> The specific quote is that “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.”
> This explains why people like Jim Ryan hate retro games. They think these older games would cannibalize sales from newer releases.
I play retro games. Mostly on Retroarch.
I play those games because I genuinely think they are better and more enjoyable than the vast majority of crap released nowadays.
If they managed (they can't) to wrestle my retro game collection from me, they wouldn't get me to play whatever crap EA, Ubisoft or Blizzard puts out nowadays. They would just get me to stop playing videogames.
Indeed; I’m still enjoying games from 1994. They haven’t stopped being fun simply because they’re old. They also represent a significant learning effort over the years. One of the things that makes a game enjoyable is having learned how to play it well. I’m not likely to make that kind of investment in too many more games in my life. I haven’t got that kind of free time. So for me as well, it’s not old games versus new, it’s old games or nothing.
The learning effort thing is a solid point. I think what I play most these days is Super Mario World romhacks. Obviously the level design and whatnot aren't the same as the original, but the controls and physics are and I learned those as a fairly young child in the 90s.
The reason I don't like most other platformers almost definitely isn't because they're actually inferior, it's just because I'm "calibrated" to SMW
The amazing part is that my cartridges still work perfectly well in my original consoles, decades later. There's no server, no login, no account, no downloading, no ads, no microtransactions... I just turn the console on, grab the controller, and I'm in game in seconds.
Personally I use a Retrotink 5X, which handles every old console I own (NES, SNES, N64, GameCube) in visually lossless quality to my eyes. The built-in composite upscaler on a lot of modern televisions handles 240p as though it is 480i, leading to bad flicker. The Retrotink and other similar products upscales the signal properly, producing quite clean visuals.
Most of the ones I've seen do, but via an rca to 3.5mm dongle. The main issue is that the scaler built into most modern TVs does a worse job than even a cheap external one.
This seems very similar to the GameCenter CX games, which is basically the "Nintendo World Championships" Switch game, but with made-up games, and it was for the DS.
I guess they would be okay with preservation if no one played retro games?
That was a rhetoric question, because I think they would only be happy if retro games became unavailable, so their profit grew a bit next quarter.
I don't even think retro games eat much of their profits, otherwise they would see it as a business opportunity, but their posture only makes sense if there's not much profit to be had in that niche.
Fair case for advocating piracy. I don't think the copyright office is doing its job in service for society. I wouldn't even call it piracy if you had a licence. It is just normal usage.
I hope that if they manage to wrestle your retro games from you that you would explore some indie games instead. There are many small companies that make high quality games, usually in the spirit of popular retro games.
> “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.”
Hahahahaha. Yes, in the enshittified capitalist utopia, GAMES aren't for having FUN! They're for addicting large swathes of people and milking them financially for years and years! Stop interfering with my right to rip you off! And for god's sake stop having fun!
Since we're on the topic, were there any fun games released in last 12 months? I wanted to play Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, but never actually got to.
The context of the quote pretty significantly changes the meaning though. It's an argument for why the rules shouldn't be loosened for the preservation foundation.
> Still, the US copyright office has said no. "The Register concludes that proponents did not show that removing the single-user limitation for preserved computer programs or permitting off-premises access to video games are likely to be noninfringing," according to the final ruling. "She also notes the greater risk of market harm with removing the video game exemption’s premises limitation, given the market for legacy video games."
That quote (from the GamesRadar article) to me, makes it clear that the "[...] preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes" quote is being used as a gotcha. It's not that they don't want you to play old games, it's that they don't want copyright restrictions to be loosened. It's a very similar situation to the recent Internet Archive book. Current copyright law doesn't let you loan out format-shifted works. Copyright length is too long, but within the copyright framework, the restrictions seem sensible to me.
This is not surprising, and unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to get better any time soon given our increasingly conservative (corp friendly) federal courts. It's really a shame because these corps have shown they can't be trusted to properly archive their own games, and any change of ownership or economic fortune can mean they are lost forever.
From a personal level, I'll just keep doing what I've always done. Help archive the things I can. Support and buy games from smaller devs or publishers who care about their games. And if you want to play something from a shitty AAA dev, nothing is stopping you from playing it anyway for free and just giving the money to your favorite charity instead. Consumers can have a lot of power if they choose to exercise it.
> This is not surprising, and unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to get better any time soon given our increasingly conservative (corp friendly) federal courts.
It's not very often that the "Both Sides" argument is valid but in this case it is: Neither major US party differs significantly in their unwavering support for corporate power and laissez faire regulatory policy. They are also largely backed by the same large corporate sponsors and do not significantly differ on their use of super PAC funding and their support of unlimited political spending from corporations.
IMO the primary reason is the difficulty of supporting older titles across various modern systems, for a too small of an audience. If older games were so popular GOG would dominate the market by now.
They don't *need* to support shit, I would pay for the rom dumps if there was a way for me to do so. Same with music, I like buying music but relatively few artists let me give them money for flacs.
Also GOG does really well considering the tough competition.
Stand alone executable are very easy to support for ~20 years on the windows platform. It's only dos games that need to be packaged in VMs for modern platforms. Support only becomes a problem when there's invasive drm tied to a specific os or hardware platform or required online services that require ongoing maintenance.
There is absolutely no need for them to support any of this. They don't need to spend even one cent of their money on this stuff.
