| emulation is theft, it's moot in these cases, because there's
| no value there, nothing to steal.
|
| There's also less altruistic arguments for emulation that are
| valid too, arguments for emulating games that do still have
| some value. One may do it as a form of protest, they want to
| edit the game, they want to play it more easily, or they want
| to put together a comprehensive list of emulated games that
| everyone can have access to. There are good arguments for all
| of these, despite the fact that they're often illegal and
| sometimes may even harm the original creators. Each argument
| should be considered on its own merits before the action is
| judged as something that ought not to happen.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| The question is missing the point the parent is making.
| Parent is saying that the purpose of IP is to, in the long
| run, benefit society. As a result, we have collectively
| agreed ( for various definitions of agreed -- I certainly
| think they are way too long ) that protecting author's works
| for a period of time is desirable. As such, after some time
| has passed, why does it not end up in the same category as
| old published books ( public domain )?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| If the sequel isn't compelling it won't sell. It's a bad game
| series that relies on the first one being unavailable to sell
| the second.
| feoren wrote:
| We can decide to make laws based on the society that we all
| want to live in. If our objective is maximizing the amount of
| creative work available to society, it may make sense to say
| that creators of those works enjoy monopoly on the
| reproduction and sale of those works, but do _not_ gain the
| right to deprive society of the works. Some minimum good-
| faith effort to actually publish the works is a perfectly
| reasonable requirement on copyright.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Is your company still up and running? No rights, unless the
| company explicitly voids the copyright.
|
| Did you go out of business but you didn't sell the copyright?
| No rights, unless you personally void the copyright.
|
| Did you die, but did you have (legal) heirs? No rights,
| because copyright is inherited.
|
| Are you a US citizen and you died without legal heirs? Still
| no rights, because (and this is the most insane one) your
| assets become state property _and copyright is considered an
| asset_.
|
| The only two ways consumers will be free to distribute that
| first game is either by the clock running out on the
| copyright, or by whoever is the copyright holder explicitly
| legally voiding the copyright before then.
| farawayzone0019 wrote:
| > If something is not legally available then copyright law
| ought to make it eligible for free distribution
|
| What about stuff that's in flight? Or your IP that you've
| developed that is taken off the market and you are
| incorporating into another product? Or stuff you put out there
| and it flops because of timing and you plan to relaunch again
| in 2 years? There are many situations where this doesn't hold
| up.
|
| You sentiment makes sense but implementation is tricky.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| This is why legislation isn't one sentence long and we also
| have judges.
| happymellon wrote:
| Unfortunately the Disney vault works exactly this way. Generate
| pent up demand by refusing to sell a product, which is exactly
| how copyright works for them.
|
| I however agree with you and have no moral concerns if a
| company doesn't want to sell me a product.
| chongli wrote:
| Copyright is supposed to strike a balance between creators
| and the public. That balance has been so distorted as to be
| unrecognizable today. It needs a reset!
| bo1024 wrote:
| Not to mention the outside influence and value captured by
| publishers and distributors (not creators).
| kmeisthax wrote:
| These are part and parcel of the same problem. Publishers
| want to strip creators of ownership as soon as possible
| _because_ their back catalog is a pile of gold and they
| are the dragon using it as a makeshift bed. At their
| scale creative works are more valuable for the status
| they confer upon the company than for being an actual
| thing that they can sell.
|
| All of this is deliberate, of course. The copyright
| bargain we currently have today was struck in the 1970s -
| a time in which much creative work was a collaborative
| effort that practically _had_ to be capitalistically
| owned by a for-profit corporation. Self-publishing was
| entirely a product of counter-culture, fan
| conventions[0], and vanity presses[1]. The only fig leaf
| to the notion of these being _authors_ rights rather than
| just a weird kind of tradeable monopoly is rights
| reversion - a thing which publishers hate with the
| passion of God.
|
| [0] Yes, those actually did exist at this time. Remember:
| San Diego Comic-Con started in 1970 and Comiket in 1975.
| If you think that's old wait until I tell you about the
| historical Sherlock Holmes fandom!
|
| [1] I suspect this was a derisive term coined by large
| book publishers as a reaction to people who aided self-
| publishing artists.
| londons_explore wrote:
| If you wrote this into law, copyright holders would immediately
| put a notice on their website that a copy of any of their
| films/books/music/whatever is available for sale at a cost of
| $1M if you write a letter to their postal mail address.
|
| That would meet the law as "offered for sale".
|
| It's hard to write a law that says "offered for sale for a
| sensible price, in form the buyer desires, and without
| excessive hoops to jump through"
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > It's hard to write a law that says "offered for sale for a
| sensible price, in form the buyer desires, and without
| excessive hoops to jump through"
|
| No it isn't.
|
| "If the work is not offered in a manner that can be purchased
| reasonably in a manner conforming to industry standards
| unless (1) it is A (2) it is not A but is B..."
|
| Have you ever read a law?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| This is not true for abandoned works, or works for which one
| cannot locate the copyright owner. The tiniest of hurdles to
| maintaining copyright could make a large amount of works
| available.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Some may, but honestly few would
| bogwog wrote:
| Copyright is a monopoly, and it should be scrutinized as such.
|
| It does provide some much-needed to protections for rights
| holders, but it provides very little protection for consumers.
| Fair use is something at least, but doesn't help when rights
| holders engage in predatory practices that only serve to harm
| consumers (e.g. the hell that is video streaming today)
|
| Idk what a better copyright law would look like, but I do know
| that we can do better, and believe it can be done in a way that
| benefits everyone fairly.
| jlglover wrote:
| Squatters rights for IP
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Copyright, as originally envisioned, should be a temporary
| privilege instead of a de facto ghost racket for perpetual
| extortion.
|
| Copyright as originally envisioned was a way of preventing
| books from being published if the crown didn't approve of them.
| bogantech wrote:
| If someone creates something and decides not to sell it that is
| their right. You don't have a divine right to other peoples
| belongings.
| f001 wrote:
| Absolutely. But that person also does not have a divine right
| to prevent someone else from copying and selling/distributing
| it either. Especially when doing so does not deprive the
| original creator of anything unlike physically stealing
| something.
| stcroixx wrote:
| In what universe does someone selling a book I wrote not
| deprive me of those same sales? How about I sell my book if
| I choose to and you decide whether to sell yours.
| lmm wrote:
| It doesn't "deprive" you of anything. You're not entitled
| to a business model.
| philwelch wrote:
| I've long favored a copyright abandonment law where refusing or
| failing to make a work available voids the copyright.
|
| I also think this should apply to derived works. For instance,
| if a film or a book is changed and only sold in the edited
| form, this should void the copyright on the original version.
| lancesells wrote:
| This type of thinking always seems very entitled. Just because
| you can't obtain a copy of something in a convenient manner it
| should be distributed for free?
|
| It's ok for things to die. It's ok for things to be hard to
| get. The world doesn't need all media available at all times to
| everyone.
| ncallaway wrote:
| It's not okay for things to be impossible to get after it
| expires from copyright. That was the entire deal that was
| struck to allow copyright to exist. The _entire_ bargain is
| that the creator gets an exclusive protection in exchange for
| the work entering the public domain.
|
| If the work doesn't enter the public domain, then it
| shouldn't have received a copyright protection.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > It's ok for things to die.
|
| Maybe, you're free to let things you care about go die. I
| don't.
|
| > It's ok for things to be hard to get.
|
| Not if it's artificial restriction that prevents me enjoying
| things I like.
|
| > The world doesn't need all media available at all times to
| everyone.
|
| Says who?
| vkou wrote:
| > The world doesn't need all media available at all times to
| everyone.
|
| The world also doesn't need any more media created, the
| amount of good - no, great - media that I'd like to consume
| that already exists is _vastly_ greater than the amount of
| time I have in my life to consume it.
|
| Given that state of affairs, why do we even need any laws
| that encourage the production of new media?
|
| I mean, I'm highly sympathetic to the situation of the
| starving artist, but I'm not at all sympathetic to the
| situation of his publisher. If copyright, and the creative
| industry, and all of its production of new works disappeared
| tomorrow, it would have no meaningful impact on my life.
|
| The world doesn't _need_ any more media created.
| TheArchive56 wrote:
| > The world doesn't need any more media created.
|
| Art is a reflection of society and culture. We absolutely
| NEED more art created. It drives humanity forward.
|
| > If copyright, and the creative industry, and all of its
| production of new works disappeared tomorrow, it would have
| no meaningful impact on my life.
|
| In relation to my previous point, no new art being created
| would have a massive negative affect on all of society.
| Everyone, including you, would be impacted. It also comes
| off as shortsighted and unsympathetic to the starving
| artist to say that their lively-hoods being
| impacted/eliminated would have no impact on your life.
|
| > I mean, I'm highly sympathetic to the situation of the
| starving artist, but I'm not at all sympathetic to the
| situation of his publisher.
|
| A publisher offers an artist many benefits, ranging from
| distribution reach, legal protections, and other benefits
| that a single artist would have a hard time managing on
| their own.
|
| Reforming the copyright system and the relationships
| between artists and publishers requires a very nuanced look
| at all of the issues to allow art, artists, and society as
| a whole to flourish.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Aye, but instead the reality is that copyright can only expire
| by running out its term. If a company gets acquired, its
| copyrights get transfered to the new owner. If a company goes
| out of business, the copyright either gets sold to cover
| bankrupcy or becomes the property of the people who owned the
| company. If a person holding a copyright dies, it goes to their
| heir(s), and finally, if someone dies without heirs, _it
| becomes state property_ in the US.
|
| The only way for a copyright to expire is either by running out
| its term, or by the current copyright holder voiding it.
|
| It's _such_ a great system.
| FreshStart wrote:
| Should have a yearly renewal bureaucracy..
| lamontcg wrote:
| no.
| FreshStart wrote:
| We shall meet again, in a year and a day.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| Let's go further and tax it. If it's still worth something
| for you after X years, claim it, but also pay the tax. When
| calculating piracy damages, use the same value as what you
| declared as taxable. If you want society to defend your
| rights, pay for it.
| arsome wrote:
| Not a bad idea - some entity must show legal ownership via
| chain of custody and make a claim every year, if they can't
| do so, it becomes public domain with an extra 1 year grace
| period or something.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| No, it should be non-transferable (but commissionable, so
| that companies can still own copyright if they paid
| employees to generate works), have a fixed short term (say,
| 20 years), and should be voided when the copyright holder
| expires before the copyright itself expires.
| ghaff wrote:
| Corporations would love it. Disney isn't going to forget to
| renew a copyright. Many solo authors or their heirs would.
| DropInIn wrote:
| Hmm... So you're saying the issue is the mere existence of
| transferability of copyright?
|
| Theres a pretty simple way to deal with that isn't there?
|
| No reasonable argument can be made that licencing is
| inadequate to provide compensation, can there?
| ryoshu wrote:
| I'm pretty sure if a copyright owner dies without heirs the
| copyright is orphaned, it doesn't become state property in
| the US. That's the problem. If the work became public domain
| it would make more sense.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Then https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/87919/does-
| copyright... should be both surprising, and depressing.
| toyg wrote:
| That's the sort of provision that is effectively
| unenforced, and is hence null in practice. I expect most
| states do not know whether they own any IP from dissolved
| companies, nor will they prosecute anyone who "infringes"
| such rights.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Ignorance of the law is no defense against prosecution,
| and any claim that "it's null in practice" is about as
| bad legal advise as you can give.
|
| Even if the company went bust, and the former owners
| died, and they have no legal heirs, that copyright is
| STILL active and now lies with the state, whether the
| state knows that or not.
|
| It might be _called_ an orphan work, and it might take a
| whole lot of digging to discover it 's now owned by the
| state, but it _is_ owned, and they _do_ have the right to
| prosecute over infringement if someone at any point goes
| "hang on, we own this, and we can make close to 50% of
| our annual budget by prosecuting".
