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Why Games Should Be In the Public Domain
Robotron23 writes "Rock, Paper, Shotgun writer John Walker shook a hornet's nest by suggesting old videogames should enter the public domain during GOG's Time Machine sale. George Broussard of Duke Nukem fame took to Twitter, saying the author should be fired. In response to these comments RPS commissioned an editorial arguing why games and other media should enter the public domain much more rapidly than at present. 'I would no more steal a car than I would tolerate a company telling me that they had the exclusive rights to the idea of cars themselves.' says Walker, paraphrasing a notorious anti-piracy ad (video). 'However, there are things I'm very happy to "steal," like knowledge, inspiration, or good ideas...It was until incredibly recently that amongst such things as knowledge, inspiration and good ideas were the likes of literature and music.'"
"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal."
Pablo Picasso
I suggest using a time unit of one "dukeNukeEm", which is approximately 15 years.
He didn't steal the game of poker, he aced it.
And a rebuttal by Steve Gaynor.
The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
By James Boyle
Available for download under the CC by-nc-sa 3.0 at
http://thepublicdomain.org/
Sorry, but the copyright lobby has more or less assured that the Public Domain is essentially dead.
They've managed to get laws passed which more or less say "if any commercial entity has ever made money off it, the exclusive right to do so is theirs in perpetuity".
They can afford to throw far more money into the pockets of politicians, and the US has more or less staked its future on IP. There's just no way in hell you'll see things going into the public domain ever faster, because I fear the way things are, things will never again go into the public domain -- unless it means a company can claim your stuff was in the public domain and then assert ownership of it.
Simply not going to happen.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Artificial protection schemes should last 10 years.. Be it copyrights or patents.
10 years. You get exclusive rights to your shit for 10 years. Then anyone can do anything they want with it and tell you to fuck off.
As it stands now you can create entirely new humans and release them to the world at 21 faster than stuff enters the public domain. That's fucked up.
There is some value in porting it to modern platforms, I don't mind paying for that. GOG does a decent job of it. Eventually they will be released into the public domain, same as movies and books. I personally think they all should be a shorter time (20 years), but I don't think that video games should not be shorter than books or movies.
Old arcade games as well and if we don't save them the code may die with them as some are on real old hardware / old pc's.
some people with the old games from places that are long out of business have the nerve to say the copyright BS for an old game that is no long made when asked about dumping the roms / HDD.
Brand protection? Who cares? This is simply not an area where "how does this impact profits" should even come into the discussion. That it's even being brought up just shows how much the law has been corrupted by corporate lobbying.
If you are Nolan Bushnell, you shouldn't be in a position to care about what is being done with 20 or 30 year old works.
It's rather amazing that anyone on a tech site would be defending the idea of stagnation imposed in terms of DECADES.
A 20 year copyright is not the idea of "freeloaders". It's simply how things used to work.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Not once does John Walker mention source code, he just wants his free executables. They already exist- people make knockoffs of every good game and post the executables, and some of them are even semiplayable. I'd really like to criticize his semicoherent thought process here by pointing out the similarities between the things he says and the things said by a certain social group that people tend to smirk at. But it's just too dangerous anymore. Oh well.
Lets face it, games will get old and out of date, game makers will not make much if any more money off the games, and should just release them to the public to enjoy.
Holding on to them figuring that at some point you will release a set of old games on your next version of media, means you are just allowing your product brand to deteriorate over this time and when you do release the customers will go what was that?
Lets say Activation who somehow now seems to own the Old Sierra Adventure games, releases these games for free as in beer. So people will play them/replay them again and share them with some friends... Then the brand image will improve King Gram with the feather in his cap, Roger Wilco in his inept adventures threw space and time, Our mighty hero in Quest for glory, in his world of Glorania. (Leasuresuit Larry is the exception as his brand seem to stay popular.)
That means there will be a defined actor and an world that will recognizable for future games, where they can make a ton of money off of.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
While copyrights are too long in general, the author provides no solid argument for why video games should be treated differently by the law versus other media. He just wants free (gratis) shit. The fact that GOG.com is a viable business kills his point that old games have no economic value. As for preservation, the Library of Congress has been archiving video games for thirty years. As of 2008, they had over 25,000 titles.
What we definitely don't want is special laws for video games. That's a Very Bad Thing.
This article is so right! He has found a way to express something that's been bugging me for a long time. I love his comparison of a policeman to a song writer.
The other thing about copyright is that it's not the creative people who make money forever off of their own work, it's the corporations that manufacture the plastic discs who make the money forever off of the songwriters' work.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
It seems absurd to me that a work be protected for 95 years when the medium it was produced for will last less than a decade.
Paying GoG for their work in *adapting* the game - spending the time to troubleshoot or repack the installer, repack the system updates, correctly create the auto-configuration for Dosbox or other compatibility software, and so on - I'm perfectly fine with.
But the point is valid. We LOSE more than we gain from the public domain these days. Almost no software, except that specifically gifted to the public domain, is available like that. The media they are stored on dies, and those whose goal is preserving our digital history against the simple ravages of compatibility and bitrot must be willing to skirt the law in order to do so, which is frankly asinine.
The expansion of knowledge requires that it be brought to the public domain. I propose we limit copyright to a term no greater than that of patent, and require that the source code of any software be provided in the copyright filings so that it cannot be lost.
What if I asked you this: Would software being moved to Open Source just like that be bad for the business and brand protection of a _INSERT_INDUSTRY_ company?
No. It endears you to the public, it gives you good karma, it helps build a community of modders, it makes derivative works possible, etc... So it EXTENDS the life of the brand.
I understand Geroge Broussard being againt this; If games would fall in public domain after X time passed, Duke Nukem Forever would have actually entered public domain before ever being published.
The problem George Broussard has with the issue is that companies like 3D Realms (while they were actually still a game development studio, and now during it's quasi-half-existence as a publisher) cling desperately to old properties as their their only source of revenue. They've failed miserably at actually releasing any updates to their own works or creating new properties, and so their revenue streams has devolved to porting Duke Nukem 3D to the Xbox, PlayStation, Steam and any other platform that comes to mind, and licensing everything else out to separate studios (such as the Duke Nukem Forever, and last year's Shadow Warrior update).
The later, I assume, is the only thing that is holding them together as a corporate entity, along with anything that might of come out of the settlement with Gearbox (if they got anything).
Take away their copyright to those IPs, and companies like 3D Realms would not last another year.
As a result, his reaction to these kinds of comments is totally unsurprising.
"I do love a good burger. And the best burgers are at Zaxby's. And also are chicken."
Pablo Picasso.
I have at least some sympathy with Disney's argument that the symbol of their company shouldn't enter the public domain. It's a very actively used, highly visible symbol of a major corporation. This is where copyright and trademark law overlap (Mickey as character vs. Mickey as symbol).
What I don't have sympathy for is that principle extending to something that's decades old and is not currently being used by anyone commercially. For example, the characters and designs of the sprites in the old videogame Galaga aren't (to my knowledge) in active use. There's no confusion to be created in the marketplace. It's not IP that has any significant current sales. It's not something that IF it became public domain would allow someone to misleadingly imply something was backed by a major trusted corporation when they were not (the Disney argument).
To my knowledge, there's a doctrine around IP being "abandoned" that has at least some legal clout (IANAL). Why isn't that the test here?