The world is literally filled with people who love these games so much they learned computer hardware and programming because of it. People who love these things to the point they'll reverse engineer the consoles and make emulators to make sure they are playable again long after the hardware has crumbled to dust. People who obsess about things like cycle accuracy and undocumented hardware behavior in order to make sure even the nonsensical bugs in the system are recreated because there were games out there relying on those things to do something awesome with limited resources. People who will reverse engineer the games themselves and make open source engines for the content. These people are beyond awesome, they literally do this because they enjoy it.
All these corporations have to do is get the hell out of these people's way, for they are doing god's work.
That's literally all they have to do. They just gotta shut up, stop whining about their "lost sales" and let these people do what they gotta do.
I think this is the correct thing to do as far as copyright law goes, but it seems to me that copyright terms are far too long to fulfill their original purpose: incentivize the distribution of creative works. Originally copyright was for relatively short terms (20 years IIRC). It is now life of the author + 70 years or 95 years from publication if the copyright holder is a corporation. Some organizations advocate for perpetual copyright terms as well.
Given the extremely long terms now available there is little incentive to quickly extract value from the copyrighted work. Patents exist for the same reason and have been similarly coopted by their holders.
Edit: if copyright terms were shorter publishers would be incentivized to keep their games in print and to update them for newer media/platforms.
There are so many ways that copyright duration could be adjusted to dramatically reduce the duration for out-of-print not-for-sale works while simultaneously allowing Disney to keep Mickey Mouse.
The fact that it's a single fixed duration that continues to be extended for just a minuscule fraction of works is ultimately the issue.
I'm totally okay with Mickey Mouse being copyrighted again if we could find a system that allowed for abandoned works to be out of copyright. It would be a huge boon to human culture.
The idea is solid, I suspect it just needs some tweaks to the language. "It's not a sale, it's a license", ironically reminds me of sovereign-citizen "I'm not driving, I'm travelling and don't need a license, Officer" BS.
This is the wrong strategy. Every year some or the other group begs the copyright office for some minor exception and most of them get denied. This is the wrong game. To win at this, you need to create your own market and succeed in it. And then you can buy your own politicans. Imagine if uber had asked the taxi board for exceptions for ride sharing. Or if Tesla had waited till states allowed them to sell (they didn't; they started selling on Indian land). Begging for morsels from the government doesn't work.
It's funny how they keep actively pushing normal people towards, rather than away from, piracy (or copyright infringement).
From a certain angle it could be seen that they're backing people into a corner from which the only escape is piracy, and once the convenience of that apple has been tasted, it's difficult to go back to the sub-standard service provision and heavy usage restrictions of the 'legitimate' world.
I think it fits this case. It's an open secret that despite constant public statements from games publishers about their old IP still having value that it's actually a scheme to push consumers on the new content treadmill. Now we have someone confirming in court that it's exactly that.
Which is a terrible misuse of copyright that goes against even its most publisher-friendly interpretation.
Meta: I don't think the phrase is actually overused, I think it's used so much due to so many companies all discovering at once that they don't have to spend time crafting a plausible cover narrative, and that nothing will happen if they just say they're being shitty and there's nothing you can do about it.
Obviously there is something you can do about it though: casually ignore copyright law because the government is acting illegitimately, just like people do with drugs. If you're interested in, say, ROMs, it doesn't take much work to find a community (say, a subreddit) that's interested in that topic and will tell you where to find what you want. Or if you're too lazy for that, you can search for retro games on amazon and find consoles with 10s of thousands of them preloaded.
The quiet part that citizens can say out loud is that for individuals, copyright basically runs on the honor system. If you don't think the situation is fair, you can just ignore those restrictions.
Patent, trademark, copyright, etc are all supposed to benefit society as a whole. The point isn't that corporations get to lock things away forever. The goal is to incentivize innovation, both technological and cultural. The more companies make the argument that 'thing x from a long time ago is crucial to us now' the more I think that our current IP laws are actually slowing down innovation instead of incentivizing it. Maybe we need a new system that starts costing money after a point to maintain IP rights. That system would recognize the value taken by private companies holding on to old IP to the detriment of society and force them to come up with new things to justify their existence instead of living off of that one thing they did right 100 years ago.
(Repeating for n-th time:) I like the idea of exponential cost of IP protection.
First 10 or so years the protection is free. Then, on the first year of paid protection, you pay $10. On the second, $20. On the tenth, $10,240. On the sixteenth, $655,360. The year you miss a payment the protection ceases.
If your IP is immensely valuable and is bringing you gobs of money, you can continue paying and keep your monopoly. But the case of keeping reams of stuff under the lock "just in case" would be largely eliminated. Anything that's not a cash cow currently being milked and paid for would get released to the public domain.
On top of that, the federal budget would receive some extra money, but only from those who is making money, and not the small guy who just has published an indie game on Steam.
That sounds like a really good idea, one problem though: this doesn't benefit the lawmaking and law-exploiting classes, so why would it happen?
It's pretty clear that the legal system mostly exists to preserve big financial interests. I spent much of my adult life watching SCO play the system...
Voters need to make it clear that it does benefit the lawmaking class. Votes are more powerful than money in politics - but only if you use them. If you fall for one party is all good you have lost power.
The hard part is getting enough other voters to care. If it is just you money is more important. If it is you and many others though you beat money.
This clearly benefits wealthy owners of IP (disney, movie studios, game publishers, etc) over small-time artists (self-published authors, small bands, etc) since the period of time that IP protection remains an economic choice is strongly tied to the value of the IP.