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Huh. If I own a Picasso and it's not for sale, then you should
| be able to take it? Strange argument on the face of it.
| tail_exchange wrote:
| The supply of Picassos are limited, since there is only one
| of each piece. Software and other digital medias don't have
| this constraint.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| True. But to take and distribute freely somebody's
| copyrighted material is essentially taking all the value
| out of the material. Some similar in that way.
| jedberg wrote:
| This is one of those things that a bit of technology could so
| easily resolve.
|
| The government sets up a website where you can upload the work
| you want to copyright and register yourself as the owner. If
| it's something like software, you must upload the code. It
| wouldn't be visible to anyone, but would be there in case the
| copyright expires.
|
| If someone wants to use your work, they can contact you though
| the website.
|
| If you don't reply (edit: this should say acknowledge) in some
| reasonable amount of time (say three months), then the
| copyright is considered abandoned and the work enters the
| public domain.
|
| For existing works, give people say two years to upload and
| register. Anything not registered (or at least marked as "in
| dispute") becomes public domain.
|
| This at least solves the abandoned works problem, as well as
| the archiving problem. After 100ish years, we'd have a copy of
| every work as it enters the public domain.
| LegitShady wrote:
| >If you don't reply in some reasonable amount of time (say
| three months), then the copyright is considered abandoned and
| the work enters the public domain.
|
| I'm not sure why I'm legally required to respond to requests
| for the use of my copyrighted works. I can simply ignore
| them. Requiring that I respond to them will create an undue
| burden on me.
|
| I don't mind as long as I can bill you personally for forcing
| me to hire someone to respond to such requests, at a
| reasonable rate for a legal attorney with a specialty in
| copyright. He can even provide invoices, although the time
| required to produce the invoice will be included in the
| invoice.
| jedberg wrote:
| You don't have to respond. You just have to acknowledge
| that you've received the request and that you still wish to
| hold the copyright.
| benabbottnz wrote:
| Then everyone will just use an auto-reply service.
| jedberg wrote:
| Which would be fine, because those services still cost
| money and/or require maintenance. There would still be a
| way to track down the owner of the copyright. You could
| even make it part of the law that the respondent must be
| the copyright holder or have had contact with the
| copyright holder within the last X days.
| xeonmc wrote:
| So basically government-mandated NFTs?
| ivlad wrote:
| > The government sets up a website
|
| What government? World government? Yours? Mine? Who will pay
| for it? What will happen is an author is hit by a car and
| falls into coma? How will authorship be established?
| Worldwide federated authentication of authors? How will it
| work of authors in Iran?
|
| Technosolutuonists are funny sometimes. "Just add a little
| bit of blockchain".
| dnissley wrote:
| Uploading the work itself doesn't seem like it would work in
| a lot of cases. I'm picturing e.g. Google trying to upload
| their entire monorepo with hundreds of thousands of file
| changes per day -- to what end exactly?
| kube-system wrote:
| This idea presumes you're talking about copyrighted _mass
| media_ which _was_ distributed widely, which is only a small
| subset of copyrighted material. A very large amount of
| copyrighted material is never distributed, or is very limited
| in distribution to begin with.
| thriftwy wrote:
| If it was ever published as a mass media (with a price tag),
| then it should be treated as mass media.
| therealpygon wrote:
| True, but it isn't a difficult distinction to make. The
| entire point of laws are to make distinctions.
| floomk wrote:
| So what value does that give society?
| kube-system wrote:
| Privacy. I have the right to make something, not share it,
| and prevent others from sharing it without my permission.
| Or I may share it only with those who I choose to share it
| with.
| floomk wrote:
| That's fine, just don't share it. If you don't intend to
| use it commercially you do not deserve commercial
| protections.
| kube-system wrote:
| Strong disagree. If I choose not to share something
| today, I do deserve, at a minimum:
|
| 1. the right to commercially share it later
|
| 2. the right to prevent others from commercially sharing
| it without my permission
|
| 3. the right to share my creations with a limited group
| of people, commercially or non-commercially
|
| Say for instance, you share a creative work with someone
| in confidence. They should not have the right to freely
| copy and publish your work without your permission.
|
| It is very common for people to create works which are
| private and or shared with small groups of people, and it
| is important for our laws to protect people's rights to
| keep those works private or semi-private.
|
| Or to put it another way, a 'leak' of a private work
| shouldn't be a free pass for the rest of the world to
| share and/or monetize that breach of privacy.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| > Or to put it another way, a 'leak' of a private work
| shouldn't be a free pass for the rest of the world to
| share and monetize that breach of privacy.
|
| I half-agree with you on this. On the one had when you
| share information with others, people should have some
| kind of right to share with others when you shared with
| them. On the other hand I don't think that someone has
| the right to profit off of something you created without
| your permission.
|
| IMHO, there is no kind of privacy when it comes to
| sharing something unless there is a meeting-of-the-minds
| agreement that all parties agree to before hand.
| floomk wrote:
| NDAs are a thing. You don't need invasive copyright laws
| for any of this.
| Zetice wrote:
| ...so are terms of use, which often include "you can't
| share this without my permission" so even if copyright
| law weren't so awful, the people who would be doing the
| sharing would still be breaking an agreement to do so.
| kube-system wrote:
| Most things in life aren't software and don't have a TOS.
| I know this is a tech forum, and people are usually
| thinking about tech, but most of what copyright applies
| to is still not software.
| Zetice wrote:
| Most things _do_ have terms of service (not Terms of
| Service), including copyright law.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes, but NDAs are not automatic and are too cumbersome to
| protect people in anything but the most formal, pre-
| planned, and equitable situations.
|
| There are many scenarios where people deserve these
| protections and NDAs wouldn't be possible or practical.
| For instance:
|
| * An artist improvising in public
|
| * Someone sharing with another party in a situation with
| a large power imbalance (and so they refuse to sign an
| NDA with anyone)
|
| * Someone sharing in a social situation where NDAs are
| not practical (romantic, familial, or personal
| relationships)
| floomk wrote:
| > * An artist improvising in public
|
| You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public.
|
| > * Someone sharing with another party in a situation
| with a large power imbalance (and so they refuse to sign
| an NDA with anyone)
|
| Don't share it with them until they sign. If they sign
| and violate the NDA, you got your payday.
|
| > * Someone sharing in a social situation where NDAs are
| not practical (romantic, familial, or personal
| relationships)
|
| If you don't trust your spouse then get a prenup. The
| other categories aren't special.
|
| That said, if your work is so easy to copy it probably
| wasn't (or shouldn't have been) valuable to begin with.
| Implementation matters more than ideas. So most of these
| concerns are silly to me.
| kube-system wrote:
| No, an artist absolutely _should_ have a reasonable
| expectation that their improv at a coffee shop won 't be
| ripped off next week by a billion dollar publisher.
|
| > Don't share it with them until they sign.
|
| Which would be possible in a situation where someone has
| the power to do so, but this isn't always the case. In
| industries where there are large negotiating power
| imbalances between creators and others they work with,
| you will typically find that creators have little to no
| negotiation power. There's a reason we have many legal
| protections in many parts of the law outside of contract
| law.
|
| > If you don't trust your spouse then get a prenup. The
| other categories aren't special.
|
| A spouse is the most formal of the examples I listed. And
| a spouse in many places is someone you've already entered
| into a formal legal agreement with. But to the contrary,
| I don't think it is reasonable to expect people bring
| NDAs to a first date.
|
| > That said, if your work is so easy to copy it probably
| wasn't (or shouldn't have been) valuable to begin with.
| Implementation matters more than ideas. So most of these
| concerns are silly to me.
|
| The concept of privacy isn't predicated on monetary
| value.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It's not strictly commercial vs non-commercial though, I
| could sell the only copy of something for a lot of
| money... and copyright ensures that it can't be legally
| reproduced.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| What if I want privacy in matters that are not copyright
| able? Clearly copyright is for commercial property, and
| privacy is an entirely separate matter that should be
| dealt with by anti-stalking laws, etc.
| concordDance wrote:
| Why should you have that right? Is society as a whole
| improved by that right? Can it be improved further by
| tweaking or limiting that right?
| aequitas wrote:
| But you don't need public copyright for that. If you
| share something with a limited set of parties just draft
| an NDA. If you publish to the public with which you can
| make no prior agreement you use copyright.
| kube-system wrote:
| The fact that copyrights are automatic is a gigantic
| reason why NDAs aren't a good solution for this. The
| people who are in the best position to abuse someone's
| creative privacy are often the same people who won't sign
| NDAs.
| ncallaway wrote:
| I generally think that copyright should have to be extended
| every 5 years for an escalating fee. Part of the scheme is that
| to extend the copyright, you must list contact information for
| the current owners of the copyright. All these numbers below
| are purely examples of the kind of scaling I think should exist
|
| So, from creation 0-5 years everything is automatically
| instantly copyrighted (as it is today). 5-10 years you must
| manually extend the copyright and it costs $500/work. 10-15
| years it should cost $5,000/work. 15-20 years $100,000/work.
| 20-25 years $500,000/work, etc. By the time we're at 50 years,
| an additional 5 years registration should cost hundreds of
| millions of dollars, and would only be done for the _most_
| important properties (like The Mouse).
|
| (In my _ideal_ world, these fees would go into an arts fund in
| the federal government that could be used to encourage the
| creation of less financially viable arts, like local theatre
| programs, arts education for children, etc)
|
| In such a scheme if a work is particularly valuable (either
| because it's being mass distributed, or because it has value in
| _not_ being mass distributed), then the owner could maintain
| the copyright, but it would just be totally financially non-
| viable for these kinds of abandoned games to remain locked up.
| There 'd be absolutely no business case for it.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| "The mouse" isn't an abstract entity you can copyright
| instead you would have to copyright countless actual works
| and the price to keep hundreds or thousands of individual
| works would be essentially billions to keep "the mouse".
| While this is an interesting concept if the practical effect
| is to end most copyrights within 20 years wouldn't it be
| simpler just to do that?
| 101008 wrote:
| so let's say I wrote a book that I like it, some people like
| it but it was far from a success -and I want to prevent from
| being copied, I have to pay $100k after 15 years? In
| publishing times that's not much, books published in 2008
| would have to pay that to avoid being copied and distributed
| freely.
| ncallaway wrote:
| The specific amounts were for example only. I could see
| making it much flatter for the first 20 years, and then
| escalating rapidly after that.
|
| But, yes, in general, if you want to prevent it from being
| copied you would have to spend ever larger sums of money to
| accomplish that.
|
| The entire point of copyright is a deal to encourage
| author's creating a work *so that it can enter the public
| domain*. This scheme is designed allow _most_ works to
| enter the public domain much earlier than they do now,
| while still allowing the most economically valuable
| creations to be pushed off for quite a while.
|
| But, you the author wanting to prevent your book from being
| copied is a _harm_ to society. So, the goal with this
| scheme is that the extension costs should _roughly mirror_
| those harms of continuing to lock a work up. The idea,
| then, is that when the economic benefit to you the author
| is _larger_ than those societal harms, then you'll pay for
| the extension.
|
| But when those economic benefits to you the author is
| _less_ than those societal harms, then you'll stop paying
| for the extension.
| dahfizz wrote:
| > But, you the author wanting to prevent your book from
| being copied is a _harm_ to society.
|
| I take issue with this. You are not harmed just because
| you don't have free access to something you want.
| Refusing to buy your kids some candy does not "harm"
| them.
|
| Using this definition of "harm", you having money in your
| savings account is a "harm" to "society". Using your
| logic, the government then ought to force you to donate
| all your savings and excess possessions to "society" so
| that harm is reduced.
| globalreset wrote:
| Sending people with guns just because someone shared
| sequences of words you claim "ownership" over is a cost
| and harm. Society does not inherently owe you keeping
| your ideas exclusively controlled by you. It's a form of
| a artificial, but pragmatic concession in the hopes it
| will encourage people to produce more interesting
| sequences of words. If it wasn't for social consensus you
| would not be able to control it and wouldn't be able to
| do anything about it (unlike physical property, which you
| can physically protect).