Most software isn't even available for sale after 15 years,assuming it even works at that point. For most software, after 15 years it either serves a purpose that nobody needs or has been replaced by at least 5 newer versions that do a better job. Assuming that it even runs on modern OSes, which isn't necessarily a given. A ton of 32bit software back in the Win 9x era used a 16bit installer that wouldn't work on 64bit versions of Windows.
One objection I can see to putting games in the public domain is that they are starting to reach a level of sophistication and maturity where age (tied to hardware performance) is getting to be less of an issue in relation to quality gameplay. In other words, the hardware started to catch up to what people were trying to design, and has passed it in many cases (if you look at many mobile apps). thief, for example, might have dated visuals, but there's nothing lacking in terms of gameplay or experience, and if given some fresh visuals, could stand against some other things I've played lately. In other words, it's like suggesting that Monopoly is out of date because it used relatively simple artwork. Sure, the weed and CoD crowd might want CoD 15, but there is a lot of good gaming out there when the "sell by" date is a decade or more ago. The one compelling argument that could be made is that since publishers feel the older catalogues compete with the newer stuff, they sometimes take it off the market (try to find some of EA's older titles), which could be a real concern in the digital distribution model.
The problem here is that the headline is pretty deliberately misleading*. The argument isn't "the only moral answer is that all games MUST be public domain and open source and perpetually directly supported by the creators at their own expense from the moment they're released, so get to work entertaining us important people, slave" that the headline implies, it's "games should enter the public domain relatively quickly". Bushnell or Hawkins would have the chance for their businesses to make money off their respective creations, but they wouldn't be able to milk the desiccated corpses of their games until dust comes out.
*: Or that you're trying to deliberately mislead the argument, but I'm just going to be civilized and assume the mistake is Slashdot's this time.
Brand protection MATTERS. It's worth hundreds of billions in the US alone. And that's a lot of jobs and a lot of livelihoods, which the government would be idiotic to ignore, especially if the only real opposition is flocking to torrents regardless the legal outcome.
it gives you good karma,
Thank you Mr. Hippy for destroying any valid point you might have had.
Claiming karma somehow exists is like saying homeopathy procedures are medicine.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Someone should set up a site that reuses all of RPS's content without attribution or permission. See how dedicated they are to media being in the public domain when it's their media.
The sad part is some developers/companies are interested in open sourcing their games (or would be open to it) but they run up against legal/pushlishing issues. Or, in a couple of cases, I have talked with developers who released classic games who said they would be happy to release their source code, but the code was lost N moves/hard drive failures ago. It's too bad. There are some great classics out there (the Sierra adventure series, Star Trek 25th Anniversary, etc) which would still be great games if they got a few minor graphic/interface touch-ups.
It is too bad some companies greedily guard their products long after they have lost the ability to make money from them. I talked with a developer a few years ago and asked for the code for a classic game from the early 90s. They claimed the company was going to touch-up and re-release the game for modern platforms. I was thrilled until they went out of business about a year later. Now, so far as I know, the code is gone for good.
First, I would like to say that Masters of Orion 2 should be entered into the public domain. It is silly that it is not. It came out in like 1995, like 19 years ago.
The ethics and idealistic rhetoric aside, there are some practical considerations. Namely that of technology changing much faster than the current copyright scheme. I am not talking even about music or outdated business models or anything like that.
So I would ask that Duke Nukem idiot, to go connect to TEN, and I challenge him to a game of Duke Nukem 3D, or if he can connect to my computer VIA his 2400 baud modem and beat me in a game we will all accept what he says as Gospel. Hell, I will even allow him to set up a Null Modem serial connection for some LAN play... Not to mention I have loaded Duke Nukem 3D onto a modern computer with modern resolution, nostalgia aside, it looks horrible! Keep your memories, they are much nicer.
In conclusion, he is an idiot, and his odd ramblings and gesticulating, should be avoided akin to looking directly into Cthulhu's eye holes, you will go mad trying to comprehend thoughts so alien to humankind.
P.S. Someone jokingly mentioned a unit of time for Public Domain being a DukeNukem which would translate to 15 orbits of our sun, which really isn't all that a bad idea. Duke Nukem 3D and Masters of Orion, Warcraft, would all have been in the public domain 4 years ago.
I mean honestly law makers need to look and say, OK what is the rational here? How much value did any of these games make their owners? I am going to guess so close to zero that it matters not.
So how does it get copyright AND trade secret (and in some cases, Patent)?
And how does it get to the public domain if the source code isn't there?
The owners of the copyrights aren't holding up to their part of the bargain. So why should they get ANY of the benefits?
...and as far as I'm concerned, it is.
No you don't have the right to make money indefinitely from work you, or in most cases others, did once.
No you don't have the right to hold our culture hostage.
I don't even think IP should be transferable, or if necessary, only very temporarily.
Brand protection is the domain of TRADEMARKS, not copyright.
Game developers should be focused on building game communities. This means releasing the source code when you buy the game and letting users run their own servers. Games are infinitely better when they are moddable. Developers can make money by charging people money to play on their superior servers. If Blizzard released the source code for World of Warcraft it would still be difficult to obtain the resources to run new servers so blizzard would still be in business so long as they provide something of value. So screw you blizzard.
He should have been fired after sitting around playing poker and WoW instead of doing his job. It should not have taken nearly so long to produce DNF which in the end was finished by Gearbox and was still a very very mediocre shooter.
It is mostly trademarks, yes, but if you are a publisher, you obviously need both.
thief, for example, might have dated visuals, but there's nothing lacking in terms of gameplay or experience, and if given some fresh visuals, could stand against some other things I've played lately.
Totally agree with you with respect to Thief. I've actually been playing Thief II recently. The gameplay is so good, and the concept and missions so interesting that I still enjoy playing it 14 years later.
The graphics are of course abysmal by today's standards. But, I think it's worth noting that if Thief or Thief II was "given some fresh visuals" as you say, it would qualify for a new copyright. Besides, if someone went through the trouble of updating visuals, they'd probably release new missions as well, at which point you simply have a sequel.
BTW, there is a multiplayer mod for Thief II floating around, and it does work... it can be great fun if you have another Thief lover!
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Can't tell what Gaynor's defending here; he correctly pins down the idea-expression divide, but seem unaware that copyright restricts people from creating derivative works.
I'm of the opinion that a good beginning to copyright reform would be immediate (or 2-year delayed) permission for anyone to create derivative works that are reasonably distinct from the original.
I welcome Gaynor to the fight for more reasonable copyright as soon as he figures out that's the side he's on.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The Slashdot freeloaders are probably quickly to approve the idea, but let's think it from the opposite perspective. You are now Nolan Bushnell or Trip Hawkins, and have the responsibility of running a successful business. Would games being moved PD just like that be bad for the business and brand protection of a video game company? I challenge you try to convince me wrong with a calm and well-reasoned opinion.
You beg the question: If the question were 'what is good for the business and brand protection of a video game company', the answer would be 'the right to do whatever it wants forever and ever and also a big fat subsidy.'
The question is 'what is a good implementation of what copyright law is supposed to do?'
Well, let's see... "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". There we go. That is the sole criterion governing congress's power to establish copyright laws.
Yeah, Mickey Mouse will potentially enter the public domain in (I think) 2018.
No, he doesn't.
It is the silent-era shorts and the early talkies that enter the public domain.
That does not give you access to primary sources. Prints on nitrate stock. Sheet music or sound tracks that can be read outside the laboratory.
The expiration of the copyright on "Steamboat Willie" only gives you the right to create derivatives based on the story and characters of "Steamboat Willie." You do not get the Mouse or his world in any other of their many incarnations. No Pluto. No "Phantom Blot."