E.g., if you write a book and realize $5,000 in sales per year, then 10 * 2^x=5000 where x is 8.97, so you only enjoy 8 years of revenues ($40,000) and you've paid Σ(1->8) 10 * 2^x = $5,100 for the privilege, for a net $34,900 or 6.98x the yearly royalty value.
If Dreamworks sees $500M a year in Minions merchandising, then 10 * 2^x=500,000,000 where x = 25.56 and so Dreamworks realizes 25 years of revenues ($12,500,000,000) and pays Σ(1->25) 10 * 2^x = $671,088,620 for the privilege, for a net $11,828,911,380 or 23.66x the yearly royalty value.
Big acts grossing colossal figures can continue that for a longer time. But the growth of the fee is exponential, while sales never grow exponentially for indefinite time. I can agree that the base of 2 may be too low; let's take 4 instead.
Let's assume that Dreamworks are so good that they get $500M a year for a particular IP. For 10 years they enjoy free coverage.
But even if on year 25 of coverage they would still have been making some money on the franchise, next year they go badly into the red.
The code:
def fee(y):
return 0 if y <= 10 else 10 * 4 ** (y - 11)
def total_fee(y):
return sum(fee(yy) for yy in range(1, y + 1))
def total_revenue(years, yearly_revenue=500_000_000):
return yearly_revenue * years
def balance(y):
f = total_fee(y) / 1_000_000
r = total_revenue(y) / 1_000_000
return "%2d %8.1fM %8.1fM %6.1fM" % (y, f, r, r - f)
for y in range(21, 27):
print(balance(y))
As we see, the optimum total revenue is achieved after 23 years of protection, and then it goes down fast, turning negative on year 26.
And this is for a mega-popular franchise, that makes half a billion every year in a row for more than two decades. It's a very rare hit, comparable to Star Wars maybe, or the Mickey Mouse. Most IPs don't stay so staunchly popular for this long.
You can try playing with the parameters and check outcomes for different revenue shapes and fee bases.
Small owners of IP get to enjoy less value from their creations due to weaker IP protections. That's backward.
Moreover the amount of tax paid as a fraction of total value realized is actually lower for the large owner of IP because the total tax payment is dominated by the final years, but the total revenue is determined by the number of years. In the example above, we had:
$5,100 / $40,000 = 12.75% tax for the small author, and
$671,088,620 / $12,500,000,000 = 5.37% tax for Dreamworks.
The ratios would be even worse if the small author could've just barely justified the 9th year. Pretty much unconscionable.
The fact that we're collecting tax from IP is not interesting. We have progressive income tax for this purpose.
I'd like to remind that IP protection does not solely exist to benefit authors. It exists to benefit the society as a whole. That is, not only the writers and actors, but also the readers and viewers. The original post, if you take a look, is about an obvious disbalance of the benefits the IP holders of old games receive vs the lost benefit of the society from preserving these games. Many games are works of art, on par with books an movies, a part of society's cultural heritage.
Unlike physical property, "intellectual property" requires quotes, and does not enjoy a constitutional protection, all for a good reason.
My proposal has a few benefits that, to my mind, outweigh the shortcomings.
* It is very simple. There's no room for any shenanigans, small print, etc.
* It is very uniform. It applies to every kind of IP (of the same class) equally. Again, no room or need for small print.
* It has a large enough free grace period, longer than the peak periods when most movies make the large box offices, most books have the first 2-3 successful reprints, most games have initial sales + DLC sales, etc. For most folks, nothing changes, because their revenues from a particular IP go to zero or near-zero by the end of the grace period.
* It's guaranteed to terminate the IP protection sooner or later, and most of the time, sooner. No demand curve stays exponential forever; the fee stays exponential as long as it takes.
* It does not depend on any accounting. No box office numbers to smear, no audience sizes to inflate. No matter how much you earn, you can pay for the protection as long as you care to afford it.
* It protects the most valuable / profitable IP preferentially. If something is really really huge, and people keep asking the authors to shut up, take their money, and produce moar, that thing can stay protected for longer. When most people stop caring enough, it becomes pointlessly costly to keep protecting it. This benefits the few that care though, the librarians and archivists of the world, and the new creators who now can build freely on top of the things that went to public domain.
So no, the small author just does not have to pay anything, small authors are just protected for 10 years for free, and may buy half a decade of protection cheaply if they care. But after that, they should admit that this particular cow is not worth milking forever.
So your argument is that something that takes in 500m in its useful lifetime shouldn't net the creator more than something that takes in only 100k in its useful lifetime? Yes, big content X that churns out mega movies that have more staying power than indy film y would make more money, but now instead of that mega company X holding onto everything for 10 lifetimes they are forced to releases it. If this is structured to kick in with normal lifespans accounted for then it shouldn't really hurt the indy side of things.
1) that something that takes in 500m in its useful lifetime should not be subject to a lower tax rate than something that takes in only 100k in its useful lifetime (in fact it should be subject to a higher tax rate, in line with income tax policy);
2) something that takes in 500m should not automatically be entitled to a longer useful lifetime than something that takes in 100k.
Unfortunately both things are true for this proposal. #1 can be ameliorated by offering an income tax credit, but #2 is fundamental.
My only issue with this approach is that some people need a lot of time to start monetizing something they invent. Say I write something cool and it takes me 20 years to find someone to buy it. This punishes anyone that can't move quickly.
I like the current model of works becoming public domain after X years, but would prefer we shorten those timelines a bit given the speed of software.