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| People saving money IS a harm to society and government
| does various things to discourage it at certain times.
| OP's copyright solution is similar in that it merely
| discourages keeping a copyright, it doesn't outright
| forbid it
| dahfizz wrote:
| It's absolutely not a harm. Increasing spending gives GDP
| a little bump, that's why governments encourage it. It
| helps re-election.
|
| You guys are using "harm" to mean "slightly suboptimal".
| It's completely ridiculous.
| concordDance wrote:
| Why do you want less people to read the book you made after
| 5 years? And why should society indulge this desire?
| bogantech wrote:
| Why shouldn't people be in control of their own art /
| work and why should you be able to leech off people who
| create things?
| concordDance wrote:
| You are "leaching" off thousands of people from history
| every moment. Using words and concepts they came up with,
| eating food from fields tamed and conquered by long dead
| people.
|
| Rights exist as heuristics for making the world a better
| place, full of fulfilled happy people living meaningful
| lives. We benefit from the works of others and this is a
| good thing, it is our main advantage over creatures like
| the octopus.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Why do you want to prevent it being copied? If it's not
| successful why do you even care?
| jstanley wrote:
| Well, yeah, that's exactly the point. To stop you from
| being able to prevent it from being copied!
| dmonitor wrote:
| I could see some negative patterns cropping up with this.
| Author writes book, publisher sits on it until the 5
| years are up and then they can publish without royalties
| to the author. Same would happen for a movie script or
| the like. Publishers just turn into scavenging hyenas
| waiting for copyrights to expire
| olddustytrail wrote:
| That scenario makes no sense.
|
| Firstly, why would the author ever hand over their book
| to such a publisher?
|
| Secondly, why wouldn't the author have a contract with
| their publisher guaranteeing terms?
|
| Thirdly, surely the publisher is incentivised to make as
| many sales as possible in the 5 years before the
| copyright expires, when _other_ publishers can then sell
| copies (assuming it 's been successful enough to make it
| worthwhile).
| bdowling wrote:
| Here's an even more problematic example:
|
| 1. Author publishes a dozen novels over the first 20
| years of his/her career. All of them are good, but none
| of them sell well.
|
| 2. Author does not pay the copyright renewal fees because
| they are too expensive. Anyone can now copy those books
| and pay nothing.
|
| 3. Author's next book is well-received. The author is
| hailed as a genius and there is suddenly a ton of
| interest in the author's earlier works.
|
| 4. Everyone but the author makes money on the author's
| older works.
|
| Edit: The point here is that when a work is successful,
| which is rare, it is unfair for everyone other than the
| author, who is most responsible for the work, to profit
| from it.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Wouldn't the author then be extremely incentivized to
| create a new novel after the well-received one?
|
| Since that new novel would be granted an exclusive
| monopoly period, and the author now has significant
| notoriety.
|
| So, since the explicit goal of the system is to
| incentivize _new_ works, and this system incentivizes
| _new_ works in that scenario, it seems like an explicit
| _success_ of the system, rather than a problematic
| example.
|
| In the current scenario, at step 4. the author can simply
| retire on the success of those previous books. That
| _fails_ to incentivize new works. So I'd argue my
| proposal works _better_ at the goals of copyright in this
| scenario than the current system.
| bdowling wrote:
| The author could be dead and his family could be
| impoverished, or maybe his best novels were his earlier
| ones. Should publishers make tons of money off his
| earlier, better works while his family starves?
|
| Also, copyright isn't just the original work, it's also
| derivatives like sequels, translations, and movie
| adaptations. Should all of them make money while the
| author and his family get nothing?
|
| In the real world, limiting copyright like you suggest is
| a non-starter.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > The author could be dead
|
| In that scenario it doesn't sound like there's a lot we
| can do to encourage the author to create new works. Which
| is, again, the explicit and primary goal of copyright law
| and jurisprudence.
| bdowling wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. None of the works would
| have been produced in the first place if there wasn't the
| possibility of making a return on the investment in time,
| energy, etc.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| This situation just doesn't seem that likely. How often
| has an author with absolutely no sales whatsoever on
| their first few books then gone on to release a best
| seller? If their early works are profitable at all, they
| would renew the copyright for the relatively low rate and
| still be holding it when their new bestseller comes
| along.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| the author could be alive, and write new works, and that
| seems more likely
|
| any member of the family could also contribute to society
| by writing new works
|
| remember the goal: to promote new works; not to make the
| author money, or their family money, or their family's
| descendants money; and not to enrich or prevent the
| enriching of any given publisher
|
| allowing the author and family to milk old work in
| perpetuity, whether independently or through a publisher,
| would seem to incentivize the opposite of that
| bdowling wrote:
| In some ways, writing a novel (or producing certain types
| of works) is like buying a lottery ticket. Most of the
| time it will be worth nothing. But if it is a winner,
| then the buyer would like to be able to cash it in. If,
| on the other hand, you couldn't win the jackpot even if
| you hit all the numbers, then people would stop buying
| lottery tickets.
|
| The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to write
| or produce creative works, even when the reality is that
| most works will not be successful in any way. If you take
| away the possibility of reward for the few works that are
| successful, then that will result in fewer works being
| produced.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| nobody is proposing "taking away the possibility of
| reward", or making anything such that "you couldn't win
| the jackpot even if you hit all the numbers", so it
| sounds like there're no issues with the proposal
|
| if there was data that shows copyrighted works usually
| earn nothing the first 5 years, and earn significant
| value after that, or even that annual earnings from
| copyrighted works usually increase after 5 years, the
| argument against the proposed reform would be more
| convincing,
|
| but in any case, the purpose of copyright is to encourage
| new works, not allow authors to perpetually cash in on
| old ones like a lottery ticket instead
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| If the author is dead, then what are you even arguing
| about? Of course copyright should not be extended past
| death. Do you think Charles Dickens descendants should
| still be getting paid for his work? It's ridiculous
| snvzz wrote:
| Copyright is supposed to be an incentive to creating
| things, with the ultimate benefit of an eventual richer
| public domain. Yet the author in your scenario didn't
| lack the motivation.
|
| Under the proposed system, he'd also be more likely to be
| encouraged to continue creating new works, rather than
| just retiring because of the one successful book.
| bdowling wrote:
| Under the proposed system, he probably would never have
| written anything because the most likely outcome is that
| he would gain nothing even if his works are successful.
| snvzz wrote:
| Considering how much effort your hypothetical writer put
| into writing several books w/o getting any compensation
| makes me doubt their motivation was money.
|
| They would have long given up, if it was money.
| [deleted]
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| The author can sell their own book even after copyright
| is up. Indeed some people may prefer to buy it from them.
| I think the system would totally change how people
| perceive these things
| Fargren wrote:
| I really don't see that as very problematic.
|
| For me, the value of the books is the value they provide
| to their readers, not the money they provide to the
| author. We want author to be able to get money because it
| will incentivize them to write. I don't think it's
| realistic to think any writer will not write because his
| work may become famous only after he has published some
| books and therefore won't be as profitable as some other
| copyright scenario. That is just not how people think.
|
| I know that some people see copyright as some kind of
| justice system to ensure creators get their due. I think
| that view in general leads to copyright maximalism, and
| is not a good place to start from when discussing the
| value of copyright
| bdowling wrote:
| It's fine that society should benefit, but why should the
| publishers who pay the author nothing benefit the most?
|
| (Edit: Not just republishers of the original work, but
| also those making derivatives like translations, sequels,
| or movie/TV adaptations.)
| ncallaway wrote:
| > but why should the publishers who pay the author
| nothing benefit the most?
|
| How do the publishers benefit from a work that enters the
| public domain? They have no more right to use the work
| than anyone else. I think the margins for publishers
| would be very low after a work enters the public domain.
| bdowling wrote:
| Derivative works like translations, sequels, TV/movie
| adaptations, etc.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Why are they making derivatives of a work that nobody
| cared about? If someone else comes along and makes a
| profitable derivative, seems like they have added
| something that the original author just didn't have
| (Better story, Better marketing, etc)
| concordDance wrote:
| Actually, without copyright the publishers will be
| getting almost nothing as with everyone being able to
| publish the price will quickly go down to printing and
| postage.
| bdowling wrote:
| Makers of derivative works such as foreign language
| translations, sequels, and movie adaptations could
| presumably hold monopolies on those.
| elektrontamer wrote:
| A government getting ungodly sums of money to do a very
| complicated task when they can't even manage the simplest
| tasks without corruption or mismanagement?
| ncallaway wrote:
| How is maintaining a simple registry a "very complicated"
| task. Secretaries of State in every state do this. This is
| the kind of nuts and bolts operations that governments are
| actually equipped to handle.
| elektrontamer wrote:
| The part where they redistribute it. There's no way that
| money isn't going to government cronies in my country no
| matter which party is in power.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| When Marvel releases a new movie, some absurdly large chunk
| of revenue is earned in the first 5 years.
|
| Why allow them to extend it at all? Even 5 years is
| excessive, give them 18 months. Disallow it entirely for any
| work that was ever released with DRM. And since we're talking
| video games, I'm not certain that online games count as being
| DRM-free... if it can't be 100% self-hosted, no copyright for
| you.
|
| What Blizzard did to bnetd was shameful
| tptacek wrote:
| Respectfully, this isn't so much a coherent set of
| principles about the limited monopoly copyright grants, but
| rather fan service. Copyright doesn't draw distinctions
| between video games and player piano rolls, and why would
| it? What would lead any of us to believe that we'd ever
| alter copyright to forfeit rights when things are DRM'd?
| One of the complexities of copyright law is that it's
| harmonized across much of the world, so you're asking for
| radical changes not just to US law but for all of Europe as
| well.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| [flagged]
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| > Why allow them to extend it at all?
|
| Marvel's an interesting choice, because the comic book
| depiction of Iron Man (for example) came out in the 60's,
| and almost certainly didn't make anywhere near the kind of
| money that the movies did. I'm not generally opposed to
| copyright holders getting some revenue from the later
| adaption of their work, especially in situations like that.
|
| 5 years is cutting it really close for your typical film
| adaption of a book: the first Twilight and Harry Potter
| movies came out 4 years after their books, and I could
| definitely see movie studios just waiting an extra year to
| cut out the original authors.
|
| My ideal world would see original authors retaining these
| kinds of royalties for prolonged periods of time (maybe 40
| years or the life of the author, whichever's longer), but
| losing their monopoly rights in a much shorter timespan:
| basically, for the first 5-10 years copyright works the way
| it does today, but beyond that anybody's allowed to make
| derivative works, in exchange for some legally-mandated
| revenue slice.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > the first Twilight and Harry Potter movies came out 4
| years after their books, and I could definitely see movie
| studios just waiting an extra year to cut out the
| original authors.
|
| So Rowling only gets to be some 8 figure millionaire
| instead of a 10 figure billionaire? That's so unfair.
|
| > My ideal world would see original authors retaining
| these kinds of royalties for prolonged periods of time (
|
| The prolonged period of time should be 18 months. I don't
| think the concept of "royalties for adapting someone
| else's work" is severable from the concept of copyright.
| These things are either the same, or royalties are some
| subset of copyright.
|
| Even just re-typesetting a book is an adaptation as far
| as these things are concerned.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Right now, a copyright holder has a monopoly on their IP:
| they alone can decide who can use their works, and at
| what price, for the entire duration of their copyright.
| My suggestion was that that monopoly should only last a
| couple years (5? 10?), and then after that, it's a free-
| for-all. Re-print the book, adapt it to a movie,
| whatever, with the caveat that some fixed share (say,
| 1-5%, idk) of your revenue is owed to the creator.
|
| The way I see it, that's the best of both worlds. If your
| goal is non-commercial in nature (e.g., game
| preservationism), then you're free to redistribute for
| free. If your goal is commercial, you're making money off
| of someone else's work, pay some token royalties, but,
| here's the big "but": the original author doesn't get to
| say "No, you may not adapt my work this way".