You do not get the rights to Disney's trademarked character designs.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/D...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
The original framers of the constitution recognized this at the founding of the republic.
"The Congress shall have Power 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...."
Nobody objects to people having the protection of a limited copyright so that they can profit from their ideas. Everyone - including, I'd argue, most copyright holders but excepting apparently their very successful lobbyists and tame congresspeople - agrees that "copyright" != "rights to exclusivity in perpetuity so that person and their heirs never have to work again".
-Styopa
That's a clever excuse but quite clearly not the real reason the government isn't doing anything about this. If the US government cared about individual citizens' jobs and livelihood, they would actually do something to protect those things. When's the last time you've seen that happen?
If you are not actively selling or supporting a version of publicly available software, then there is no reason for you to have any protections for said software. If someone cannot acquire or purchase the license from you, how can you claim "theft" if someone copies it or acquires it from third parties? There really should be allowances fro abandonware in IP law. There are some provisions dealing with abandonware, but they don't nearly go far enough. If you want to make some new version of Pac Man for the X-Box One, you can keep the protections for the character and such, but unless you actively support and sell the Commodore 64 version, you shouldn't get any special protections for that.
I did RTFA and he had some public domain paintings in the article. Can anyone identify this painting? http://www.rockpapershotgun.co...
-Xoltri
When books are out of print, or videogames not available for purchase for a certain length of time, then third parties should be able to "do something with them" without being labeled pirates. Original creators should still collect royalties, and I think there should be clearly established legal guidelines for each industry for royalties to be paid to the original copyright holder so people know what to expect. No negotiation is required, standard rates will apply if you let your stuff "expire" like that.
If the concern is that works are just being lost from our culture, a compromise move like this would address it, and provide people with incentive to keep their stuff available for sale.
The confusion in the public eye, intentionally created by some, is between the actual authors/creators and the copyright holders.
They are often not the same.
I've also written a much longer reply to John's Editorial on my own forum.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And coincidentally, 15 years is the maximum duration that copyrights should last, according to the only proper study of economic incentives surrounding copyright of which I am aware.
We could use some more research on this, but it sounds okay to me.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Rock, Paper, Lawsuit is my favorite.
I propose we limit copyright to a term no greater than that of patent, and require that the source code of any software be provided in the copyright filings so that it cannot be lost.
I feel your second point is terribly important, and often lost in the discussion. When an author writes a book, and it enters the public domain even after 100 years, we don't have problems then reproducing the work 100 years later. If one copy survives, we can reproduce it with a little work. If you have a copy of a piece of software from 100 years ago, who knows what your options will be? The operating system that your software ran on will no longer be in use. The hardware that the operating system ran on will no longer exist. Even if there are emulators, there's the issue of copy protection-- Will keys be made available? Will the authentication/activation server be running?
The only way to hope to make these things available for posterity is to provide source code. Then, even if you have to rewrite it a bit to make it work on current platforms, you'll be able to do that.
Therefore, I believe we should change copyright law for software, to say that for a piece of software to be protected by copyright, a copy of the source code must be provided to the Library of Congress. It can sit in a vault for however long the copyright holds, at which point it's republished under the public domain.
Thank you for your communistic views.
Don't you understand? Disney's ability to take now-important cultural artifacts and lock them in their "vault" until they develop enough value to sell briefly again is for the artists who got their cut when it was made and won't see a dime of the new profits, so they keep making things, well past retirement.
I challenge you try to convince me wrong with a calm and well-reasoned opinion.
Instead they mod you Troll. Good to see people still understand what the word "Discussion" means.
Nobody objects to people having the protection of a limited copyright so that they can profit from their ideas.
I guess I do, technically.
First, copyright protects expressions of ideas, but not the underlying ideas themselves. E.g. anyone can make a game about a woman who hunts for treasure by raiding tombs and shooting endangered wildlife. But you can't just outright copy Tomb Raider's code, art assets, and so forth.
Second, the reason for granting copyrights isn't so that people can profit from their works, but so that the public profits from having more works created and published than otherwise would've been, and in the public domain as much as possible, as soon as possible. That copyrights may have economic value which can provide a profit for authors is a side effect, a means to an end. It's not the actual point, though.
I don't have an objection to copyright generally, however, provided that it produces a better outcome for the public than if we didn't have copyright.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
If you want a game like [your favorite game here]? Just write it; that's what the author did in the first place. Oh wait, you don't want to make the same investment they did? Boo hoo.
Homeopathy may not be medicine, but plenty of vaccines work on the same principles.
I propose we limit copyright to a term no greater than that of patent, and require that the source code of any software be provided in the copyright filings so that it cannot be lost.
Copyright protection is automatic. You don't have to file for it. Anything you write that is an original work is protected automatically, even one-off comments on a technology news site.
Patents are where I see a potential for saving public domain. Many, perhaps most, Slashdot users here will disagree with me, but I don't think code should automatically qualify as speech, nor should most code enjoy copyright protection. Most code is more analogous to a machine than to literary text or visual art. Machines, when broken down to their lowest components, machines are devises that use energy to transform matter into different forms. Code is a construct that uses energy to transform data into other forms of data. Code can be art, like a painting or a sculpture, and it can be used to convey information and ideas, like a book or a play. But by and large, most code is written to do a job, like cellphone firmware, or to be a tool, like a web browser or a word processor. Code like this should not be copyrighted, but it should be patentable, just like the machines they are.
Here is where patent law has failed us. Software patent applications should, by law, include full source code or at least psudo-code. If you look up the patent information for any physical machine, you could follow those designs to reproduce that machine. Not so with software patents, which are notoriously vague.
Moreover, if a piece of software is protected under patent, it should not get the benefit of copyright protection, or vice-verse.
I agree. Software should be in the same realm as patents. You have to disclose how they work (source code) and then the government grants you exclusive rights to sell that for the next XX years.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Everything should enter the public domain quicker than it does now.
This did happen. A lot.
A consortium held the patent on the idea of a car, and would grant or deny the right to build one at the dawn of the 20th century. This patent was eventually fought by Henry Ford after the consortium refused to grant him a license.
Maganox held a patent on the idea of a home video game system. Atari, Mattel, Activision, and Nintendo all paid royalties to build a home video game
Thomas Edison held a patent on movies. Hollywood arose, in part, due to filmmakers running as far away from Edison as possible to avoid his patent enforcement.
I'm not defending infinite copyright, just pointing out that his example isn't as absurd as it seems. History is full of examples. And yes, I do understand the difference between a patent and copyright. The original author lumped the two types of IP together in his analogy.
I think content publishers and creators are significantly more threatened by the value of old IP compared to new ones. Trying to compete with a massive back catalogue must appear daunting, despite intervening advances in technology and fashion. If anything, it seems like the prevailing strategy in software is to promote consumption of new content by forcing the unavailability of older content through IP enforcement. Aside from projects like GOG, I rarely see feature-sufficient older works maintained or sold even though the incremental cost to do so seems low after limiting support.
Its been done before.
I'd say we should take it further than that. Really, all the works necessary to recreate said work should have their source components in the Library of Congress*. This is, not surprisingly, sort of in the scope of the idea of the GPL and anti-Tivoization, but I'm actually thinking of music, photography, etc. After all, rarely today is music mixed on the fly to a final master. Usually, if nothing else, there's at least one mid-stage to better equalize the audio after a recording is made. There's also likely things like having the pre-autotune vocals, having any base audio track used, etc.