OK, person A invented something, patented it, and sits on it for 20 years, unable to find an useful application.
Person B invents the same thing, and immediately sees a way to make it a big hit, with lots of demand. Should person A be blocking person B for 20 years? Why do you think person A should be entitled to that? What do you think would be more beneficial for the society?
Or just don't have IP at all. It's entirely a waste of resources. What, you won't work on a cure for cancer because you can't rent-seek discovery? No, of course not. The marginal profit is sufficient. The entire system is unnecessary and serves no public utility. It just facilitates a new form of rent on knowledge. It's as bad as the idea of privatizing land rents.
Patents were invented for a good reason. They prevent important inventions from dying as trade secrets, and being lost to the society.
A patent requires a clear explanation of an invention, in exchange for a limited time of monopoly on its use. After that, the invention enters public domain.
Before patents. important inventions would stay tightly guarded secrets, because once the invention leaks, there's no recourse, every competitor can freely use it, and put you out of business. Hence the inventions were lost forever (at best, need to be reinvented from scratch) if the original inventor went out of business somehow without sharing the secret.
Patents are a boon for everyone as long as the detrimental effects from the monopoly don't outweigh the beneficial effects of sharing knowledge and general ease of business operation without thick shrouds of secrecy. That is, as long as the time of protection is set right.
Being able to play old video games for free is not the point though, it's just a nice side effect of an intellectual property regime with a reasonable duration, say something less than 150 years.
Reminds me about how many times I've ended up buying the same game I already own, but on another platform because the original is on something I no longer have reasonable access to anymore. (I don't have a television with a RF modulator handy and getting a proper setup working takes more effort than I'm willing to put in at this age.)
With the people that understand that reality isn’t as black and white as you make it out to be and that will hopefully find better compromises going forward.
Show me an actual person whose livelihood or retirement depends on their copyright (and not, say, owning somebody else's copyright). I'm not convinced that the current state of copyright law actually benefits authors and artists.
Nearly all fiction authors own the copyrights to their books. They have an agreement with publisher to publish it and they get the royalties. If that agreement ends, they can find a new publishers. The authors get an advance and if book is popular enough, they get royalties.
Any semi-famous author would do, no? Famous authors everyone's heard of are probably rich enough that they have other investments via money they earned from their copyrights, but arguably that's still a living derived from their owning of copyright. So let's start with hearing why,
say, Stephen King, Charlie Stross, and J. K. Rowling aren't actual people who's living (sizable as it may be) doesn't depend on their copyright on the books they wrote, before we look for any lesser known authors. Taylor Swift makes a living off her music, which is dependent on copyright. Or have I missed something somewhere?
> The 12-time Grammy Award winner made more than $780 million on the U.S. leg of the Eras Tour, according to an estimate by Forbes. The total ticket sales from Swift's 2023 Eras Tour could make her the highest-grossing female touring artist of all time, according to Billboard. The Eras Tour could gross over $1 billion, making concert history as the first billion-dollar tour, according to The Wall Street Journal.
J.K. Rowling doesn't have exclusive rights to her books, past the first couple. Lots of copyright-related suits (most?) are made by Warner Bros. She's fully capable of mobilising her fanbase (or, was, at least, before she went off on the deep end) to prevent or restrict what she considers misuse of the Harry Potter brand. (And, as you say, she doesn't need the money.)
Copyright isn't why Toby Fox need never go hungry. His work is trivial to pirate, he doesn't even bother enforcing copyright on his music; and yet he's probably a millionaire, with more works on the way.
But someone IS suggesting that people lose copyright protections over some of their works, and eventually all of them when they don't have 10 thousand dollars to pay to keep their rights per work after just 20 years.
There are no residuals for game devs. It's work for hire, so holding on to this idea that they will get paid money for every sale (even after it's no longer sold - but maybe somehow once these assholes "resurrect" a game they never bothered to bring back after 30 years, will somehow benefit the actual people who made it is a joke). This has nothing to do "their livelihood and retirement"It's about protecting corporate profits in the very slim case they may discover that bringing something back (ha sure) will benefit the corporation that OWNS the rights.
IP isn't the same across the board it's not like game devs are singers who have ASCAP/BMI etc protections. Game devs are code jockeys who get shit on by the corporations with NO rights to the actual work THEY produced. Why do you act like this is the same as music with perpetual rights to the actual creators? It rarely if ever is.
You can go ahead and "blame" the workers you claim to support for failing to "put that in their employment contract, it is a "free market" for labor, after all" or you can work on changing the system to at least let the past be free and open and history have a chance of being important or just let it all be locked in a vault, in disuse in the "hope" that maybe someday a corporation will "release" it again as a game. Or you can let people who ARE passionate about it work on it and let the public have the right to it.
As the parent comments point out, the LITERAL REASON OF COPYRIGHT IN THE US CONSTITUTION is to benefit the public. It has nothing to do with giant corps getting rich as fuck off other people's labor. Contract law gets in the way and lets these pricks steal the work and wealth, deny people the rights and only THEY get the benefit, this is the precise opposite of the public benefit intended.
Culture happens on faster and faster cycles than ever before, yet instead of admitting the speed of it, these behemoths who own IP, demand continual extensions (well until the most recent time when Disney finally relented and let Steamboat Willy enter the Public Domain recently).