|
| It even works for software copyright, with the caveat
| that you'd need to put some thought into how to deal with
| multiple claimants of royalties would work (since owing
| 50% of your revenue to 25 different authors seems
| excessive). Maybe have a cap of, say, 10% that, after
| reached gets subdivided based on some criteria.
|
| 18 months is flatly too short. Most creative works take
| longer than that between completion and market. You have
| to give artists some time to attempt to extract value
| from their work. Listen: J.K. Rowling is an evil bitch,
| but the world loved her work, and she was compensated as
| such. I feel the same way about Notch, of Minecraft fame.
| Guy's a dick, but it's hard to say he stole much of his
| fortune.
| jlg23 wrote:
| > In such a scheme if a work is particularly valuable (either
| because it's being mass distributed, or because it has value
| in not being mass distributed), then the owner could maintain
| the copyright, but it would just be totally financially non-
| viable for these kinds of abandoned games to remain locked
| up. There'd be absolutely no business case for it.
|
| Value is in they eye of the beholder. If someone makes
| $30/month from an indie game they developed 30 years ago, is
| it ok to take those 30 because they ain't 3 million?
|
| I genuinely like the idea of regularly having to renew the
| claim to copyright, though.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Why couldn't they continue to sell the game? There are lots
| of works out of copyright that still make money just by
| virtue of the method of delivery (i.e. a bookstore selling
| a physical copy of Don Quixote is preferable to many people
| over downloading it online)
| tryptophan wrote:
| I think first 5 years should be free, then the author
| declares the value of their work to be X and pays a yearly
| tax of 0.05 * X to keep for copyright for as long as they
| want.
|
| To make sure they dont put a low X, have anyone be able to
| buy the copyright from the author for X. If someone wants to
| buy, author can raise X to keep their copyright.
|
| This is a nice system because it is naturally progressive and
| balanced, huge corps with billion $ IP will finally start
| paying a ton to have the gov keep enforcing their copyrights.
| tnecniv wrote:
| The problem with a lot of these systems is that
| copyrighting happens at the time of creation whether you
| register or not. If you don't register, it may be harder to
| prove someone is violating your copyright in court, but it
| is still the IP of the creator (or employer of the creator
| if a contract was signed). I guess you could argue that if
| you haven't bothered filing for copyright after 5 years the
| value is approximately $0, but that poses the following
| problem:
|
| Let's say I make a web comic that's basically worthless for
| 5 years. Then, after 8 years Jimmy Fallon or some other
| late night show sees it and shows it on the air. Overnight,
| my old comics, which I have implicitly valued at $0.00 or
| close to $0.00, become incredibly popular. Disney or an IP
| troll or whoever can come along and then buy my early
| comics for pennies before I realize what happened and I get
| nothing.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I don't think this was very well thought out.
|
| The only way this would be a nice system is that it would
| icentivise everyone to make everything free and open
| source, or don't create anything at all, since if you
| create siomething with the intention to get value from it,
| anyone else can decide to take it from you simply because
| they are Apple and you don't have the 100k to stop them.
| It's already bad enough that big companies can buy smaller
| companies just by waving the cash at the owners, and all
| the Figma, Centos, etc users get to suck it.
|
| Except that it wouldn't even be nice in that sarcastic way,
| because what happens to copyleft in that world? I think
| it's critically important that the "you may have but not
| steal this" in GPL doesn't expire in a mere 5 years, and no
| one has to pay hundreds of thousands to prevent a big for-
| profit company from stealing something that they could have
| had for free anyway.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Or even simpler: 5 years and you can extend it twice. That's
| it.
| ncallaway wrote:
| I would be totally fine with that, but I think it would
| be...not politically viable. This scheme is basically my
| compromise that I think could be able to survive in some
| form.
|
| I think your proposal is a _better_ version of copyright,
| but I think as a starting point for a legislative
| discussion it probably doesn 't get a conversation off the
| ground
| tptacek wrote:
| That would be a shorter term of copyright than has ever
| existed in the United States.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| What one country has done in the past doesn't have to
| limit what any country does in the future.
| tptacek wrote:
| Sure, but at this point why pretend we're discussing a
| copyright reform? You're effectively asking for
| abolition.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| 15 years is much longer than 0, that's a silly thing to
| say.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think I'm trying to say that you're as likely to get
| abolition as you are a term of copyright shorter than has
| ever existed in the US, so why not shoot for the moon?
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| I don't think so. Vast majority of creative works fall
| out of favor in the first 15 years of publication, so
| creators wouldn't be giving up anywhere near as much as
| if copyright was totally abolished. The situations are
| not comparable in the slightest.
| tptacek wrote:
| Then their creators can released them under a lenient
| license, or to the public domain. Why do we get to decide
| for them?
| mrob wrote:
| Because it's not clear that short copyright terms are
| harmful. Modern copyright shouldn't make us lose sight of
| the goal of promoting "the Progress of Science and useful
| Arts". 15 years is a reasonable starting point for
| achieving that aim. If it's still too long it could
| always be further reduced later.
| tptacek wrote:
| You're as likely to get abolition as you are to get a 15
| year copyright, which is ~1/4 what copyright was in 1909.
| watwut wrote:
| There used to be time without copyright at all. And the
| copyright was tightening rather slowly until it reached
| that infinite super serious thing it is now.
| ta988 wrote:
| So every broke artist that cannot afford the fees would not
| benefit from their work once it becomes recognized way later
| in their life? that sound pretty bad.
| cogman10 wrote:
| How often does this really happen?
|
| Becoming an artist that makes it big is like winning the
| lottery. It almost never happens in the modern era because
| we are flooded with extremely talented artists that have no
| differentiation between them.
|
| But further, those "make it late" artists are almost
| certainly making the majority of their money on their later
| works. And if we get into the nitty gritty of art, it's
| super common that the rights to those early works are long
| sold for $.10. It's unlikely the original artist could see
| any sort of monetary benefit.
|
| On the flip side, media protection is a huge racket that is
| primarily a detriment to society. It stops media companies
| from innovating (just keep making mice videos), encourages
| nasty behavior (Like Disney's vault, where they
| purposefully lock away media so they can re-release it
| every n years, for a limited time only), and ultimately
| limits creativity. Consider how often we hear the story of
| a youtube video getting taken down because someone hummed
| something that sounded too close to copyrighted material.
| That is an active harm to art that is very common.
| owisd wrote:
| The vast majority of artists make all the money they're
| ever going to make off their copyright in the first few
| years, so seems like a fair trade to end perpetual
| corporate copyright if an extremely tiny number of bleeding
| heart edge cases lose out.
| mcast wrote:
| It would probably make more sense for copyright fees to be
| proportional to the revenue the company makes. Disney paying
| $500 to license Mickey Mouse after 5 years while making
| millions isn't equitable for a small business copyrighting a
| toy brand for instance.
| henry2023 wrote:
| Why a small Toy brand needs copyright after 25+ years? what
| benefit society gets out of that?
| ncallaway wrote:
| I'd be open to there being an additional cost based on
| total revenue earned, but the scale should be the fixed
| costs, with significant additional revenue just moving that
| number up.
|
| I think the goal for the financial cost of the extension to
| be roughly equal to the "harm" caused to the rest of
| society for locking it up. So, I think making the scale in
| some way proportional to revenue could be a rough proxy for
| "how popular is this thing", which is then a rough proxy
| for "how much does it harm society to lock it up for 5 more
| years".
|
| That said, I'm more interested in being equitable to
| _society_, rather than being equitable to _creator_.
| Copyright should be just good enough of a deal that it
| encourages creative works. It doesn't need to do more than
| that.
| adamc wrote:
| On many levels, this would not work well. A quick example:
| Stories written for children typically do not generate as
| much revenue per year. They make up for that, eventually (if
| they are popular) because they are new to every new cohort of
| children, so that stories like "The Pokey Little Puppy" get
| sold for decades before falling out of favor.
|
| Your scheme would make writing children's stories less
| attractive.
|
| In general, overly clever schemes like this often do not work
| as anticipated.
| [deleted]
| concordDance wrote:
| > Your scheme would make writing children's stories less
| attractive.
|
| Honestly, this is fine.
|
| We already have tens of thousands of good children's
| stories, let those who do it for love of the art or the
| exceptional ones (like Rowlin make more if they want.
| adamc wrote:
| No, it's not fine. Children are important, and worthy of
| getting new stories that address their needs.
|
| In general, judging which categories don't need the
| protection of copyright amounts to deciding which
| categories of readers don't matter. It's elitist and
| unhelpful.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > In general, judging which categories don't need the
| protection of copyright amounts to deciding which
| categories of readers don't matter.
|
| I agree if you say "don't need protection", though I
| think that's a harsher criticism of my proposal than is
| warranted. Maybe there are categories which need stronger
| protection that what I proposed, which is fine.
|
| But I think you're also not considering the fact that
| _entry into the public domain_ is also a huge positive
| value to the reader.
|
| So, we need to have a balance between adequately
| incentivizing works, and works entering the public
| domain. I'd argue the current balance we've struck is
| _totally fucking broken_ , and _gravely harming readers
| of all types_.
|
| But, I'm open to the criticism that we would run the risk
| of this scheme of not adequately incentivizing certain
| works. I think that's good feedback.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| Wouldn't this scheme benefit children? Imagine growing up
| on Arthur and hitting early adulthood as its copyright
| expires and being able to contribute to the Arthur
| universe you grew up on. Conversely, I wonder how many
| people know Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is public
| domain and different from the version Disney has had
| since the 50s. The way things are now, I couldn't make
| anything related to most of the things I grew up with
| because everything being pushed on children is owned by a
| corporation.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > No, it's not fine. Children are important, and worthy
| of getting new stories that address their needs.
|
| Equating retaining ownership by copyright to protection,
| is an example of reasoning used to abuse copyright. The
| products still exist when they enter the public domain
| and need no additional protection, that copyright offers.
| It's really disturbing to see commenters repeat the
| attitudes that left copyright in such a degenerate state.
| concordDance wrote:
| Eh? All categories of copyright should be equally
| weakened. The readers happiness matters far more than the
| author's pocketbook for they outnumber him.
|
| Children's stories have been made since time immemorial.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| If the goal is to get new stories, a short period of
| copyright is magnitudes better than copyrights lasting
| for lifetimes. OPs system allows people to copyright
| their work for free for 5 years, which is when most works
| will be most profitable anyway
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| Authors generally don't build their careers by publishing
| books in 5 year periods. They generally build a body of
| work over decades whose residuals keep them alive in
| hungry/lean years. You also run into issues e.g. The Last
| Unicorn's author whose rights were taken from him because
| of elder abuse! Once he gets them back he gets nothing?
| That sucks.
| rvba wrote:
| There are already thousands of stupid comments on the
| internet, so why do you keep adding yours?