It seems almost criminal to grant a copyright to someone based on the final baked version of something and to then provide some notion of a public domain access years later, even if it were a short time. I mean, if we are to accept the notion that it's good enough to recreate it, then we have little reason for a public domain (but a wider berth towards fair use). If we argue something about the value of originality, we have little reason for a public domain (and again, a wider berth towards fair use). Obviously when works were more or less just their source material (with a loss of fidelity due to the revisionism process), it was easy to see why such a provision wasn't a necessity. Today, it seems obviously the reverse.
*And yea, I can see how this can be a problem if you use an OS that isn't copyrighted or is from an area without copyright law requiring source and hence you don't have the source code. By the same token, the GPL isn't entirely clear on the subject except that the writers of it have more or less hand-waved the point about the technical legality of with their own personal interpretation and how a published API and compiled ABI is a sufficient break to differentiate a derivative work and hence outside the scope of source code requirements. That's more or less what copyright law says today too as a matter of interoperability. So, I'd say we could continue to use that standard.
"The European Commission is thinking about the future of copyright in the EU, and your input can push them into the right direction."
The pick-your-battles version http://copywrongs.eu/
The full version, 80 questions http://youcan.fixcopyright.eu/en/full/
While attribution and copyright are lumped together they should not be. You should have the right for your work to carry your name indefinitely, others shouldn't be allowed to claim your work as theirs.
In many non-US countries attribution and copyright are not in fact lumped together. The concept of moral rights allows for perpetual claims to attribution, while copyright's economic aspects are dealt with separately.
The U.S. does not really have moral rights (except, technically, a bastardized form in the VARA), which unfortunately forces us to rely more on copyright for issues of attribution, thereby confusing the issue.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
No. They don't. At all. Homeopathy "works" on the principle that after dilution of a solution dozens of times, until such point as there is statistically no solute left, the water has somehow retained some magical behavior from that solute, and behaves as medicine. That's right, all homeopathic remedies are nothing more than water. They're a complete scam, and there's no counter to that fact, at all, ever.
They may also have various inert chemicals such as thickeners or coloring for purposes of packaging.
They may also have various active chemicals that actually behave as medicine, or at least cause some physiological effect to make you think the product is doing something worthwhile, but they are claimed to be inactive, because the "active" content is nothing more than water.
Yah I have to put homeworld in a category of its own. I haven't played a game since that holds up so well 15 years after its release. That feeling when you're trying to save the cryo-tubes, Adagio for Strings is playing, and that overwhelming sense of hopelessness. One of those few games that is truly a work of art. I've played and replayed lots of games from that era (spent a lot of time in descent on KALI) but overall I think that is the one game that is quintessentially unique.
It's not fair to say, "Only one game deserves such a protection" though. You can't fairly say one game is excepted, so you have to accept that all games should be allowed to keep their copyrights/trademarks. Even the crappy ones.
But if copyright only lasts 15 years, then anyone could make a terrible Robocop reboot instead of the one official terrible reboot.
This.
But to actually get this pushed through, it's going to take some compromise on the "however long copyright holds" part. Which is why I suggest that copyright be automatic (as it is now) for 5 years, and indefinitely renewable for a 5-year term at the end of each term. Registration is allowed before the 5-year mark, but is required beyond 5 years or the work joins the public domain. There would be a registration fee. Renewing requires registration. Renewing also should have a fee. Transfers can be done as well, but only for registered works.
So if an author doesn't want to share their source code, they can simply ride out the 5-year automatic copyright, then the work joins the public domain, but without their source code being published. Any kind of reverse engineering or decompilation would be perfectly legal, "clean-room" style or otherwise, but their source code could be kept secret if they chose to do that. They could not renew their copyright without giving a copy of the source code to the Library of Congress.
But if Disney wants to lock up their version of Cinderella until the end of time, they have to register a "production master" copy with the Library of Congress, then pay a fee to renew their copyright every 5 years. Thus, when their monopoly on their variation of Cinderella becomes unprofitable to the point the copyright renewal fee is not worth paying anymore, it then joins the public domain, and the master copy may be borrowed from the LoC and copied and/or distributed by anyone.
Note: When I'm talking about a fee, I'm talking about a paperwork handling fee by the LoC. The money should go to the LoC and the amount should probably be under a hundred dollars for each registration, renewal, and transfer.
When an AC calls everyone freeloaders, they're a troll. Discussion actually involves... a discussion. An AC firing off an inflammatory comment and then leaving, never to return, is not a discussion.
OK, see here's the deal.
The RPS author mentions 20 years. I'm assuming it's because 20 years is an arbitrary-ish figure he settled on.
It's 2014, so 20 years ago is 1994.
Really what he was getting at originally was that it was somewhat bizarre that computer games from the 1980's are still considered copyrighted and illegal to distribute, even if the original developers, publishers, etc. have long since gone defunct.
So I really think the author should have said 25 years or something like that but just for the sake of discussion let's stick with 20.
The game Super Mario Bros. from Nintendo was released in 1985. That's almost thirty years ago. So, by a blanket application of his proposition, SMB would have gone PD back in 2005. Anyone could do anything they wanted with the game and there would be nothing Nintendo could do about it.
But this smacks of unfair for one reason - Nintendo is still around. And they're still selling SMB. You can get it on Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U and 3DS.
The author isn't necessarily proposing that a developer should only get to make money off of his or her creation for 20 years, or at least that's not how I'm interpreting it.
Let's take another example - there's a critically acclaimed game called No One Lives Forever, a somewhat wacky spy caper with a female protagonist that has a parody of James Bond in the 60's thing happening. The game was developed by Monolith and published by Fox Interactive. Fox got bought by Activision, Activision merged with Blizzard, and Monolith got bought by Warner Bros. Long story short, no one can release the game on GOG because no one knows who owns it. But someone does, in theory. However it will be a long time before anyone sorts it out because there is, in theory, not enough money for anyone to care.
By the way copyright works today, NOLF will be illegal to distribute until 2090. Who knows what will happen by then? If we lived in a perfect world where piracy and copyright infringement didn't exist, then the only places NOLF would exist are on the hard drives of Monolith and the discs of whoever bought the game - what are the odds either would be functional in 2090?
But a dirty little secret is you can go download NOLF right now on torrent sites. Anyone can download it. Thanks to copyright infringement it will never truly go away.
This happens in other sectors, too. There's about a hundred of the original Dr. Who episodes from the 1960's or so which are lost because the BBC taped over them. I'm not kidding, they seriously never thought that anyone would want to watch them in the future. But every so often a few turn up - they put nine episodes on iTunes a few months ago - all because someone somewhere found some tape they were either supposed to return to the BBC, or someone taped them and didn't realize they still had them.
So going back to SMB, Nintendo is actually sort of doing the right thing here. Sure, they're basically selling a ROM image and an emulator, and the only people who get to play SMB are the ones who paid for it, but the point is they can get it, play it, and pay for it. It's available.
But if Nintendo had closed up shop in 1995 or something would it really benefit anyone to have to wait until 2075 to be able to play SMB again in our piracy-does-not-exist fantasy land?
GeorgeB3DR is getting upset about this because he is still selling those old games and still making a living off of it. The hard-and-fast 20 year proposal would fuck him over. But the point is he's still selling them.
Let's say that we had a different rule - if your game hasn't been available for ten years for sale it goes PD. GeorgeB3DR would be fine. Nintendo would be fine. And we could distribute NOLF all we want.