Instead of promoting "innovation" (as phrased in the US Constitution), it promotes lethargy slouch and continued re-use of the same things. It's the exact opposite of the intent. And no, this bullshit about "livelihoods and retirement" mean jackshit in game dev. You shit your game out, you got paid for that work, and that's it. All the excess profits go to the corp, not the actual devs. IP in this case is not about humans owning/making, and it's corporations through and through, and unless you held onto the same corporation for 40 years, as the creator, it's not going to be you getting the supposed benefit of this.
Ip rights should just end after a relatively quick slice of time. You made your money off it, now it’s time to pass it on to the public. A payment model just ensures the only entities who can hold ip long term are corporations.
That's how it was originally but over time the terms have been extended (largely due to advocacy from organizations that own large catalogs of copyrighted material). It's now tied to the life of the creator rather than the time since creation or publication.
IIRC, early copyright (say, during Mozart's time) required royalties to only be paid out for the first performance of a work.
And that is why some of these composers were so prolific - to keep up their payday, they had to crank out music instead of collecting on royalties of performances they were directly involved with.
So musicians should not be compensated when their old songs play on the radio? You made your money in 1974 now move along while my company exploits your work for free.
I see this sentiment frequently, but I think it is missing some of the crucial details:
- patents last for 20 years in the us
- trademarks do not have value to the rest of the world. Eg, the name “Kleenex” is (was?) a granted trademark, to help customers identify products from that specific company. “Kleenex” has somewhat become generic, but I don’t think this is really better or worse for humanity in general — it just removes some branding strength from Kleenex.
- copyright lasts life of author +70 years. This is problematic imo.
I think the concern about copyright is justified, but I think the others are honestly pretty decent. But of course different people will have different opinions.
The big problem is that none of these laws have been updated to deal with digital property. We simply get new interpretations based on the whims of random judges who may not even be familiar with how the technology works. Software patents are the perfect example of this. Digital piracy/lending is another. And let's not even get into AI/LLMs.
Patents last too long, given the current speed of technological advancement. 20 years ago, we looked at CRTs, we carried dinky Nokias, and data came on shiny disks. Giving somebody a monopoly on an idea for that amount of time is a huge impediment on the free market.
The other issue with patents is that the whole underlying idea is questionable. You're supposed to give people access to your idea in return for protection. But what is the value of that access? In a lot of areas, the value is zero, since reverse-engineering (or just looking at something) will give you all the information contained in the patent.
I suspect that most patents are giving companies a long-term monopoly on an idea, and providing absolutely no, or close to no value in return.
I think it's the other way around. Patents are hard work, often you make a physical product and you get a measly 20 years. Meanwhile, copyrighted material flows out of my ass and gets 70+ years. Ridiculous. Why bother making anything?
There have been patents that are the result of hard work, but there is a deluge of patents that contain only ideas that are so obvious that nobody was shameless enough to attempt to patent them before.
Moreover the majority of patents contain extraordinarily broad claims, which cover many things that the authors of the patent have never succeeded to make, but they include the claims in the patent with the hope that someone else will find a way to make those things and then they will reveal the patent and blackmail those who have actually made a real device.
In the old times, for a patent to be granted there was a condition to present a working prototype embodying the claims of the patent.
Unfortunately this condition has gone a long time ago, otherwise it would have filtered most ridiculous patent claims.
These sorts of patents do exist, but they are not made “correctly”. Patents are supposed to contain novel ideas that are not obvious to experienced practitioners in the field. I think I agree with your criticism, except I feel it is a criticism of the execution of the law/system, rather than the law itself.
The law itself is broken, at least when combined with trade secret law. When you look at the incentive structure, you see the no one would apply for a patent if they thought it was actually difficult for others to independently figure out or reverse engineer; it's better to simply keep it a secret, and anyone sharing it will be liable for civil action and criminal prosecution. If you believe that others will figure it out on their own anyway, then it makes sense to patent it to deny them the ability to do so. Pretty much the entirety of IP law is a farce.
The whole story about wanting to incentivize companies to share their secrets doesn't even make sense. If we want the body of public knowledge to grow, don't legally protect secrets. Make non-competes illegal and make NDAs have a short maximum time limit, and you won't need to do anything special for knowledge to proliferate. The nerds that actually make things tend to like talking about how it works.
The problem with patents is not the length, it is that they are being applied to a general ideas and not implementations of those ideas. You patent your mouse trap, not all mouse traps.
20 years is an eternity in terms of innovation. This has an extreme effect compared to the natural state (no IP restrictions). I argue that the effects of patents is actually poorly understood, and most arguments for how they work fail to explain how and why open source works, revealing serious flaws in the foundational theories of IP restrictions.
The sole function of a patent is to restrict innovation. That’s the only direct result of patents. All other claims about encouraging innovation rely on beliefs about secondary and tertiary effects which I believe are incomplete, out of date, and often simply incorrect.
> copyright lasts life of author +70 years. This is problematic imo.
Personally, I think copyright isn't so bad simply because of what it covers.
A patent can stop me making stainless steel razor blades. At all.
But copyright? I can write a story about a boy wizard going to wizard school and learning from a man with a long white beard and a robe with huge sleeves. The law just says I can't call him Harry Potter.
I think this is accidentally a bit misleading. You _could_ write a story similar to Harry Potter without infringing copyright, but it isn’t just the name “harry potter” or some other substring that’s protected. There is a degree of similarity after which you’d be guilty of copyright infringement. I don’t know how that criteria is decided though.