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| As a sometimes-author and indie game dev, I find the sound of
| that to be exhausting. Tiny companies, and individuals
| especially, find it hard enough to deal with weird
| regulations and costs.
|
| Like, some retired Grandma who writes popular mysteries is
| going to have to pay the government regularly to keep amazon
| from selling thousands of copies of her work without having
| to pay her?
|
| Everyone who makes a side project game on itch.io has to keep
| it online forever, or they lose rights to it forever?
| concordDance wrote:
| This balances the good of people being able to
| see/read/play the work against the good of incentivising
| future people to make more of it.
|
| Grandma can make money from her new mysteries and get some
| from the first five years without needing to charge.
|
| As it is, many works are being irreparably lost to time.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| What happens if grandma became disabled and is living off
| the residuals of her books 10 years ago published? Should
| old artists just die in poverty like the good old days
| then?
| californical wrote:
| This is such an edge case that it makes me think that
| maybe copyright isn't the solution that grandma needs.
|
| And by their proposal, the first couple extensions would
| be extremely cheap. It could be a simple form on some
| copyright.gov website to register your work.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| The edge case is actually quite common-- many authors
| mostly survive off their entire body of work, not just
| the works published recently. This was an issue in e.g.
| Disney, who refused to pay royalties to Star Wars books
| published many many years ago because they claimed to
| have purchased assets but not liabilities. One of the
| authors who was suing for royalties needed the money for
| cancer treatments. Bad look.
|
| 5k/work is not cheap. That's how much publishers may pay
| for a book. 15k/work is prohibitively expensive for
| books.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| What ticks me off is situations where I literally cannot
| buy a game. I would _gladly_ pay $60 _today_ for a copy of
| civilization 2 that ran perfectly on modern operating
| systems with the sound track and everything. I literally
| cannot buy it. It 's not for sale on GOG because no one
| knows who owns the rights.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > some retired Grandma who writes popular mysteries is
| going to have to pay the government regularly to keep
| amazon from selling thousands of copies of her work without
| having to pay her
|
| Well, for the first 5 years after publication, no. She
| would need to do nothing exactly as the world exists today.
| She would have an exclusive period of 5 years to monetize
| the book exclusively without having to register it, pay
| anyone, or talk to anyone.
|
| After 5 years, she would have to pay $500 (again, exact
| value for discussion purposes, not a final proposal) and
| register it with a government website (with her contact
| information, and attesting that she still owns the work).
| After 10 years, she would have to pay again, and update the
| registration. Or, if the works are no longer valuable, she
| could simply not do that, and let the works enter the
| public domain.
|
| The _entire point_ is that works that _aren't financially
| viable_ enter the public domain rapidly, and works that are
| continuing to produce financial value would be worth
| registration. >99% of works produced would likely never be
| registered (since every comment on a website counts as a
| separate "work"), and would enter the public domain after 5
| years. Only a small fraction would be extended for 5 years.
|
| But, yes, if you want exclusive rights to your game for 10
| years, you'd have to pay a small amount of money and fill
| out a form on a website (my goal would be about the same
| difficulty as updating your whois information for a
| registered domain name). If it's not worth that amount of
| trouble, then the work enters the public domain.
|
| > Everyone who makes a side project game on itch.io has to
| keep it online forever
|
| My proposal had no _online_ requirement. So, no, that
| wouldn't be part of my proposal. Don't know where you got
| that requirement from.
| jamjamjamjamjam wrote:
| As a consumer id just wait for indie games and smalltime
| books to become free. This ruins the demand and people
| have much less incentive to create. In general taking
| money away and giving it to a government is not a
| productive solution and definitely hinders creativity
| condwanaland wrote:
| I agree that some people would do this. However the
| proliferation of early access games and pre-
| ordered/special editions coming with an early access
| period suggests there is a significant chunk of consumers
| willing to pay to get something earlier
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| You can already do this to an extent. Wait a while for a
| book / game to have used copies available for a deep
| discount or easily checked out from Library
| watwut wrote:
| Yeah, if all it takes is to wait 5 years to have it for
| free, many people will wait.
|
| People wait for steam sales of just released games and
| that can take 2 years and you still pay. If they were
| sure it is free after 5, they gonna wait.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Except in the proposed scenario they're not sure it's
| going to be free at all? If they want it for free, they
| usually can find a torrent anyway.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| This would only work for games that have virtually no
| sales, otherwise you'd probably be waiting at least 10
| years
| Aardwolf wrote:
| This system may create weird incentives though.
|
| Say I make an indie game to sell on steam, earning a meager
| but acceptable income from it, and I want to provide it 15
| years of patches and updates (not unseen in indie games).
|
| Does updating it with a new patch adding a few features count
| as a new work or the same one? Or should I instead not do
| updates, but make a "part 2" instead since that's a new work?
| But then it's not the same game anymore and it may be a worse
| experience for players to have to get two separate games,
| rather than one improved one!
| ronsor wrote:
| Updating your game would count as a new work.
| mathgeek wrote:
| What parts of the game would count, though? If Disney
| creates a Mickey Mouse game and puts out a patch every
| year with "bug fixes", what is renewed?
| ncallaway wrote:
| This is already addressed by existing copyright law. For
| example, Sherlock Holmes has entered the public domain
| (mostly), but many of the more recent updates to Sherlock
| Holmes are not in the public domain.
|
| So, existing law wouldn't be impacted by these questions.
| mathgeek wrote:
| Yes, but that wasn't the question when it comes to
| "updating a game creates a new work".
| kragen wrote:
| weird is good
|
| under this proposal, if you only copyrighted part 2 or your
| patch, then people would be free to copy the original
| version and make derivative works of it
| xtracto wrote:
| Right, your example got me thinking about Dwarf Fortress,
| which was initially released on 2006 (according to
| Wikipedia). By GP's assessment they would have to pay
| $100,000 a year to preserve their copyright? Seems a bit
| harsh, I think.
| natural219 wrote:
| I don't think anyone is trying to fork Dwarf Fortress and
| sell it on a different platform.
|
| Actually, even if they _did_ , they would likely have
| proved the market to the founders earlier; maybe lighting
| a fire under their feet to monetize quicker. The current
| renaissance of DF via the Steam release could have
| happened five years earlier -- inspiring five more years'
| worth of other business-focused indie developers...
|
| You catch the drift. I like the OP's system hah.
| Supermancho wrote:
| While it seems harsh for someone who is well-regarded
| today, the system itself discourages abuse of the intent
| of copyright. I think the tradeoff is warranted.
| ncallaway wrote:
| $100,000 for 5 years (though, again, my specific numeric
| suggestions were mostly an example placeholder, not the
| result of considered thinking about what exact values
| make the most economic sense).
|
| It's also not clear to me that continued updates wouldn't
| reset the term.
|
| So, if they wanted to maintain a copyright on the 2006
| version of DF (v0.21.93.19a, released August 2006), they
| would need to pay $500 in 2011, and $5,000 in 2016, and
| $100k in 2021, for a total payment to the unitd sates
| treasury of $105,500.
|
| However, even if they paid nothing the latest release
| (50.09, released June 28, 2023) would remain under
| copyright automatically and for free until June 28, 2028.
| So they _could_ choose to let the community have access
| to the oldest versions of DF under public domain, while
| retaining copyright on the most recent versions. Or they
| could choose to pay to keep even the initial versions
| locked up.
|
| I'd also probably want to make sure that the legislative
| language ensured that you didn't have to pay the
| copyright registration on each patch release. So, if the
| DF team paid for the initial version to remain under
| copyright, _all_ the patch versions would retain that
| same copyright status without needing to be individually
| paid for. That seems like an implementation detail for
| the legislation that would be important to get right, but
| I didn't feel it was important to specify in the
| proposal.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| > I'd also probably want to make sure that the
| legislative language ensured that you didn't have to pay
| the copyright registration on each patch release
|
| Does that actually matter? Updated versions are
| derivative works of the original so as long as the
| original remains copyrighted who cares whether the
| patches are or not? Unless you're trying to monetize
| updates individually separate from the main product in
| which case why not register them?
| ncallaway wrote:
| > Does that actually matter?
|
| Maybe? It's why I think it's something that if you got
| the far the legislative process would need to consider.
|
| It's a detail that I could see being important to address
| in the actual law, or (as you note) it might be that
| everything falls out pretty naturally without needing to
| be addressed.
|
| I think my point is: "if this ever got to the point where
| it was being drafted into draft legislation, the drafter
| should make sure this part works sensibly instead of
| being crazy".
| dudeofea wrote:
| I think it matters more that the system is equally applied
| than what the system is exactly. So maybe no system at all
| would be better.
|
| With our current system, some players can choose to ignore
| copyright so its not like we really live under a copyright
| system.
| tptacek wrote:
| People can choose not to make the product of their work
| available. We don't have an inalienable right to access other
| people's creative works.
| bakugo wrote:
| > People can choose not to make the product of their work
| available.
|
| And these people have chosen to make it available. If you
| want to create something and keep it all to yourself, fine,
| do that, nobody will force you to release it to the public.
| But once you have released it to the public, you shouldn't be
| able to take it back.
| tptacek wrote:
| People are allowed to be selective about how they make
| things available, and they're allowed to stop putting the
| effort in to keep them available without forfeiting their
| rights. Again: we aren't entitled to access this stuff,
| except by contract, which spells out our remedies when they
| exist.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| You are free to make things unavailable, why should my
| tax money be spent on criminally charging people that do
| not conform to your preferences?
| tptacek wrote:
| For precisely the same reason people believe tax dollars
| should go towards enforcing the GPL. You're welcome to
| disagree, but not to withhold your tax dollars when you
| fall into the minority.
| bakugo wrote:
| You're just regurgitating what the current laws state.
| The whole point of this discussion is that said current
| laws lead to most media effectively becoming lost after a
| certain period of time and this is a problem, so the law
| should be changed.
| tptacek wrote:
| No, I'm saying that the principle underlying those laws
| is sound and should be respected. We're not entitled to
| other people's work product!
| pseudalopex wrote:
| We are not entitled to reproduction monopolies.
| tptacek wrote:
| The Constitution says otherwise.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The American constitution permits Congress to grant
| temporary reproduction monopolies. Not compels.
| cush wrote:
| One thing not mentioned in the article or comments here is how
| open source enriches the historical significance of a piece of
| software. No game will stand the test of time like Doom has,
| thanks to its source being available (and of course, elegant).
| cubefox wrote:
| If it is any consolation, it seems morally, if not legally,
| permissible to pirate unavailable classic games.
| agentultra wrote:
| The ESA's main thrust is incredibly stupid. _What if we decide to
| re-license that content but everyone can already get it for free
| from the library? Think of our profit losses!_
|
| That hasn't stopped book publishers from publishing the classics
| over and over.
|
| Preservation is super important. Just look at the Shoah
| Foundation's effort at preserving the video testimonies of
| survivors: preservation of digital media is complex, difficult
| and ever-evolving. Preserving video games is even harder:
| emulators that run on an ever-evolving set of target hardware
| have to be maintained just to play them. Current trends in video
| game design almost guarantee that some games are impossible to
| preserve: they exist as a moment in time, a memory, the articles
| and blog posts that were written about them.
|
| Shame really that profit is more important than the art and
| medium. Not surprising. But shameful.
|
| _Update_ : fixed some sentences for clarity.
| azlev wrote:
| What's the definition of a classic video game?
| coldpie wrote:
| > It's hard to define exactly what a "classic game" is, but for
| the sake of this study, we looked at all games released before
| 2010, which is roughly the year when digital game distribution
| started to take off.
|
| https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/
| codetrotter wrote:
| From the excecutive summary of the original study:
|
| They analysed a dataset of ~4,000 video games released in the
| US before 2010.
|
| https://zenodo.org/record/7996492
| skibz wrote:
| I'd say it's a video game of outstanding merit relative to
| other video games of its time.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| Just last weekend I wanted to play Cryostasis after seeing a
| playthrough on YouTube. It's a pretty unique mid 00s shooter that
| is relatively light on the shooting and heavy on atmosphere -
| you're a researcher meeting an icebreaker to leave Antarctica in
| 1981, but when you find the ship it's been wrecked since 1968,
| and the game follows you unraveling the mystery using
| supernatural time-jump powers. Instead of a health bar, you have
| to keep your body temperature high enough. It's a genuinely
| unique title that approaches the genre differently from pretty
| much any other...and it's literally impossible to buy.
|
| It's been delisted from Steam, Good Old Games, and any other
| storefront I could find online. People resell genuine retail keys
| that can get the game activated on Steam for ridiculous sums.
| Reposted hearsay online is that the original source code is lost
| so there will never be a remaster. There's a copy up on
| Archive.org, and without it from what I can tell this title would
| just be lost to time.
|
| There's so many cool, weird, obscure games from the 90s and 00s
| and its their weirdness and obscurity that puts them most at risk
| for disappearing and becoming unattainable.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| My go-to example of game that are "lost" is No One Lives
| Forever and its sequel. In this case, though, I don't know
| about the source. All I know is that studio M&A have rendered
| these titles to be in eternal copyright limbo.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| Definitely great examples. Those games are fantastic, so
| unique, so full of heart, and just gone.
| Solvency wrote:
| I mean, there's a point where the blame lies on every single
| developer and business person involved with these projects.
|
| You don't pour years of manpower and creativity into a game
| like this and then .... not even save a single .ZIP file to
| your personal HD.
|
| It just casts such a nihilistic ephemeral shadow on all of
| this.
| lolinder wrote:
| There's definitely a mindset thing going on here.
|
| It reminds me of how old television shows (like Doctor Who)
| are often missing good chunks of the early runs because they
| recorded over the tapes. Television was seen as ephemeral and
| if they never intended to broadcast it again then there was
| no need to store thousands of feet of tapes for episodes that
| (they believed) would never be wanted again.
|
| I can imagine something similar happening with video games--
| they put in the work, shipped the product, and didn't think
| what they had done was important enough to preserve for
| posterity, because who actually thinks that about their own
| work?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Television was seen as ephemeral and if they never
| intended to broadcast it again then there was no need to
| store thousands of feet of tapes for episodes that (they
| believed) would never be wanted again._
|
| A lot of big band music was lost because the band leaders
| were against recording music, whether for phonograph or
| radio.
|
| It was supposed to be a a philosophical objection, but I
| suspect they also didn't want to put themselves out of
| business.
