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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.
And a rebuttal by Steve Gaynor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good news for Disney. Their trademark on Mickey will never 'expire'. The only way it goes away is if Disney is bankrupt and nobody want's to buy the trademarks from the bankruptcy trustee.
The only thing that goes into the public domain in 2018 is 'Steamboat Willie'. Consider that 'Buried Treasure' (the greatest animation of the era) is already public domain, as it was done open source style. After hours, without Walt knowing a thing about it. Too bad their aren't better copies.
Fair warning 'Buried Treasure' is NSFW.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
...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.
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.
Oh please, cause nobody else has made a version of Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Alice in Wonderland, etc other than Disney, as they are all so terrified of Disney's army of lawyers?
Take a look at IMDB sometime...you'll find multiple versions of all of the above.... :rollseyes:
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.
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.
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.
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.
The fact that GOG.com is a viable business kills his point that old games have no economic value.
Actually, it does not. GOG.com does value-added work on old games. There is no evidence that the games themselves maintain any significant economic benefit without that work. As I understand it, GOG.com fixes the game and those fixes should be entitled to copyright protection for a suitable length of time, however, the underlying games should no longer have any protection. Do you really think it's reasonable that the source code for Pacman, for example, will be protected by copyright until 2055 at the earliest?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Solution: You don't get both a copyright and a trade secret.....just like you don't get a patent and a trade secret. [Maybe you mean a Trade Mark which is yet another form of IP.]
Coke has never released their formula. If you are smart enough to figure it out, you can make your own Coke. They won't patent it because then you'd be able to clone it for cheaper. They haven't copyrighted it because that would require it to be published somewhere. If someone broke in and released their formula, they could sue for the actual theft, but once the knowledge was out in the public, they couldn't do anything to anyone using that knowledge.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.