Assumption 1: Commercialization and incentivization(beyond what is already achievable in our market system) of the production of media goods are a good thing and we would be poorer culturally-wise.
Assumption 2: Without IP laws, people would not produce works(aside from credits and attribution). Engineers will stop engineering. Lawyers will stop writing opinions. Scientists won't write research papers.
Assumption 3: IP laws did work to incentivize production and technological advancement, and they are only or the primary means to do so. We just need to reign in the excess.
Assumption 4: People who created useful works for its own sake are not valuable(open source software/hardware, inventors inventing things and freely publishing information, etc). Patents and copyright laws should favors the people who use copyright and patents over them, and the profit motive should reign supreme.
Is this meant to be a rewording of the parent comment as a critique, or is it meant to be an expression of your views? I’d probably contest assumptions 3 and 4, but I’m not sure if you yourself even support them.
How about both? You are welcome to critique my opinion.
As for assumption 3, there's SpaceX. They don't open their design of their rockets to the public where their competitors, such as the Chinese can copy them. Neither the US government nor SpaceX wants that. So there's a large amount of innovations, probably countless designs that went into these rockets. Maybe in a better geopolitical situation, patents would be respected, but why would SpaceX gives everyone the blueprint to catch up? Patents make more sense if designs are easily reverse engineered and you still want a monopoly to make back your investment. That is clearly false as people have made innovation in 3D printing where new designs are standardized for the benefit of the whole market.
Assumption 4 is the defacto state of things even if it were not the intention. People who invent useful things for the sake of useful things are clearly at a disadvantage against corporations or entities who have more money to hire lawyers.
There's already at least one case of a trivial patent for 3D printing stronger layers that expired being repatented again by another company, increasing legal uncertainty from implementing the technique in slicers and other software. Most slicer these days are open source, generally don't make money for its developers(at least not directly), but they do grow the 3D printing market through its active development. The slicers also happen to share code, unsurprising given that they are forks of one another. Clearly, this model is incompatible with the patent system as it stands.
On the SpaceX example, they couldn't release their designs even if they wanted to. ITAR prohibits it.
If they weren't prohibited from sharing rocket technology SpaceX might share. Tesla patents are open. I don't see why Musk wouldn't do the same for SpaceX if the government allowed it.
I don't see Musk doing that as he directly stated it himself.
As for Tesla patents, I would speculate that it's more about companies not willing copy Tesla which is why Telsa doesn't really care if they open source the information. Copying isn't always so easy especially if there are structural issues involved. Recall the superchargers that became standard. Other companies were using a different connector, but the supercharger connector was obviously superior and they relented after many years.
Patents are more useful in situation in which your designs are easily reverse engineered and there's little barrier in copying. In any case, there are firms in the automative industry that specialized in doing the teardown of cars and doing cost estimation. Such a firm would tell their competitors how Tesla actually make their cars, so there's not much value in publishing their patents anyway, other than PR stunts.
Patents are not as useful in scenarios in which trade secrets provide a strong and durable barrier to entry. They also require lawsuits to enforce, which is rather costly and imposes cost on our economy, so there's inefficiency to consider as well. Theoretically, a monopoly in this instance would incentivize R&D effort but we know that monopolies has various nasty side effects and not everybody have money to hire lawyers and enforce them.
There's lots mixed up with IP laws. Are talking inventions (patents) or works of art (books, movies, music, games)
I certainly know that most games and movies wouldn't exist without a monetary incentive. They take too much work to make. There are exceptions. You can make pong in a few hours and you can shoot a movie of yourself talking. You can also do both as a hobby a few hours a night. But, most movies require sets, costumes, props, and lots of other equipment and labor. Most games also require many person years of work. It's unlikely people would put in that much work if they couldn't make a living from it as it allows them to do it full time so they actually have the time needed.
OTOH, music "can" take a few hours and so could be done more easily as a hobby so while not all forms of music would continue I suspect we'd still get tons of it with without monetary incentives.. Books, it depends on the type of book. People write blogs for free and compile them into a book.
I mostly agree that there are assumptions built into IP law that may not be true. Are there good examples of history where a society that didn't have some similar system out-innovated one that did? Are there good parallels today?
Highly recommend the book “Against Intellectual Monopoly” which argues against IP law with a lot of historical references.
One such example is paint & coloring in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the book - “In 1862, British firms controlled about 50 percent of the world market and French firms another 40 percent, with Swiss and German companies as marginal players. By 1873, German companies had 50 percent of the market, while French, Swiss, and British firms controlled between 13 percent and 17 percent each. In 1913, German firms had a market share of more than 80 percent, the Swiss had about 8 percent, and the rest of the world had disappeared.” Switzerland at the time had no patent protection, and Germany allowed processes to be patented in 1877 but not products themselves.
Parallels are harder to find today due to the expansion of IP law as a condition of trade with many developed nations, but the book does have some more recent examples.
I am not a die-hard supporter of IP protection laws, but your examples are classic survivorship bias, as well as falling victim to the broken windows fallacy.
It is not a given that we should incentivize the production of cultural good beyond of what is already achievable.
I should note that there is already strong intrinsic motivation to create and there are already too many works to read, watch, or listen, and a lot of slops created clearly to make money.
People are willing to accept deplorable working conditions to pursue their dreams, such as developing video games.
Since I do improv, most of the value I created are on the spot and ephemeral anyway and I basically perform for free anyway. I would stand to gain if people go out to theaters and other avenue as opposed to consuming content on netflix.