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| Another thing I noticed lately is a lot of iPhone games that were
| built in the early days like 2008 to 2014 and beyond even, get
| removed from the app store once the developer cannot maintain
| enough resources to update the code to the latest iOS version. I
| tried downloading a lot of games I fell in love with with in the
| early days of the app store but cannot. This is sad too.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I was surprised nobody cared when Google announced they'd be
| pulling every app from their repository that hasn't been
| updated in, what was it, 2 years or so?
|
| Things that are functional and complete don't need updating.
| Why _require_ a subscription model rather than a finished
| product in a frozen state?
|
| From f-droid I have a few apps that were last updated 11 years
| ago or something, works just fine. Just tried to find an
| example, e.g. pizza cost calculator is an app mostly for
| amusement that had its last real update in 2015 (then in 2021
| and 2022 there were updates to support more recent android
| versions) but I used it literally two hours ago and found that
| the smaller pizza is cheaper per cm2. On my previous phone
| (2018--2021) I used a 'share to clipboard' app from f-droid,
| which installs itself as a sharing target. It only ever
| released v1.0.0 in 2011. Super simple functionality that indeed
| doesn't need updating; would still use it today if my new phone
| didn't have that built in. Google would have removed that from
| their store a decade ago.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Another thing I noticed lately is a lot of iPhone games that
| were built in the early days like 2008 to 2014 and beyond even,
| get removed from the app store once the developer cannot
| maintain enough resources to update the code to the latest iOS
| version._
|
| Aurora Feint
|
| I Love Katamari
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Oh man Aurora Feint. Who knew they'd go on to make Discord
| lucb1e wrote:
| What?
| mauvia wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Katamari
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Feint
|
| They're examples.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| What percentage would run even if they were? A lot of the
| cracking isn't just about bypassing some DRM, but solving
| compatibility issues.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| I'd say almost all, maybe 80-90%. WINE is a pretty great
| compatibility layer for anything Windows and there's large
| emulation community for the majority of consoles going pretty
| far back.
|
| luckily the older and more obscure the game also means it's
| 'easier' to emulate.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Probably most. Old Windows games run perfectly fine on WINE for
| the most part. I assume that makes up the majority of "classic"
| games.
|
| And those that are for older consoles can usually be emulated
| just fine.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| There's fairly robust emulators for most consoles up to 2000.
| There's even full DOS/windows environment emulators for this
| task.
|
| The ugly spot is the 2000s, but the ps3 and 360 emulator are
| quickly improving.
|
| Wii/DS/3DS/Switch emulation is basically perfect.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| It's kinda funny how GameCube emulation is still notoriously
| poor (remember how badly even the official Switch port of
| Mario Sunshine ran?) but every Nintendo console since then
| lends itself so well to emulation. And that's even accounting
| for the Wii and (3)DS's hardware gimmicks!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jjice wrote:
| Not to pile on, but to agree with the sibling comment:
| Dolphin (the GameCube and Wii emulator) is insanely good.
| It seems like Sunshine has weird issues but I've never had
| a negative experience with anything else and it works out
| of the box everywhere, even on Linux.
|
| As a tangent just because of how impressed I was, I
| installed Dolphin on Linux via a Apt (I believe) and it
| just worked. I already had the GameCube USB adapter drivers
| installed and those just worked out of the box. I don't
| know how drivers work for selectively compiling with them
| from the kernel tree, but it appeared that they were part
| of the main kernel tree and they were just there for me.
| BearOso wrote:
| I don't understand what you're talking about. GameCube
| emulation is excellent. You can use the same emulator
| responsible for Wii, Dolphin, and it has great
| compatibility.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Aren't GameCube games prone to weird issues and artefacts
| though?
|
| For example, most emulated versions of Mario Sunshine
| (including the official Switch release!) show these
| little grey debug cubes in certain levels:
| https://tcrf.net/Super_Mario_Sunshine#Debug_Cubes
| Dwedit wrote:
| Mario Sunshine is a game where doing anything beyond the
| original (Running at high resolution, Widescreen mode,
| 60FPS mode) will break the game. I wouldn't blame Dolphin
| for bugs that only show up when you exceed the
| capabilities of the base hardware.
|
| Current Dolphin doesn't show those debug cubes.
| neilv wrote:
| All the emulators, etc., work has had its merits, both for
| cultural preservation effects and for the hacker-y craft
| achievement, but...
|
| Business-wise, had that bootleg environment not happened, I
| suspect someone could've made a killing by re-releasing vintage
| games on current devices.
|
| Now I suspect most of the nostalgia/familiarity demand is
| satisfied, and won't return even if you were able to delete every
| existing emulator, unlicensed ROM image and AV assets, etc.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I disagree. Getting MAME running with the ROM you are
| interested in on modern, consumer hardware might be easy for
| you and me but I suspect the majority of your target audience
| for retro games do not know how.
|
| There was always a market there, it just wasn't big enough for
| the copyright holders to want to bother with.
| the_af wrote:
| > _" Business-wise, had that bootleg environment not happened,
| I suspect someone could've made a killing by re-releasing
| vintage games on current devices."_
|
| In many cases, the "legal re-release" is leveraging the
| technology that was used to emulated the games in "less than
| legal" situations. For example, GOG wraps DOS games with
| DOSBox, which is how we in the (illegal) abandonware community
| used to run them anyway.
|
| Another thing to consider: back in the 2000's or so when I
| discovered abandonware, almost nobody was legally wrapping the
| games I wanted to play. I wanted to play them _back then_ ; now
| I have no interest. So the illegal abandonware way was the
| right way for me. Who cares what would eventually happen 10 or
| 20 years later? I wanted to play the games _then_.
| neilv wrote:
| > _I wanted to play them back then; now I have no interest._
|
| IIUC, you're saying that a commercial effort couldn't/didn't
| offer the vintage games at the time that you wanted to play
| them, and now you no longer want to play them?
|
| You're also saying that, although you played the games then
| (with abandonware), the reason you no longer want to play the
| games now _isn 't_ because the abandonware satisfied the
| desire?
|
| (You think the nostalgia was time-limited, or something else
| changed for you? Is this generalizable to the rest of the
| market for vintage games?)
| the_af wrote:
| That's a fair question.
|
| Let me clarify: there was a time in my life, almost two
| decades ago, where I had no family obligations and lots of
| spare time, and I went through a nostalgia thing where I
| played lots of DOS games from my youth. Nowadays this thing
| holds no interest for me, except more abstractly: I want
| old games to be preserved, as curious artifacts of an
| ancient time. I'm sad when a game "dies" of neglect. But
| playing them? Not for me anymore.
|
| Back then there were "sub-communities" in abandonware. Most
| abandonware groups were keen to make a difference between
| them and the so-called "warez kiddies", i.e. people who
| just downloaded games because they didn't want to pay for
| them, often recent games but usually whatever. Abandonware
| in contrast was about _preservation_ , i.e. "how can I play
| this game? Is there a legal way, or must I pirate it?".
| There were different degrees of compliance with this
| "line", but almost everyone understood that Abandonware was
| about preserving old games, not about piracy _just
| because_. Legally there was no difference, piracy is piracy
| -- but for people in the abandonware community, there was a
| world of difference.
|
| One of the biggest abandonware websites back then was Home
| of the Underdogs. The webmaster (a Thai woman who was an
| investment banker in her country) made a big deal about
| legality: if she received a takedown notice, she promptly
| took the download down. And if she found a way to link to a
| legal way to buy the game, she did so. She provided reviews
| of the games, so HOTU wasn't just a link farm. If people
| requested game downloads for games that were obviously
| available commercially, they got banned promptly.
|
| So let me get back to your final question:
|
| > _You think the nostalgia was time-limited, or something
| else changed for you? Is this generalizable to the rest of
| the market for vintage games?_
|
| - Yes, nostalgia was definitely time-limited for me. I
| seldom buy DOSBox-wrapped games in GOG anymore; I prefer
| newer indie games (that I end up not playing because I lack
| the time, anyway).
|
| - Yes, something changed in me: I grew older, my interests
| changed, and my spare time became more limited.
|
| - Yes, this is generalizable to all vintage games: if
| copyright owners don't make an artifact of the digital past
| available for playing -- and games "want" to be played,
| they are not static webpages -- then I have the moral right
| to download them. Within reason, I'm talking about games
| neglected for decades, not a game temporarily unavailable.
| Common sense applies.
|
| Would I _want_ to play those oldies _now_ if I hadn 't
| played them back _then_ , thanks to abandonware websites? I
| dunno. I doubt it, but everything is possible in the realm
| of "what ifs". Who really cares though? Publishers didn't
| care back when I had the time and inclination to play them,
| and that's all that matters ultimately.
| [deleted]
| DangerousYams wrote:
| THIS is what NFTs should be designed to solve, instead of
| whatever it is they have actually become.
| anthk wrote:
| NFT, Web3... stop the snake oil, please.
|
| Retroemulation people have been preserving the classics since
| decades, even more with libre (FLOSS) implementations made with
| SDL/SDL2 making these games ultraportable and eternal.
|
| What does your lovely NFT solve here? Explain.
| DangerousYams wrote:
| Not my lovely NFT at all. Imagine the retro game and
| emulation required to run it forever preserved in a standard
| format. That's what a concept like NFT SHOULD be addressing.
| I'm lamenting that it's not doing so.
| anthk wrote:
| We already have these standards. Binary ROM dump formats
| with headers. There's no need for NFT's.
| shmde wrote:
| How do people jam NFTs in the most random of places.
|
| Global Warming ?
|
| NFT.
|
| Inflation ?
|
| NFT
| DangerousYams wrote:
| jeez guys, please read before dumping on me :) I'm saying
| ideally, NFTs SHOULD prevent obsolescence of digital assets
| They don't. But if you think about it, it ought to be one of
| the primary purposes of a concept like NFT, right? That's all
| I'm saying. Sorry to use the trigger word :P
| devnullbrain wrote:
| We should really know better. The TV & film industry have already
| been through this.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when the only way to see an
| old movie was if it showed up on TV or in a repertory theatre,
| if there was one nearby. And if a TV show wasn't in syndicated
| reruns, it just didn't exist.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| They prefer it this way.
|
| Ultimately an intellectual property based economy leads to this
| without proactive measures limiting IP.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Circa 1980 there was a panic over color movies fading that
| was spearheaded by people like Richard Scorsese who saw it as
| a huge cultural loss, but a major factor was that home video
| could turn movies like the old _Wizard of Oz_ into gold.
|
| At the time they tried bad preservation idea such as dividing
| the colors up into separate reels before they realized even
| relatively fugitive dyes would hold up for centuries if you
| keep them in a dry freezer.
| iso1631 wrote:
| You could just have a land tax, as copyright is land.
|
| Let companies value their copyright, and let them pay the
| cost to maintain that copyright (say a 2% per year cost), and
| let someone buy that copyright from them at the price they
| value it at.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Copyright, unlike the land comparison, is not physically
| limited in nearly the same way. There is a limited amount
| of land, but ideas are nearly infinite.
|
| I genuinely think if a company has piece of media X that
| they make a decision to not distribute, it shouldn't be
| piracy. Things like Nintendo sitting on titles teasing a
| fat "maybe" of bringing a subscription based access model
| to on limited hardware isn't cool.
|
| These games sold their last physical copy decades ago, long
| before an online store. They took them off the market, so
| fair game. There's zero difference from Nintendo's
| perspective, of buying a used game vs playing a rom on an
| emulator.
