Slashdot Mirror
New Front In The Copyright-War: Abandon-Ware
Ventilator writes: "The New York Times (free login required) features an interesting story about out-of-print games and the copyright issues for dedicated Web sites. It also discusses the benefits for game developers if they would make those old games available to the public. "
When copyright was first introduced (in England and the USA at least, AFAIK), the term was fourteen years, with a possible renewal for another fourteen years during the author's lifetime.
Since then, the world has become faster and the pace of change has increased. News is now minute-by-minute rather than week-by-week, technologies come and go in years rather than decades, the popularity of music waxes and wanes far faster than it did then. Yet the copyright term has become longer and longer, for some reason. It now ranges from life plus fifty years, to life plus ninety years. That's an effective copyright term of a century and a half in some cases - totally unjustified by any substantially increased incentive to create new works.
Unfortunately, international treaties prevent countries from adopting more sensible policies, even if they wanted to. Or rather, it means that greater political will is required to get past the 'hiding behind our international "obligations"' stage. (IMHO intellectual property law, like taxation, is best decided individually on a country-by-country basis.)
I reckon that the copyright term will be put right during my lifetime; if it ever became an 'issue' it would certainly provoke a lot of support for a reduction to the original 14 years, or some other reasonable term. Unfortunately, the large media conglomerates such as Disney are those who keep pushing for another twenty years every decade or so, so it's unlikely that any of the mainstream media would start actively campaigning on this issue. But sooner or later, it is bound to get attention.
Regular renewal sounds a bit bureacratic and could be an excuse to favour those who can afford the lawyers and paperwork. Having to prove (ultimately before a court) that your work is still worth copyrighting could bog the whole world down in endless appeals and wrangling. Better to have something which is clear-cut and automatic; such as, if the author is alive you can extend the copyright up to a maximum of 28 years; if a book is out of print, however, copyright expires after 10 years.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Maybe OT, but I wish all small old games (hehe like joust) were open-sourced. It would be great to see how games on PC's came about, and how people used to program them before OO programming and game engines.
I find it easier to learn a programming concept by looking at a small program. Try to learn anything by looking at the Quake source. Ugh, my brain isn't that big. But I could probably learn a few concepts from looking at the source for Asteroids!
When you post a story that involves a link to the NY Times website, how about just prefixing the "www" with "partners" (http:// partners.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/05/circuits/a rticles/18aban.html), for the benefit of those who haven't registered, or don't want to?
Muchas gracias...now back to our program already in progress...
raunchola (at) hushmail (dot) com
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
Abandoned software is just the tip of the iceberg. Modern-day copyright law bears little resemblance to the original intent of copyright.
Congress is authorized by the Constitution:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
The purpose of copyright is not "to provide for the welfare of artists," or "to secure the intellectual property of artists." The constitutional authorizes copyright strictly to promote the creation of more creative speech. The fact that some people and companies can get rich from copyright is a side effect of copyright, not its purpose.
Copyright doesn't come for free, and more isn't necessarily better. Copyrights are a restriction of free speech. They are a constitutional compromise. Copyright temporarily trades away part of the natural right of free speech -- the right to repeat and build upon other people's speech -- in exchange for what is hopefully a public benefit -- the creation of more speech by artists.
The original copyright laws reflected this. Up until 1978, if you published something, but neglected to include a correct copyright notice, your work immediately entered the public domain. This forced artists to identify the works that they considered valuable, and provided protection for those specific works. Furthermore, after 28 years had passed, the work would revert to the public domain unless the copyright had been renewed. This took care of the abandoned-works problem. Works that were abandoned would enter the public domain faster.
The idea that everything you create is automatically your property protected by copyright is a very, very new idea. 1978 exactly.
In 1978, the law was changed so that everything that anyone creates is automatically copyrighted. This was a great deal for publishers, because instead of having to keep track of all of their copyrighted works, and renew them when necessarily, their copyrights would just take care of themselves.
What was lost was the public domain. Prior to 1978, vast amounts of material were published without copyright notice, or even registration, and immediately entered the public domain.
This was 22 years ago; which probably corresponds to the age of the average slashdotter. This is the first generation to come of age in a world with no contemporary public domain of ideas -- where all ideas are someone's private property, and will remain so long past all of our lifetimes.
It isn't surprising that the new generation is philosophically rejecting the theory of "near-perpetual copyright on everything ever published." There is no moral or ethical basis for functionally perpetual copyright on anything and everything. The copyright terms and conditions are, at this point, simply out of proportion to any possible public benefit to be gained by them. No surprise that many people are very dissatisfied with copyright law. Right now, it mostly exists to benefit the large media monopolies, and is being used to destroy our culture as fast as it is created. The DMCA makes it illegal to make a preservation copy of a copy protected diskette. Most old Apple II games are on copy protected diskettes. In a few decades, as those disks decay, the only records of the early days of home computers will be illegal records. Same for DVDs, and anything else that is distributed on encrypted media.
How can you preserve history and learn from it, when the very act of preservation and dissemination of abandoned historical material is illegal?
The destructive effects of the DMCA will be most acutely felt when future generations seek to study our era, and discover that most of our contemporary culture no longer exists in any form because our Congress outlawed its private preservation at the request of the RIAA and MPAA. At that time, our grandchildren will be awash in a sea of deteriorated, encrypted media from the early 21st Century, unable to read any of it, and the "benefits gained" from the DMCA will seem very small indeed. The only traces of our culture that will remain will be the few works that were continually preserved and restored by their copyright owners, and those works that have been illegally decrypted and preserved, using programs like DeCSS.