Of course, under this rule it's possible that ActiVendiFoxoLith would get their shit together and hash out who owns what and release it for sale on GOG or something. Sure, we wouldn't be able to just distribute NOLF for free that way, but isn't it better that we ha
Schnapple
Well as to the first Disney has sued other for creating stories about 'Cinderella' that were animated, even though the Cinderella story predates any animated work by them. The animation was not the same and no copying was done. Simba the White Lion is another example which predates The Lion King (and is most likely the primary inspiration for it), yet they went to court over it. Disney realistically will sue over works that bare any similarity based on underlying story or plot.
As for the second... The hope is that a limited time of exclusive rights to their work gives a monetary incentive to create more works. However this is hit or miss as our system has long since made things nearly impossible to ever became public domain and create the core of the next generation of works. It has become the way for corporations and surviving relations to artists, writers, and anyone else owning a copyright on something to make money without any effort or additions on their part.
I'd argue that maybe copyright has some place, but what we have now is simply ugly and hugely disruptive. It may make more sense to discard it for a time.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
"It seems absurd to me that a work be protected for 95 years when the medium it was produced for will last less than a decade."
Which actually makes be think that at this point in time, 20 years is far far too long. 4 years, in my opinion, is a lot closer to some theoretical ideal timeframe (possibly with extensions for when the owners are using, updating, and expanding on the work). I think with something like that, content creators would invariably have far more freedom, and invariably make more money.
I think the biggest issue is the fan scene is greatly helped, which will bring more attention and money to the original creators.
And freeing up the licences from the publishers, so that the original creators cannot be shut out of their work in perpetuity.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Consider Spiderman.
The character was created in 1962, which puts it just over 50 years of existence. But the character is still being used in new and ongoing works. I expect that 100 years from now, the character will continue to exist in some form.
I think copyright laws need to recognize that characters used in ongoing works need different protection then something like a song (which is written once).
END COMMUNICATION
Well, dead or alive, you don't have to watch them.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
As long as the game is actively for sale, I don't see anything wrong with the copyright holder continuing to make money from it. The problem is when games and other works can no longer be found for sale. For other works the copyright ownership might be unknowable. For these works, they should be in the public domain. To me this strikes the right balance. If someone cares enough to keep the game working on current hardware, they can keep the copyright. If they no longer care about the game, then the public can have it.
The original framers of the constitution recognized this at the founding of the republic.
"The Congress shall have Power 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...."
Nobody objects to people having the protection of a limited copyright so that they can profit from their ideas. Everyone - including, I'd argue, most copyright holders but excepting apparently their very successful lobbyists and tame congresspeople - agrees that "copyright" != "rights to exclusivity in perpetuity so that person and their heirs never have to work again".
You do realize that SCOTUS has ruled that limited times is subject to the "I'll know it when I see it" rule of being out of bounds. They have yet to see a number that they've declared limited. Of course, it's all about perspective. In a geologic time scale, then 100 years is very "limited".
What I would like to see is a "short-circut" timer based on dates of publication. If a work is not published at all (made available to the public in some form), then it gets a shorter protection time. Once a work is published, the date it is no longer available (ie, the book goes out of print, the software is no longer sold), then another timer starts - you have X amount of time to re-publish it (say 10 years) or it passes into the public domain.
As it is current practice that after you die, people publish all sorts of diaries/journals/etc, it seems to me that all thought processes when they are not of potential value to the original thinker. That might prove embarassing to a few facebook/youtube prolifigators, but at least it would prevent those companies from exclusive license to that material in perpetuity...
There is also the common concept of "salvage". When someone say finds a treasure in a sunken boat, they are effectively entitled to a cost-plus reward for their efforts recovering the treasure (limited of course to the value of the treasure). Similarly, if some thought cannot be economically exploited, perhaps someone else should be enabled to do that with a cost-plus reward from the economic return if they are successful (and of course they are guaranteed nothing if they are not successful).
Just a thought.
Don't you understand? Disney's ability to take now-important cultural artifacts and lock them in their "vault" until they develop enough value to sell briefly again is for the artists who got their cut when it was made and won't see a dime of the new profits, so they keep making things, well past their decomposition.
FTFY
Time to offend someone
I do, such protections, even though perfectly fine on toilet paper, are nothing more than a way for people that fail at promoting their idea to suck out the resources of those that were able to promote it. If you want your idea to be yours, don't share it until you have a product.
Please elaborate? I'm not following that train of logic.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
Source code for games aren't very useful - games are some of the worst-programmed pieces of software out there. They were written to get it working quick, not to be maintainable - once it's shipped, that's it, onto the next game. Very few games actually survive longer than release - like say, StarCraft and such which still get patches years later. But those are the exception and not the rule.
If there's any reuse at all, it's probably in the code that's meant to be reused - i.e., the engine. The scaffolding that integrates the engine into the game will probably be thrown away because it's not useful. Heck, the engine might be thrown out and the next game uses a fresh copy.
As for IP protection - software is really special. It doesn't fit in the copyright regime well, nor does it fit in the patent regime. Yet obviously it needs protection. Instead of trying to fit square pegs in round holes (like we do with software), it's time to realize that software IS special and can easily fit in multiple categories.
After all, copyright was traditionally used to protect creative works - works that humans use to communicate with other humans. Patents protect things - works that humans use to produce something. But software can be both - it can be used to create, or assist the creation of creative works, or it can be used to help create things.
And anyone complaining that software shouldn't be patented is missing the point completely - because the line is extremely fine. If I make a machine using gears and other bits (or electronic logic circuits and opamps and such) and it's novel, it's obvious it can be patented. But if I decide to do all the processing in software while using a generic hardware interfaces, then the entire system can't be patented?
\
it's time to realize that software IS different, it cannot fit neatly in any existing IP protection category, and it really deserves a different set of rules in order to protect it.
And anyone complaining that software shouldn't be patented is missing the point completely - because the line is extremely fine. If I make a machine using gears and other bits (or electronic logic circuits and opamps and such) and it's novel, it's obvious it can be patented. But if I decide to do all the processing in software while using a generic hardware interfaces, then the entire system can't be patented?
Well, the reason why I'm opposed to software patents is because I don't think they're necessary. There are such significant incentives to invent and bring to market inventions in the field of software that a patent monopoly really has no meaningful incentivizing effect. And software does a pretty good job of disclosing itself; it's very open to being reverse engineered, so disclosure isn't a good reason to grant software patents either.
We could probably stop granting software patents and see the pace of invention in that field increase. Sounds like a good reason to me. If it slows down, we could revisit the matter. Same thing with business methods.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
You do have to file to claim statutory damages though.
Code in not in any way like a machine. If operates on symbolic data, how the data is represented, and what sort of turing-complete device you use to carry out such transformation is completly irrelevant.
Code is quite clearly a symbolic language, Code is a set of insturctions for the manipulation of symbolic data, and as such is clearly not the proper subject of a patent. As such you'll never see a patent with psuedocode in it because code is clearly not patentable. You can recieve a process patent for a process that uses code in a unique and nonobvious, though people try to keep pushing claims more into the code with less process attatched.
When dealing with woo, there is no train of logic. What the OP said is correct. Some people believe if you add something to water, then dilute that water to the point where there might be a single part per billion (or even trillion) of that substance in the water, that somehow, magically, the water will "remember" what was put in it and act as a conduit for a "cure" of what ails you.