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| Probably because 76% of them sucked. Well, maybe that's a bit
| strong but having lived through most the history of video games,
| a lot of mediocrity out there. From a preservation and historical
| standpoint I could see this as a problem but as a large store of
| video games that most people would want to play, not so much.
| devinjon wrote:
| Mediocrity aside, I generally prefer pre Y2K games to their
| contemporary brethren. Maybe I'm in a tiny minority, though.
| padobson wrote:
| 25-30 years ago, there was a game studio called 2am Games that
| made a series of strategy-type Java games that allowed online
| multiplayer. All the games were monetized with ad clicks. Click
| on an add, get 15 more minutes of play time.
|
| Their most popular game was an RTS called Chain of Command. You
| had a squad of four soldiers that you could position on an
| isometric board designed to look like a farm. 5-10 players would
| each run their four-man squads into a firefight and play some
| scenario - seek and destroy, capture the flag, etc.
|
| The other two games I enjoyed were a business strategy game
| called The Invisible Hand and another RTS where each player took
| a European country and conquered cities using robot-like walking
| tanks.
|
| All of the content from 2am Games is lost to history. Chain of
| Command has some clones out there, but I've never been able to
| find anything - roms, source code, clones, for the other games.
| It's a part of my childhood I'll never be able to re-experience.
|
| Edit: I got curious again and did some investigating. Here's
| their archived home page from 1997:
| https://web.archive.org/web/19970707215116/http://www.2am.co...
| smokel wrote:
| A painful example in this context is the Philips P2000T home
| computer.
|
| It was hugely popular in The Netherlands in the early 1980s, but
| not so much in other countries. Because the market was so small,
| there were nearly no commercial games. Almost all games for it
| were written by hobbyists, and were copied freely, using Mini-
| Cassette tapes.
|
| I have been working on an emulator for it, but it seems near
| impossible to redistribute the original games. Most of the games
| do not have a copyright message, and it is often not clear who
| the original author was. Ironically, these games were _meant_ to
| be copied, but as of 1993 this is now prohibited by law, and (as
| far as I understand it) I can only make copies for my own use.
|
| Note that there is a GitHub repository [1] that preserves a lot
| of games and information about the machine, but I wonder if this
| is even legal?
|
| (An even bigger problem I face is redistribution of the P2305
| Basic Interpreter ROM, which is copyrighted by both Philips and
| Microsoft. If anyone at Microsoft is reading this -- could you
| please assist me in getting a license to reverse engineer and
| ship the original Basic ROM with my emulator?)
|
| [1] https://github.com/p2000t
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not
| legally available?
|
| Streaming and on-demand content delivery, rather than purchased
| physical copies, does the same damage to other content as to
| games. Per internet traditions, the porn industry is leading the
| way. No doubt the copyrights to millions of porn films belong to
| long-defunct studios, leaving no legal access. Today is it porn,
| tomorrow it will be the older Futurama episodes.
|
| But industries want this state of affairs. Any time spent with
| old content is time not purchasing the new content. To keep the
| content creation industry going consumers need to forget past
| material. Want to watch old Simpsons episodes? Want to play the
| original Civilization? No. Those are dead. Here are some new
| versions.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There was a show in the late 1980's called _Murphy's Law_ about
| an insurance investigator who lived on a floor of a warehouse
| like the base in _Sneakers_ and had an asian girlfriend. It had
| some of the best comedic pacing I'd ever seen on TV but only
| made one short season and never got into syndication or home
| video which is too bad.
| geswit2x wrote:
| Damn, I'm curious now
| zokier wrote:
| Yeah, I found the articles comparison to Titanic bit of a miss,
| while it specifically might be reasonably well available, tons
| of classic movies and even more so tv is not, same as games.
| Books would have been maybe better comparison, they I think
| have bit better availability in general.
| xtracto wrote:
| Reminded me of this article I read the other day:
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/12/04/silent...
|
| "The Library of Congress conducted the first comprehensive
| survey of silent films over the past two years and found 70%
| are believed to be lost. Of the nearly 11,000 silent feature
| films made in America between 1912 and 1930, the survey found
| only 14% still exist in their original format. About 11% of the
| films that survive only exist as foreign versions or on lower-
| quality formats."
|
| It's too sad that we as a species are allowing our culture and
| history to be lost ... for some temporal profit of a minority
| of people. Any IP that is 20+ year old should be automatically
| free to copy.
| coding123 wrote:
| I feel like TV/Movies are generally more available in Amazon
| for rent at least. Not great to be required to pay the same
| prices as we did in the past. For example the original TMNT is
| 3.99 to watch (rent) and $13 to buy. It seems to me like it
| should be $1 or free on some subscription network and $3 to
| "cloud own" permanently.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not
| legally available?_
|
| Hundreds. Probably thousands.
|
| A few years ago I started watching noir films. Once you get
| past the Criterion Collection, it gets harder and harder to
| find the good stuff.
|
| A lot of it never made it to VHS. Even fewer made it to DVD.
| Compared with the number that were made, hardly any made it to
| streaming.
|
| It's even worse for television. One example among many: 77
| Sunset Strip.
| criddell wrote:
| > How many films and TV-sows are now not legally available?
|
| Or if they are, they've been changed to remove material that
| can't be distributed. WKRP in Cincinnati is an example of this.
|
| From the Wikipedia page for the show:
|
| > WKRP was videotaped rather than filmed because at the time,
| music-licensing fees were lower for videotaped programs, a
| loophole that was intended to accommodate variety shows. Music
| licensing deals that were cut at the time of production covered
| only a limited number of years, but when the show entered
| syndication shortly after its 1982 cancellation, most of the
| original music remained intact because the licensing deals were
| still active. After the licenses had expired, later syndicated
| versions of the show did not feature the music as first
| broadcast, with stock production music inserted in place of the
| original songs to avoid paying additional royalties.
| tibbon wrote:
| Books too. The vast majority of books (or paper media overall)
| ever printed are no longer available new. There _might_ be some
| electronic version, but realistically not. Library systems help
| fill this in, but there are so many titles are are simply
| difficult to obtain.
| rcarr wrote:
| For old books it's understandable but for modern books it's
| unforgivable. Even if the author is old school and wrote it
| on a typewriter or by hand, at some point that book has been
| digitised for production. I wanted a book recently that is
| paper only and was published in 2015. I emailed the publisher
| to request if they'd make it available as an eBook and they
| didn't even bother replying. Why on earth publishers continue
| to release paper only books in 2023 is beyond me.
| dirtyv wrote:
| Some books absolutely do not lend themelves to a digital
| format. I'm currently in the middle of House of Leaves and
| there are sections of it that play with the fact that rely
| on the fact that they are printed on paper.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Why on earth publishers continue to release paper only
| books in 2023 is beyond me.
|
| Because digital books are horrible. A have a self of work-
| related books full of reference images (military
| equipment). I budget about 100/month for book purchases as
| many of them are 200+ each. There is no plausible
| replacement. Just ask anyone who collects painting or movie
| posters. A digital file is no replacement for a reference
| copy on a shelf.
|
| One book that I purchased new only two years ago for <100$
| is now out of print and apparently going for 500+ on
| ebay/amazon.
| rcarr wrote:
| > Because digital books are horrible.
|
| Completely subjective.
|
| > A have a self of work-related books full of reference
| images (military equipment). I budget about 100/month for
| book purchases as many of them are 200+ each. There is no
| plausible replacement.
|
| Er yes there is. A large tablet. Which would allow you to
| zoom in on those images in high resolution if the book
| was formatted properly by the publisher. Connect some AR
| glasses and now you've got a massive book you can read
| comfortably anywhere without strain.
|
| > A digital file is no replacement for a reference copy
| on a shelf.
|
| It absolutely is, particularly if your book is primarily
| text and you want to search that text on a regular basis.
| Or if you're out in the field and you don't have space to
| carry an entire library of maintenance books with you.
| Which might actually be quite a common scenario in the
| military. Unless you know the book back to front (and
| even then it's debatable) searching via a computer is
| going to be faster than flipping through pages manually.
|
| The digital file will not decay (unless the underlying
| hard drive decays) and it can be available,
| theoretically, forever. It can be shipped around the
| globe in the blink of an eye, and doesn't require
| anywhere near the same carbon footprint to do so. It can
| be easily replicated and the potential market is anyone,
| anywhere, on the entire planet rather than anyone with
| access to a book store or living in a location where a
| bookstore will ship to.
|
| No-one is trying to take your paper books away. But
| presumably a digital file of that book was sent to the
| printers. So why is that digital file not readily
| available for consumers to purchase to consume in the
| manner that best suits them?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Er yes there is. A large tablet.
|
| Nope. No tablets allowed anywhere near where I work,
| certainly not some random device that wants to just
| connect to the public internet to download some random
| pdfs from a defunct book subscription service.
|
| >> The digital file will not decay
|
| Yes they do. The chances that a tablet with a digital
| file, or a subscription service, will still be accessible
| in 10/20 years are not good. A physical book will last
| centuries.
|
| >> Or if you're out in the field and you don't have space
| to carry an entire library of maintenance books with you.
| Which might actually be quite a common scenario in the
| military.
|
| Nope. That is a very rare circumstance in the modern
| military. What is not rare is someone wanting a specific
| question answered about an old bit of equipment or place,
| something nobody has touched in a decade. Someone in the
| field needs info and calls back to the support unit.
| Suddenly that old paper book on the shelf about some
| forgotten topic or place is a literal lifesaver.
|
| And in the real military, one cannot assume network
| connectivity. We have to keep working even when the
| lights go out, especially when they lights are out. Paper
| books can do that.
| wiseowise wrote:
| [flagged]
| rcarr wrote:
| > Nope. No tablets allowed anywhere near where I work,
| certainly not some random device that wants to just
| connect to the public internet to download some random
| pdfs from a defunct book subscription service.
|
| Cool bro, good for you. Not everyone works where you do.
|
| > Yes they do. The chances that a tablet with a digital
| file, or a subscription service, will still be accessible
| in 10/20 years are not good. A physical book will last
| centuries.
|
| If you're making a point about the file being in a
| proprietary format and unavailable for corporate reasons
| then yes. But otherwise, no. We have been copying digital
| files between devices for decades now.
|
| > Nope. That is a very rare circumstance in the modern
| military. What is not rare is someone wanting a specific
| question answered about an old bit of equipment or place,
| something nobody has touched in a decade. Someone in the
| field needs info and calls back to the support unit.
|
| A call they wouldn't actually need to make in the first
| place if they had the book in digital format on their
| person. But we can assume that's an intelligence risk if
| it goes missing so we'd rather keep the info safe on
| base. That is understandable. But it doesn't change the
| fact that one of the pros of ebooks are their
| portability.
|
| > Suddenly that old paper book on the shelf about some
| forgotten topic or place is a literal lifesaver.
|
| There's literally no reason why that old paper book
| couldn't have a digital copy in an archive somewhere and
| probably does.
|
| > And in the real military, one cannot assume network
| connectivity. We have to keep working even when the
| lights go out, especially when they lights are out. Paper
| books can do that.
|
| It's almost as if both formats have different pros and
| cons and the consumer should be able to decide which work
| best for them and their own needs rather than having that
| dictated to them by the publishing industry or the needs
| of the military. I don't really consider having a copy of
| the "Crime Writer's Guide To Police Practice and
| Procedure" by Michael O'Byrne on my tablet whilst I'm
| backpacking to be a national security risk.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| A suitably high quality digital copy can be used to
| create your own hardcopy.
| swilliamsio wrote:
| Reference books are the best candidates for being
| digitised. Why would you want to physically search a real
| physical library for hours to find a dusty forgotten book
| about a forgotten piece of equipment when you could just
| Ctrl+F and instantly find what you seek?
|
| Any other kind of book I do much rather prefer the paper
| version though.
| anthk wrote:
| Getting some slaptick+satire comic books made after the main
| $COMIC_BOOK_INDUSTRY in Spain it's night impossible. And it
| sucks, because these comic books from the 80's are a
| masterpiece where the author were not tied to their editors
| and they innovated like never did. Think about stories close
| to Futurama in humor but for younger teens and without
| dumbing down them (political jokes and so on).