That is why the copyright problem is the most important issue of our generation.
Part of the idea is that things that end up making a lot of money will justify their continued copyright, whereas things that weren't able to, enter the public domain.
The numbers could be tweaked, certainly, but I'd like to know what people think of this idea.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
> Aren't the copyrights on some of these games, especially the old arcade ones, about to expire?
:)
No item has been placed into the public domain due to expiration of copyright since (IIRC) 1923. The US Congress has extended copyright terms every single time that the issue is about to come around. (The conspiracy theorist will point out that new copyright bills are introduced at the same time that Disney's copyright on Mickey Mouse is about to expire.)
As it stands now, something is copyrighted for nearly 100 years from date of creation. I believe you're thinking of patents, which are protected for 17 years from date of filing.
(keeping my opinion out of this; I don't need to get tagged as flamebait.
Currently, copyright lasts at least 95 years, and whenever the time rolls around when copyrights start to expire, Disney buys another 20-year copyright extension from Congress. This time it was the Sonny Bono Act (PDF factsheet).
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is a good thought, but it's not enough to protect our modern cultural legacies. Sure, games need to be protected. But games are only a very small part of the copyrighted material that gets "abandonded" every single day.
For example, music. How many old LPs are out there, mildewing in somebody's basement, that will be destroyed and unusable in another decade? Quite a few, I'd guess. This music should be allowed to be digitally recorded and publically displayed, for example, on Napster (another good use for that medium).
Or, say, old tapes. They don't last very long, and most aren't being produced any more. If I want to go find a tape of some obscure 80's artist, I'm usually SOL. Once again, these should be encoded and put online.
Modern CD's probably come the closest resembling the situation with games of anything I've mentioned so far. There are plenty of old CD's that nobody buys anymore, that will be obsolete when, say, DVD-Audio comes about, and that have not been updated in YEARS. This is music that has been left by the side of the road - nobody has remastered or rerecorded or remixed it for years or even decades. Why let this music die in its staleness when everyone who wants a copy owns it? Digitally redistribute it!
Or, even better, just like the optimal solution would be to Open Source abandoned games so that they can be further improved, we should Open Source abandoned music. I propose that any music that has not been rerecorded in any form within the past five years should have all the masters freely made available so that the public will have an opportunity to improve and enhance the original, and add features that have been requested for a very long time (for example, adding definition to "'scuse me, while I kiss the sky" on Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix). Many ears make bad mixing shallow, and somebody unknown may have the perfect sample for you out there if you'd only let him play with your master copies and make his contribution.
So why let your favorite music grow stale and die when it could be made fresh again every single day? Sleep on that thought, and I guarantee you'll agree with me.
A game that reaches hundreds of thousands or even millions of people eventually becomes more than a product to be sold, it becomes part of our culture. But the shelf life of these things is fairly short, a few years at the most, but on the other hand it takes several decades for the music or game to become public domain. In the meantime, the original printings of the work degrade, or the hardware they require disappears, and because of the copyright "protection" the work disappears altogether. And of course since there's no longer any money to be made from it, the owners of the copyright just let it gather dust on a tape somewhere. And ultimately, by the time anyone interested can legally distribute it or emulate it, no one is around who remembers it.
Clearly, the laws must be changed. Any sane government should recognize that even popular culture items are part of the overall culture and it's in the public interest to preserve them. The duration of copyright protection needs to be shortened. One way to do this which would quell the corporate fear of having a money-maker torn from them by the law and given to the public domain, would be to tie some sort of "marketability burden of proof" on the item -- if it hasn't been sold, made money, etc, in several years, and it's past the expiry, off it goes into public domain. If it's still selling, then the copyright holder gets an extension.
But regardless, something must be changed. We lose enough information on a daily basis as it is, we don't need laws that force us to lose our culture to bit rot.
A week later, the Nintendo of America lawyers would send a letter to Slashdot telling them to remove the post. This would stir a censorship debate throughout the country.
Slashdot will gather their lawyers together, and then send a letter back to Nintendo saying that
a) "Donkey Kong" is obviously taken from "King Kong", so Nintendo doesn't really have a trademark anyway.
b) The tricks in Donkey Kong were lifted from Highland Gorilla training tricks originally developed by animal trainers at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology, and therefore the game belongs to all taxpayers.
c) Since the game can be gotten so easily on the Net anyway, how can Nintendo claim that the game is copywrited?
Mattel Inc will respond by blocking the Slashdot or any Donkey Kong related site with their censorware. A brave group of librarians will then prove that what they have done is block access into any site that mentions donkeys, or even horses, ponies ,zebras and unicorns.
This, will of course, cause even more controversy, especially when rival toy maker Galoob claims that Mattel only did this so they could prevent children from getting to their "My Little Pony Web Site"
Bank of America claims that they have a janitor working in their St. Louis branch with the name and likeness of "Mario", and would Slashdot please take this down?
I think I have run out of silliness. Thank you for listening to my silly rant.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Not that I disagree with the underlying point, but I think that there's an important thing that you're missing, here. You're fundamentally comparing the cream of the crop from the good old days with the run-of-the-mill games from today. Sure there were some really great games available back then that involved creativity, good design, and great hacking to get the most out of the system. But there were also a ton of lousy knock offs and lame brained games that were boring after you tried to play them for more than a few minutes. We just forget about the ones that sucked and remember the great ones.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
So it's retroactive. BFD. The change to 95 years was in itself retroactive. If it wasn't, Mickey Mouse would've been in the public domain a LONG time ago.