In fact, when you read homeopathic literature they will tell you the more dilute a substance is, the stronger its potency.
What these scam artists fail to explain is how water can retain this memory of a substance while completely forgetting about all the piss, feces, rotting vegetable matter and dead carcasses that have been run through it over the eons. By their own logic, these substances, by being so dilute, should be exponentially more powerful than whatever they put in the water.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
When an AC calls everyone freeloaders, they're a troll.
I'm only glad that someone said it out loud. The freeloader mentality (free-as-in-beer software, piracy) is quite high around these parts.
Really? Cause I don't see it.
What I see most brands being sold to China then run into the ground. See MTD mowers for a prime example. Would you ever consider buying a mower from one of their brands? Not long ago 'Troy built' was worth something, not anymore.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Therefore, I believe we should change copyright law for software, to say that for a piece of software to be protected by copyright, a copy of the source code must be provided to the Library of Congress. It can sit in a vault for however long the copyright holds, at which point it's republished under the public domain.
God yes, this could be a boon to programing education.
Since the purpose of copyright is to provide an incentive for new works to be produced, and that incentive comes in the form of revenue during the copyright period, we can use the sales history of products in some genre as a guide to how long their copyright period should be.
For example, if 99% of the revenue of a new game comes in the first 5 years after release, then we can reduce the copyright term to 5 years while retaining 99% of the incentive to produce such games.
Source code for games aren't very useful - games are some of the worst-programmed pieces of software out there.
None the less, if you were trying to get a Windows 3.1 game to run on Windows 8.1, and it kept crashing, I would bet that having access to the source code would increase your chances of solving that problem.
What a bunch of freedom hating bullshit. Indefinite copyright is an abomination. It reneges on the deal that is the fundamental purpose of copyright.
The original framers of the constitution recognized this at the founding of the republic.
"The Congress shall have Power 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...."
Nobody objects to people having the protection of a limited copyright so that they can profit from their ideas. Everyone - including, I'd argue, most copyright holders but excepting apparently their very successful lobbyists and tame congresspeople - agrees that "copyright" != "rights to exclusivity in perpetuity so that person and their heirs never have to work again".
You do realize that SCOTUS has ruled that limited times is subject to the "I'll know it when I see it" rule of being out of bounds. They have yet to see a number that they've declared limited. Of course, it's all about perspective. In a geologic time scale, then 100 years is very "limited".
What I would like to see is a "short-circut" timer based on dates of publication. If a work is not published at all (made available to the public in some form), then it gets a shorter protection time. Once a work is published, the date it is no longer available (ie, the book goes out of print, the software is no longer sold), then another timer starts - you have X amount of time to re-publish it (say 10 years) or it passes into the public domain.
I'd go further. The fact is, no one can make anything without the help of other people. It could be as simple as the fact that someone else grows your food, someone works in factories to package that food. Same with clothes. How about TV? No one comes up with ideas without input from other things around them. You can't write a book with out education, without experience stuff. Which requires other people.
The truth is, no one can make anything without the help of other people, and this is why stuff should go into the public domain after 14 years.
Be seeing you...
But this smacks of unfair for one reason - Nintendo is still around. And they're still selling SMB. You can get it on Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U and 3DS.
But why it that unfair? Why should Nintendo receive a monopoly on making copied of SMB for more than 25 years?
Remember the whole point of modern copyright is that a temporary monopoly (14 years, originally) on creative works (books, originally) would provide incentive to have more books written and published. The alternative was one where every book immediately entered the public domain, and nothing (save the collusion to prevent flooding the market and destroying their own profit) prevented every publisher from printing every book, and copyright was chosen because it was believed that it would enrich the public domain in total by more than the books that, at any one time, were locked up by copyright.
Of course we've extended copyright to other classes of works (whether because the music, movie, software etc. industries got big enough to hire lobbyists, or because we also thought society would benefit from more works of each class just as it did from more books -- or probably a mix of the two), and we've stretched the term of copyright as well*. But the only way in which 20 years is obviously "unfair" is that, at the time Nintendo created SMB, they were promised a longer term by then-current copyright law. Would a 20-year term for new works, starting today, be unfair? No -- if Nintendo thinks they can't make their money back with a reasonable ROI in 20 years, they can just not make a game under a 20-year copyright law. If this were the case in enough instances (not with Nintendo specifically, but the software industry as a whole), the change to copyright law could be ineffective, as our meager incentive isn't enough to yield the same creative output we hoped for, but it's not really unfair.
Now if we try to determine effectiveness rather than fairness, it should become obvious that our current copyright law, with one term for all covered works, isn't -- cannot be -- very effective. Works of different types require different typical levels of investment (e.g. millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours for movies, while some novels are churned out in less than a thousand man-hours), offer different value to society (not that it's clear how to measure it, but at least for entertainment works, could be argued as proportional to the length of a movie, hours to read a book, or hours to play through a game, multiplied by the level of enjoyment in those hours?), and exhibit different typical turnover periods, and all those parameters have to be incorporated in an optimization to maximize the public-domain return on society's temporary monopoly investment. It's insanely improbable that these factors happen to balance each other out so that one term suits all forms of creative work.
*The term extensions are obviously not entirely, if at all, about incentivizing new works, since any extension for that purpose would only apply to newly created works, rather than to older works that were already created with a shorter term. Since many if not all copyright term extensions from the last century have retroactively lengthened terms on extant works, which is just as unfair to society as retroactively shortening the term on SMB would be to Nintendo, we can be sure it's at least partly about plain old rent-seeking.
Nobody objects to people having the protection of a limited copyright so that they can profit from their ideas.
I do. No one deserves government-enforced monopolies over ideas or procedures that, in their enforcement, infringe upon privacy property rights and free speech rights. Find your own business model; don't beg the government to enforce a monopoly for you.
No, it most certainly does not. You need to go read the Constitution. It does not establish copyright. It gives Congress the power, if it so chooses, to establish a LIMITED system whereby creators are given TEMPORARY monopolies on their ideas, EXPRESSLY for the purpose of encouraging the creation of new works. Copyright exists to enrich the public domain, as per the Constitution.
So, essentially exactly what the grandparent poster said...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Right, I understand the quack perspectives behind homeopathic medicine. What I fail to understand is how the Kremmy is equating the principles of homeopathy and the principles of vaccinations, unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how vaccinations work. Or I'm fundamentally mis-reading what Kremmy is trying to communicate, which is always a possibility.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
Isn't that what trademarks are for, not copyright?
Brand protection MATTERS. It's worth hundreds of billions in the US alone. And that's a lot of jobs and a lot of livelihoods, which the government would be idiotic to ignore, especially if the only real opposition is flocking to torrents regardless the legal outcome.
Ignoring the idea that protecting brands are more important than advancing culture and the arts.
Brands aren't really protected by copyrights, they're protected by trade marks. The most valuable brands like Coca-cola or McDonalds don't really have that much copyrighted (in fact they benefit from a lack of copyright, locking up the use of McWhatever only harms the brand because to remain relevant and valuable, the brand has to remain on people's minds).
99 out of the top 100 most valuable brands sell products or services, only one was entertainment (Disney at #26). Copyrights don't really help brands.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
When an AC calls everyone freeloaders, they're a troll. Discussion actually involves... a discussion. An AC firing off an inflammatory comment and then leaving, never to return, is not a discussion.
What proof do you have whether an AC returns or not? If you have any proof, they are not an AC.
Let's see if you "return" to reply or not. You like your double standards I guess?