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| If the original entity that owns a copyright is no longer
| around to enforce it, does it still have an owner?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Usually someone will have bought the copyright when it was
| liquidated.
|
| If it was dissolved while still owning the copyright then it
| becomes bona vacantia. What happens to that depends on the
| country, in the UK it technically becomes property of the
| King, and you can buy the rights from the government.
| cush wrote:
| Countless movies and shows are out of print and only available
| on VHS
| atum47 wrote:
| I've been searching for Scrubs for a while now. I don't know if
| it's due to the country I live or what, but I can't find the
| whole show to watch.
|
| I saw they have it on Hulu, but the app itself seems like a
| nightmare.
|
| As I'm writing this post, if I try to log in Hulu I get a
| message "Something went wrong. Please try again later."
|
| I guess my parents pay for a delivery service here that gives
| us access to Disney and Star+, but I don't know for sure if
| Hulu is included in the package. There are so many streaming
| services now a days that I can't keep track of the ones I have
| access to anymore.
|
| I've been thinking about going back to torrents sites and
| trying to get it unofficially;
| jprete wrote:
| You might need to go to DVD for something that old.
|
| There are advantages to getting owned DVDs, like the fact
| that they can't mess with the content later. Music licensing
| problems are fairly common. For Scrubs Season 1 in
| particular, they had to change all the music around for
| Netflix's streamed version. The DVD version, as far as I
| know, has the original music.
| anthk wrote:
| Northern Exposure. The only why to get the untouched
| version and with no music cuts it's to pirate it thanks to
| the lobbies.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| > with no music cutswith no music cuts
|
| Dark Skies. It was x-files if set in the 1960s. But as it
| used music from the time, the classic music licenses have
| since expired and nobody is willing to pay enough to
| renew them.
| anthk wrote:
| Also, why in the world isn't The Twilight Zone (the one
| from the 50's) in the public domain? It already set up
| the genre, it has been exploited in TV with ads for sure
| for decades. Also, I think Rod Sterling is not alive
| since a good chunk of time, ditto with the producers.
| There no loss on torrenting that series. If any, it would
| help on sales on current sci-fi series.
| burkaman wrote:
| https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/scrubs
|
| You can select your country and see if it's legally available
| anywhere.
| kawogi wrote:
| I'm still trying to get MythBusters and DuckTales* in German. I
| can only find fragments on youtube and some shady websites.
|
| I'm totally willing to pay full price, but there's simply no
| offer.
|
| Edit: I just learned about justwatch.com (thanks HN!) There's
| one streaming service listed which offers at least two seasons
| for 7 EUR per month - including commercials :/ it became so
| hard to buy stuff legally.
|
| * the available DVD are incomplete. I could fill some gaps in
| English.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Probably the majority.
|
| Many older works are permanently lost, or the few film copies
| remaining are rotting in vaults.
| phkahler wrote:
| Ever drive a model T? Can you find a 64 Mustang convertible?
| 1800s vintage tea cups?
|
| Lots of old things are scarce. Arcade games are in the same boat,
| but you've got MAME and I've got a bit-slice coprocessor and
| rasterizer ASIC controlled by a 6809 in I,Robot.
|
| Not sure how games are different from other antiques other than
| the possibility of emulation.
| terlisimo wrote:
| The main difference is that creating a 100% perfect copy of a
| game costs next to nothing, and creating a new 100% perfect
| copy of model T is almost impossible, even if you have one to
| copy it from.
| ghusto wrote:
| This is why piracy is nearly always the best option.
|
| Want to play the original Tomb Raider? Well it's for sale, in
| many stores, and for many platforms. Trouble is they're all
| glitchy. Meanwhile, download a PS1 emulator and the ISO, and it
| works perfectly.
|
| Saw something on Netflix a while ago that you're only now getting
| round to have time for? Woosh, it's gone. Meanwhile, download it
| from BitTorrent and it's yours forever, no internet needed. Same
| with Spotify and songs.
|
| Pay for things legally, get treated like crap. The piracy option
| is just a better experience.
| nunez wrote:
| Yeah, I agree.
|
| If you didn't buy the original copy of something from 20 years
| ago and can't get it from eBay, you're SOL in most cases.
|
| Lots of punk albums from small bands made in the 00s fall into
| this trap.
|
| If you do find it, it's unlikely to be the original mix and
| might sound louder/have some content missing.
| megmogandog wrote:
| The problem being that availability is a function of popularity
| and age. If you want something older that isn't a celebrated
| classic, it can be a lot more difficult to access...
| keb_ wrote:
| In some piracy circles and torrent trackers, sharing
| rare/obscure titles is a way of gaining rep, so at least
| there, there is incentive in finding and distributing the un-
| celebrated classics.
| szatkus wrote:
| But that's rarely a case. There are people maintain huge
| packages with thousands of old games. I can only think about
| maybe one or two titles that I couldn't find on the internet
| after some search. Besides, if a game is really obscure,
| chances for a legal release are close to zero.
| gochi wrote:
| These fixes were not available in the original. What you are
| experiencing is altered and is not at all what people are
| talking about when it comes to preservation.
|
| For most people this is ok, but when we're talking about
| preservation it's the ability to play the game _as it existed
| at that time_ with no barriers, and not something upscaled to
| 4k with widescreen patches and framerate changes to make it
| feel like a modern game with blocky aesthetics.
| skyyler wrote:
| >What you are experiencing is altered and is not at all what
| people are talking about when it comes to preservation.
|
| People are making cycle-accurate emulators for exactly this
| purpose! Not all emulation is focused on "enhancements"
| Eumenes wrote:
| This prompted me to find out that MediEvil
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediEvil) has a remaster ...
| nostalgia incoming
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| There is https://www.myabandonware.com and
| http://www.abandonia.com/en/game/. It's been a while since I have
| used abandonia. But I use myabandonware.com regularly. It is not
| perfect I suppose, but I get most of my childhood favourites
| here.
|
| Croc 2 - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/croc-2-cj0. The only
| 3D colour videogame we had in our school's computer lab.
|
| Claw - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/claw-a39
|
| The thing - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-thing-bfm
| wiz21c wrote:
| Many movies are locked the same way because their owner think
| they're not worth publishing again and after all, it's their
| stuff, they do/don't do whatever they want with it.
|
| It'd be so much better if copyright was limited for say, 30
| years. So that you could pay when you're young and get it for
| free when you're old... So you'd pay for novelty, not for
| content. Dunno...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Article reminded me that Phil Spencer from Microsoft Gaming about
| two years ago did advocate for legal emulation[1] to preserve
| games. He seemed to be pretty passionate about it, does anyone
| know if they're still pursuing this or lobbying for it? Microsoft
| got to have at least some weight.
|
| [1]https://www.axios.com/2021/11/17/microsoft-old-games-
| preserv...
| kleiba wrote:
| _> Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used
| VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you
| could still watch it._
|
| Well, maybe not for "Titanic" but there are tons of movies for
| which the process is pretty much exactly like that.
|
| Video games as a broadly consumed medium are a relatively young
| feature - let's say some 40 to 50 years. Now, try to easily
| access most films from the first 40-50 years of cinema!
|
| And even for newer films, if it wasn't for streaming, you would
| find yourself in the situation that you either watch your
| favorite movies on outdated technology, or that you have to keep
| on rebuying the same movies over and over again. And even
| streaming services provide a fraction what e.g. the original
| Netflix DVD rental had to offer.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| How many of those games will actually run on modern hardware?
|
| And at what point do we tell the authors to fuck off - they're
| not getting paid any more! Because that is what you are
| advocating.
| coldpie wrote:
| See also this companion article about the study methodology:
| https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/
| baerrie wrote:
| Piracy to the rescue! The companies with the endangered IP should
| make a deal to forgive key piracy hubs in exchange for archiving
| their games into perpetuity. Earthbound is a great example of an
| incredibly influential game that is very expensive in its
| original form but widely available illegally, having inspired
| multiple generations of game developers that played it this way
| that otherwise would not have. How can we simply call this
| "theft"?
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| You can't expect to hold on to stuff through the decades, but I
| do miss my old consoles and sometimes I wish I still had one or
| two them to experience playing a game on the original hardware
| versus an emulator.
| penjelly wrote:
| this is why emulation should be allowed forever
| coding123 wrote:
| I used to pay for Nintendo's Switch account (or whatever that was
| called) I was kinda frustrated with how limited the collection of
| NES and SNES games are available there. Played through all the
| Zeldas, which is great, but I wish a lot more was available. I am
| wondering if, for the most part, the license holder is Nintendo,
| it's a lot easier for them to make it available, but as soon as
| you get into third party developers, I imagine the people that
| owned the copyrights are either non findable or dead now.
| jjice wrote:
| The thing that's so disappointing to me is that the library was
| _so_ much large for the Virtual Console on the Wii, and the Wii
| launched in '05 I think. They create artificial scarcity of the
| games so they can slowly roll them out or do a remaster.
|
| It's a real shame since I _love_ old Nintendo games, they
| really did a fantastic job, but the limited access is sad.
| mateo- wrote:
| And I'm sure if they posted it anyway, those owners would be
| findable or reanimated pretty quick :)
| [deleted]
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| The NES isn't _that_ old. 1985-1993 was when it being produced
| in the U.S. SNES was 1991 through 1996 or 1997. I bet both
| systems ' Japanese counterparts were produced at least twice as
| long.
|
| Entities that produced the games and likely were assigned the
| copyright are game companies, which should be trackable, and in
| some cases, still exist (like Capcom or Konami). You might have
| problems hunting down copyright owners for unlicensed games
| like the Wisdom Tree games, but those all sucked anyway.
|
| It's not like an 8-bit computer platform where individuals
| produced a lot of content and are hard to find.
| droptablemain wrote:
| Thank goodness for so-called piracy.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, I know "abandonware" sounds like a euphemism (and maybe
| it is), but I really don't have a problem with people keeping
| these older things available.
|
| (And I have written a few games in the past that are now on
| abandonware sites, ha ha.)
| kleer001 wrote:
| I prefer the term "Freelance pro bono archivist"
|
| :)
| segphault wrote:
| It's bizarre that companies aren't just selling the roms for
| classic arcade games that are otherwise completely unmonetized.
| There's an audience that would happily pay money just to be able
| to legally do what they are already doing with emulators and
| homemade arcade cabinets.
| OnuRC wrote:
| meanwhile some of the legally available old games are just
| spreading virus, literally.
|
| see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101899
| hiatus wrote:
| That seems to indicate that the game has a vulnerability which
| can be exploited. That is very different from actively
| spreading a virus.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| And most old games are run within emulators (even something
| like dosbox) anyway. All you can do is infect that.
|
| But in those days viruses were truly rampant. I have many
| Amiga disks with viruses on them. As my Amiga had no hard
| drive and only 1 floppy there wasn't many places for them to
| go though.
| kroltan wrote:
| And some legally available contemporary mainstream games are
| also viruses!
|
| Hello kernel-level anti cheat developers :)
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