In a free market of ideas, copyright would have perished long ago.
As a teenager of the 90s I have, correctly or incorrectly, been indoctrinated with the notion that RIAA/MPAA have too much clout for their own good. Sweden (Pirate Bay) and New Zealand (Kim.Com) taught us that.
But it’s not just The US — the bulk of my record collection is still digitised as Ogg/Vorbis in protest of Fraunhofer’s hold on MP3 as a non-public format.
Was I brainwashed? Did the kids of yesteryear lose in the long run? Aside from nostalgia, it’s worth remembering the history of this battle to learn for the future.
I like that your solution to corporations locking things away forever is a new system that would immediately excludes individual citizens and ties the capability to remove a cultural good from the public to wealth.
The main problems with current copyright laws, I think, is the creators need to sell their right to one of a handful of powerful corporations to make money at all, then those corporations grip on their rights and monopolize it, even if it means something isn't available at all. A better idea would be author's rights that can't be sold, and licensing that can't be denied. That way there still is monetary incentives to create, but cultural goods remain available to the public.
Article I Section 8 Enumerated Powers Clause 8 Intellectual Property
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;
Seems like the idea is to promote innovation by making sure it is for a limited time only seems pretty ingrained in the idea.
If it says 'for a limited time', then wouldn't tying itmto the lifetime of the author be unconstitutional? Because strictly speaking it's impossible to predict whether an author's life will end.
Decided in Eldred v. Ashcroft. As long as Congress stipulates a non-infinite copyright term, it's constitutional. Given that the chance of a human being eventually ceasing to live has been 100% so far, it's legitimate to assume that life + n years is still a finite period of time.
For Americans, the utilitarian argument is made in the Constitution:
_"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises [...] 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"_ [1]
half of your sp500-based-retirement is munching off ancient standards patents in media/tech/health. the rest is split between selling you disposable devices and sugar water.
... so in a way it does benefit society. but it's the society that likes to steal from social security and then call it a scam.
the entirety of all roms and emulators are probably in the hands of those who actually want to play them, this only prevents research archives from being operated.
i find it interesting that OG retro games actually are considered threatening to modern AAA games.
Yep. The games are already being archived. It's kind of silly to strike down an official archival at this point, and only brings risk to consumers that seek out illegally distributed ROMs on malware-infested sites.
And shout out to Red Viper on the 3DS for letting me experience the Virtual Boy without needing to deal with a second hand market that gets more expensive as the years go by.
The web platform can help mitigate this risk - while native emulators might be malicious or attacked by malicious roms, emulators written to run on the web platform are practically safe.
Why would it be anything other than expected that the top 10 or so percent of the whole history of games would compete favorably against any other subset of games, like whatever happens to be releasing this week?
Gamers are once again let down by the shameless ignorance and dishonesty of games journalists:
> More importantly, this also ignores the fact that libraries already lend out digital versions of more traditional media like books and movies to everyday people for what can only be described as recreational purposes.
What this ignores is that libraries are not allowed to digitize in-copyright print books (or physical films) and then distribute these digital copies. This is what the Internet Archive got in trouble for. Emulating old games is not that different.
Maybe the laws should be changed. But pretending that there's one set of rules for books and then a higher scrutiny for games is utterly backwards. Game publishers want the protections afforded to books and movies; it is archivists and emulators who want a double standard because of the unique technical challenges around old games. I am sympathetic to this position[1]. But I am not sympathetic to what has felt like 20 years of smarmy, dishonest games journalism around copyright. Too many journalists are completely in the tank for emulation, and they intentionally mislead readers with useless articles like this. It drives me crazy.
[1] Although note the dishonest conflation of "games publishers" and "game copyright holders." Game journalists simply ignore that small indie devs also want copyright protection, focusing on Nintendo and Playstation for naked political reasons.
> Soon after the settlement, the United States Congress passed the Computer Software Rentals Amendment Act prohibiting software rentals, excluding Nintendo cartridges from similar protections. Although Nintendo criticized the game rental business, they came to accept it, even working with Blockbuster to offer exclusive rental versions of their games. The first-sale doctrine was eventually subverted by end-user license agreements, which describe that the consumer is purchasing a singular, non-transferable license to the software, thus limiting the sale of used software.
> Excludes certain home video game software from the prohibition (including a computer program embodied in a machine or product which cannot be copied during the ordinary operation of such machine or product).
Libraries had a specific carve out as well over software in general "Authorizes nonprofit libraries to lend computer programs if a copyright warning has been affixed to the computer program packaging" which probably wouldn't apply to digital. But, it is wrong to say there weren't different rules for software vs books vs specifically game console software.
The DMCA had lots of flexibility for administrative law to make specific carve outs treating different media circumvention stuff differently for things like preservation:
> Lawmakers opted to create a rulemaking mechanism through the United States Copyright Office to review the state of copyrights and fair use to make limited classes of allowance for fair use which would be considered lawful means of using circumvention technology.
Even if the DRM-protected media is being used for purposes not protected by copyright (e.g., fair use), 1201 makes it illegal to crack to the DRM unless there's been a 1201 exemption.
To make this explicit: If rightsholders believe you are infringing on their copyright, they can sue you for copyright infringement no matter what. 1201 acts as another layer preventing fair use and other non-infringing works.
> That ruling cites the belief of the Entertainment Software Association and other industry lobby groups that "there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes."