The truth is, AC is the only account that is always here, in every discussion.
In fact, it is the non-AC accounts that only respond to certain stories, or certain topics, so it is
the non-AC accounts that tend to leave, never to return.
The non-AC accounts like yours, only showing up occasionally to post some flamebait and then
disappear, ARE in fact freeloading on the hard work and brilliant posts of AC.
It sounds like everything AC said is true, and everything wagnerrp said is a lie.
Please, discuss, we are all here. Because you ran away does not mean the AC did.
It sounds more like you did exactly what you accused the AC of doing.
But this smacks of unfair for one reason - Nintendo is still around. And they're still selling SMB. You can get it on Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U and 3DS.
...and even if it was public domain, they would still do this. The only thing that would be available for free are ROMs online -- and guess what, those have been available for years. Sure those almost certainly aren't legal, but nobody cares to prosecute.
They're not still selling the original. They're selling ports. So, first, those ports are derivative works and should get all the same protections...meaning new copyright terms. You can do your own port (from the raw machine code; nothing says they have to release source), but you can't freely distribute Nintendo's. But...you also CAN'T actually do your own port, because Nintendo retains exclusive control over distribution for Nintendo consoles.
So your best option there would be to try to sell an emulator and give away the ROMs as that's gonna be far less work than trying to reverse-engineer and port the ROMs...which it turns out is *exactly* what's going on today. Except nobody really sells emulators because there's not enough of a market and because the console makers probably won't let them.
When an AC calls everyone freeloaders, they're a troll. Discussion actually involves... a discussion. An AC firing off an inflammatory comment and then leaving, never to return, is not a discussion.
What proof do you have whether an AC returns or not? If you have any proof, they are not an AC.
There can be no discussion without continuity. Without continuity, you merely have a series of one-off rebuttals. Without some form of identifying symbol, there is no way for an AC to be actively involved in any discussion. It matters not if they are written by the same entity or not, because as you say, there is no proof one way or another.
But if copyright only lasts 15 years, then anyone could make a terrible Robocop reboot instead of the one official terrible reboot.
This only makes sense if you believe that no human alive could possibly make a good reboot version. Do you honestly believe that, out of 7 billion people, not one of them has a good idea for a Robocop reboot?
The game Super Mario Bros. from Nintendo was released in 1985. That's almost thirty years ago. So, by a blanket application of his proposition, SMB would have gone PD back in 2005. Anyone could do anything they wanted with the game and there would be nothing Nintendo could do about it.
The way it should be. They have already made a butt-ton of money off SMB, and they could just as easily offer SMB on WiiU even if it was in the public domain. Others couldn't because the WiiU is a closed platform, so nothing else would stand as direct competition, we have abandonware romsharers, but that is not direct competition, since you can't play it on your Wii U, at least unless/until the WiiU is busted open like every console before it.
But this smacks of unfair for one reason - Nintendo is still around. And they're still selling SMB. You can get it on Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U and 3DS.
It's not, and wouldn't be unfair. Nintendo made billions off SMB, and when they originally made it, Copyright was 25 years, so they had no expectation to still be milking it after 2010 when they made it.
The author isn't necessarily proposing that a developer should only get to make money off of his or her creation for 20 years, or at least that's not how I'm interpreting it.
Why not? I think if someone is patient enough to wait 20 years after a game/film/album is released to enjoy it, they have earned it and ought to get it for free. I can't believe you're seriously suggesting that people would shutup shop and stop making games if their after 20 years revenue tail was cut off. Nobody is financing video game, film or music producers on some hypothetical profitability after 20 years. In fact the exact opposite is written into virtually all production contracts; it's called residual termination. If a creative product doesn't produce net revenue after usually 3, sometimes 5 years, ownership of the asset is transferred to the financer, who usually liquidates it to cut their losses. That tells you quite clearly that no one is holding out for that magical "it'll become popular 20 years later" cult classic.
Like that release in December of the Beatles 1963 recordings. If EMI or whoever hadn't released those for sale then they'd be PD this year. But aren't we better off with those out there for sale than potentially lost forever or stuck in bootleg traders hell? Yes there's some people upset that they were *this close* to having PD Beatles stuff, but they'll get their wish in 20 years, in the meantime you can just buy them on your phone. Isn't that better overall?
How the fuck is it better overall that I have to pay for something that to all reasonable persons should be in the public domain?
Aside from "because we can, and fuck everyone else", there is no argument that can be made in support of >20 year copyrights. Unfortunately that single argument wins when the side making that argument is the only side with any political power or influence.
You are idiotically ignoring the hypothetical jobs and livelihoods being lost by crushing the creativity of everyone else who might use that brand/story/characters etc to create something great.
You are also dishonestly conflating icons of fiction with brands. Disney is a brand, Dreamworks is a brand. Mickey Mouse is a character and icon. Hobbits are a fictional race.
Abusing copyright and trademark in a dishonest attempt to pretend hobbits are a brand (and not a fictional concept) is a real example of how dishonest usurpers have destroyed real creative potential and harmed culture in the name of greed. People who have been productively producing games and books have been sued by the Tolkien foundation which has directly harmed the economy, and cost people jobs and livelihoods. That is not hypothetical, that is fact.
The current (disputed) owners of Tetris have been most destructive to the Tetris concept. Demanding that all new Tetris games are implemented according to the "Tetris Guidelines", rules that govern the game mechanics, and in their current form, make it impossible for Arika to release another Tetris Grandmaster title, The greatest Tetris franchise, preferred by virtually all hardcore Tetris players. This is real economic harm.
I don't want to live in a world where I'm permitted to do nothing creative, as every facet of creative endeavour is engulfed in the darkness of ever more abstract and pervasive ideas of ownership. Yesterday's jokes about copyrighting plot elements of Shakespeare will no longer elicit laughter when lawyers convince courts that plot elements are creative works and warrant protection. As I watch the American IP lobby cannibalise both the creative and industrial sectors of every country under their dominion, I doubt there is anything that they will not claim falls within their grasp.
http://www.unvanquished.net/ You can thank me later.
Liberty.
So odds are your attempt will fail too, and that has nothing to do with copyrights, pirates or anything else other than it just didn't work.
But you're getting free enforcement of your right to "own" that stuff AND sell it to people (remember: if you don't sell it to people, it's worthless), but what are you paying for that? It was supposed to be that it would be given to the public, that what you did, how you did it would be available from year dot to educate others on how you did it and what you did.
But now you can keep it trade secret and copyrighted.
And you can keep it from surviving the term of copyright, therefore never getting into the public domain.
So you aren't paying for your rights.
So why should you get them at all?
"I worked hard" doesn't cut it, because 90% of businesses had people working hard to make it go, but it failed and they lost their job and their money.
For as long as you support the software sold, it can be under copyright.
When you no longer support it, it goes out of copyright.
If someone isn't making money AND DOES NOT WISH TO, then why should they get the right to close the work again so nobody else can?
On copyrights, patents and copyright infringement.
First of all, lets all realize that calling copyright infringement piracy is an attempt by the RIAA/MPAA and others to make copyright infringement sound like a far worse crime than it really is. While copyright infringement is not right, it is in no way as heinous as the acts of the real past or present day pirates of the high seas. Penalties for copyright infringement need to be limited to the actual production cost of the media involved, not the totally bogus figures seen today.
Copyright has been extended far beyond all reason in recent years, delaying the entry into the public domain of many works that rightfully should have been there for many years, so that the overly greedy can continue to profit on these works to the great detriment of society as a whole. These vastly overextended copyrights are also used to stifle innovation and derivative works.
