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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
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.
...and I don't really care about his excuses.
If it's been 20 or 30 years since you published something, then your time has passed already and it's time for you to step aside and allow the next generation a chance.
In the intervening period, a work has either become too important to hoard or too worthless to justify being a burden on anyone.
After 20 years, it's time for you to allow the next group of people to have the advantages that you were allowed.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
The answer is simple: Greed. They don't want their old (free) titles competing with the new.
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.
The problem with saying "Public Domain isn't the answer" is that Public Domain is the essential trade-off for copyright. The only reason people are given copyrights is that they are allowed a temporary monopoly on a work they created before it falls into the Public Domain. The Public Domain then helps feed the next round of creators who make works that copyright protects before they, in turn, fall into the Public Domain.
What we have today is works that essentially never leave copyright. If I released a book/movie/game/etc today, it would be covered by copyright until 2109 (assuming no law changes between now and then - a big assumption). The logic behind the copyright extension was that it would encourage the creator to make more books/movies/games/etc. The only problem is that I'd be 134 in the year 2109. If I'm even still alive then, I doubt I'll be in any shape to create many more works. If I'm not alive, then what is my copyright encouraging me to do? I doubt I'll rise zombie-like from the dead to pen a book about the after-life. ("It's Cold In The Ground" by Zombie Jason. But it before I eat your BRAAAIINNNSSS!!!!)
If the copyright expires on your work, you don't get any say in what people do with it. Were Shakespeare to come back to life today, he wouldn't have any say over some movie company making a modern musical version of Romeo and Juliet. Da Vinci wouldn't have a say in someone taking an image of the Mona Lisa and selling it on a postcard. If your work goes Public Domain and someone makes a "remix" version of it, that doesn't reflect poorly on you, but on the remix maker.
Copyrights NEED to expire at some point. It's hard enough trying to find out who owns the rights to Random Game From The 80s. Imagine trying to track down the rights holder for A Mid-Summer Night's Dream to make a movie based on it. It's not a question of SHOULD copyrights expire, but WHEN should they. I, and I'd wager most people here, think that copyright term length has been extended way past its usefulness and should be seriously trimmed back. (Personally, I'd go back to 14 years plus a one-time 14 year renewal, but at this point I'd take one 50 year copyright term as an improvement.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.