Copyright MUST be reduced to 5 years maximum, with no extensions allowed whatsoever for the original works. Further, purchase or transfer of copyright must not extend the original copyright period at all. Death of the original creator of the copyrighted content must automatically make that content public domain. And once a work is in the public domain, under no circumstances at all will it ever be copyrighted, or removed from the public domain. Further, anytime that copyrighted material becomes unavailable to the general public for more than 2 years, copyright must be terminated and the work becomes public domain. Any copyrighted material over 5 years old needs to automatically made public domain, no exceptions!
Patents must not be granted for business methods nor for computer software. And any such patents must be immediately invalidated. Further, far too many spurious and/or vaguely worded patents have been granted, which must be reviewed (at the expense of the holder) and invalidated. And the practice of patent trollingâ entities buying patents only for the purpose of litigation to make a profit) needs to be illegal, with extremely heavy fines and long jail sentences. The penalties for wrongfully bullying a competitor (in any way) with invalid, vaguely worded patents or false patent claims need to even higher.
Patents need to be very very specifically worded, and not granted if there is the slightest bit of prior art. Entities seeking patents must prove beyond any doubt that there is no prior art at their own expense. Patents that are not being used to actively bring a product to market must become public domain after 3 years. All patents that are currently being sat on to stifle a product or innovation must fall under this 3 year term.
Copyright infringement will never completely go away. BUT here is how to drastically reduce it. The RIAA/MPAA/Publishers need to:
STOP going after the folks that download a few mp3s, movies, or ebooks. Go after the pirates who sell hundreds of thousands or millions of illegal copies!
STOP buying draconian legislation that only hurts legitimate customers and threatens the internet!
STOP treating your paying customers like criminals with DRM. DRM doesn't stop or even slightly slow down the big piracy operations, it only hurts legitimate paying customers!
STOP all the regional restrictions BS!
STOP screwing and ripping off the Artists/Authors/content creators!
START producing high quality, DRM-FREE content that people want. Price it reasonably, and make it easy to get over the internet.
START adapting to changing technology and the real world!
Copyright infringement cannot be legislated away, it cannot be sued out of existence. The only real solution is to give the customers what they want, when they want it, at a price they consider reasonable, with as little hassle as possible. I know that the above mentioned entities (and their clones around the world) don't want to hear this. If they don't start listening, eventually they will go away. They are already starting to be
Take away government and descend into anarchy, and you'll still have property rights. It'll suck, and be more far more expensive to secure and protect (i.e. you'll have to patrol your own territory, buy your own guns instead of amortizing it across a larger population) but it'll still be there, and most people will very easily see it and respect it. Even animals know about most of this stuff; that's how simple it is.
Yet for all that, you won't have the slightest thing even vaguely approximating the kind of right that you're saying exists; you won't even get 1% of the way there. When you write a book and sell a copy to a traveller in exchange for a gallon of petrol, and he sets off on the trail and out of your physical control, there is nothing you can do about how he uses the book. He might read it to someone else but also keep the book, he might trade it to someone you don't like, and he might use its pages in his outhouse. You sold it and it's not yours anymore. You had a property right to the book, but now you have a property right to the gallon of petrol instead.
You can pretend you have a right to both the petrol and still the book too, but the world's reality disagrees with you.
Everybody hated the expense and unreliability of anarchy's ability to secure rights, so we have governments now. A lot of us think governments are mainly just good at securing our already-existing rights, though, and that governments lack the capacity to create or remove rights (though they can "infringe" them, as opposed to actually removing them). Our rights are unchanged by governments. There's a very famous explanation of this viewpoint, written in 1776.
You can take a broader view of rights, which doesn't really fit into any of this. Then you might say governments actually can create rights that we otherwise never had prior to government. I think that's going to be a very unpopular viewpoint among Americans, though. (And there are a lot of Americans on Slashdot.)
Most of the time when we Americans hear people talking about rights that way, we try to not make a fuss, and just assume you're using "right" a little sloppily and loosely, or as shorthand for some expedient tradeoff. There's nothing wrong with talking that way! Just don't forget, when you're doing it.
In your case, your sloppy application of "property rights" to controlling what happens to a book that you already sold to someone else, really sounds like one of those new-fangled "rights" that we think is merely a neat idea, so expedient that we even put something about it into the constitution. But don't think for a second, that you're really going to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, whenever you use "right" in that manner.
The core reasoning for the troll is that homeopathy works by using substances that are known to cause ills, which is something core to vaccinations - many of them rely on deactivated or "dead" cells from the original ailment to train the body to fight against it. The dilution stuff is pretty silly, but the basic idea is important. My comments on the subject, however, are all about trolling.
From: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
"The copyright system developed along with the printing press. In the age of the printing press, it was unfeasible for an ordinary reader to copy a book. Copying a book required a printing press, and ordinary readers did not have one. What's more, copying in this way was absurdly expensive unless many copies were made--which means, in effect, that only a publisher could copy a book economically.
So when the public traded to publishers the freedom to copy books, they were selling something which they could not use. Trading something you cannot use for something useful and helpful is always good deal. Therefore, copyright was uncontroversial in the age of the printing press, precisely because it did not restrict anything the reading public might commonly do.
But the age of the printing press is gradually ending. The xerox machine and the audio and video tape began the change; digital information technology brings it to fruition. These advances make it possible for ordinary people, not just publishers with specialized equipment, to copy. And they do!
Once copying is a useful and practical activity for ordinary people, they are no longer so willing to give up the freedom to do it. They want to keep this freedom and exercise it instead of trading it away. The copyright bargain that we have is no longer a good deal for the public, and it is time to revise it--time for the law to recognize the public benefit that comes from making and sharing copies.
With this analysis, we see why rejection of the old copyright bargain is not based on supposing that the Internet is ineffably unique. The Internet is relevant because it facilitates copying and sharing of writings by ordinary readers. The easier it is to copy and share, the more useful it becomes, and the more copyright as it stands now becomes a bad deal."
See also: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/... ... ...
"Something strange and dangerous is happening in copyright law. Under the US Constitution, copyright exists to benefit users--those who read books, listen to music, watch movies, or run software--not for the sake of publishers or authors. Yet even as people tend increasingly to reject and disobey the copyright restrictions imposed on them "for their own benefit," the US government is adding more restrictions, and trying to frighten the public into obedience with harsh new penalties.
How did copyright policies come to be diametrically opposed to their stated purpose? And how can we bring them back into alignment with that purpose? To understand, we should start by looking at the root of United States copyright law: the US Constitution.
The copyright bargain places the public first: benefit for the reading public is an end in itself; benefits (if any) for publishers are just a means toward that end. Readers' interests and publishers' interests are thus qualitatively unequal in priority. The first step in misinterpreting the purpose of copyright is the elevation of the publishers to the same level of importance as the readers.
The second mistake in copyright policy consists of adopting the goal of maximizing--not just increasing--the number of published works. The erroneous concept of "striking a balance" elevated the publishers to parity with the readers; this second error places them far above the readers.
Diminishing returns applies to copyright just as to any other purchase. The first freedoms we should trade away are those we miss the least, and whose sacrifice gives the largest encouragement to publication. As we trade additional freedoms that cut closer to home, we find that each trade is a bigger sacrifice than the last, while bringing a smaller increment in literary activity. Well before the increment becomes zero,
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.