I have an RPi which has over 10k games from my youth. I play those games, some arcade, some from early consoles when I want to play those games. Just like sometimes you want to listen to music from when you were a teen.
I also have many consoles and games which I will hook up to my TV when I want to play those games - SSX Tricky anyone?
I have a PC and a Steamdeck with almost 9k licenses to play games.
So what do the ESA want?
Kill off music older than x years?
KIll off games older than x years? (MAME would like a word there)
I just recently had a mini obsession with SSX Tricky after ~20 years away.
I got it running using PCX2 with a few graphical tweaks including upscaling and widescreen, running it over sunshine/moonlight so I could play it via an Android box on the TV. It looked and felt like a modern game. Great work by the community to keep it up to date like that.
I'm not sure if I could have gotten it working with the actual PS2 and disc, whether those devices are still working and whether the TV could accept RCA cables as input.
It’s funny because you never hear authors complaining that people might read classic literature for entertainment as if it was some kind of threat to their new book and that says a lot about the gaming industry.
Shame they care more about capturing my attention by any means necessary than they do about providing the world with a new fun game.
Good thing nothing like that could ever happen with the pharmaceutical industry, then I might have to go to Mexico to get OTC drugs…
The next step will be to bombard indie game developers making modern “retro” style games with patent infringement for the most trivial and basic game concepts, so that no one could ever hope to truly make a game.
25% of Swiss population are foreigners. It is 60% in Geneva where I live. Yes, non-citizens cannot vote (except in some municipal and cantonal referendums). But neither can they in the US.
Plus, all neighbors of Switzerland are NATO members, so they can neither attack each other, nor Switzerland. Moreover, Switzerland is recognized as a NATO "partner".
This allows them to handle internal matters with more concentration.
Heh, they even had the luxury to "close" their air force on weekends until very recently.
From the other end, Switzerland has roughly 30 times the pop of classical Athens which I guess was then the largest democracy. It's not super obvious their governance could not evolve to scale to U.S. size.
Does that size difference matter? I see the wisdom in having a Senate to give different geographical locations some independence and control. But maybe it is possible to have more direct democracy while also balancing that concern?
People worked to try and get an alteration made to the law; they “wrote to their congressmen” already. This was functionally the result of that process.
Then you need to politically organize and get the votes together to vote in people who will effect the desired changes to the law. Till that happens, tough. The law is the law.
An existing research exemption for copying materials has existed for many decades. Libraries have copiers.
That they ruled that this specific case is not covered by that exemption is unfortunate, and the argument is not the slam dunk you appear to think it is.
> The specific quote is that “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.”
> This explains why people like Jim Ryan hate retro games. They think these older games would cannibalize sales from newer releases.
I play retro games. Mostly on Retroarch.
I play those games because I genuinely think they are better and more enjoyable than the vast majority of crap released nowadays.
If they managed (they can't) to wrestle my retro game collection from me, they wouldn't get me to play whatever crap EA, Ubisoft or Blizzard puts out nowadays. They would just get me to stop playing videogames.
Indeed; I’m still enjoying games from 1994. They haven’t stopped being fun simply because they’re old. They also represent a significant learning effort over the years. One of the things that makes a game enjoyable is having learned how to play it well. I’m not likely to make that kind of investment in too many more games in my life. I haven’t got that kind of free time. So for me as well, it’s not old games versus new, it’s old games or nothing.
The learning effort thing is a solid point. I think what I play most these days is Super Mario World romhacks. Obviously the level design and whatnot aren't the same as the original, but the controls and physics are and I learned those as a fairly young child in the 90s.
The reason I don't like most other platformers almost definitely isn't because they're actually inferior, it's just because I'm "calibrated" to SMW
The amazing part is that my cartridges still work perfectly well in my original consoles, decades later. There's no server, no login, no account, no downloading, no ads, no microtransactions... I just turn the console on, grab the controller, and I'm in game in seconds.
I bought a Retro Gameboy for my kids this year specifically to avoid all that non-sense.
Turns out that Mario & Tetris & bomber man etc are just as fun to a kid now as they were in the 80's
How do you handle the NTSC video output? Or are your consoles new enough to output composite video or VGA?
Personally I use a Retrotink 5X, which handles every old console I own (NES, SNES, N64, GameCube) in visually lossless quality to my eyes. The built-in composite upscaler on a lot of modern televisions handles 240p as though it is 480i, leading to bad flicker. The Retrotink and other similar products upscales the signal properly, producing quite clean visuals.
Do TVs not have composite input anymore? I haven’t bought a new one in forever.
Composite - no. But an adapter costs less than a good beer in most countries on AliExpress (well, shipping excluded).
Most of the ones I've seen do, but via an rca to 3.5mm dongle. The main issue is that the scaler built into most modern TVs does a worse job than even a cheap external one.
framemeister, ossc and rgb mods
Check out Ufo50. Based on your comment I think you will thoroughly enjoy it.
It’s a fake compilation of 50 games made by an imagined video game studio from the 80s.
They take retro sensibilities and incorporate contemporary game mechanics.
It is an absolute joy.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1147860/UFO_50/
It's also from the makers of Spelunky - one of the tightest precision platformers out there.
This seems very similar to the GameCenter CX games, which is basically the "Nintendo World Championships" Switch game, but with made-up games, and it was for the DS.
I guess they would be okay with preservation if no one played retro games?
That was a rhetoric question, because I think they would only be happy if retro games became unavailable, so their profit grew a bit next quarter.
I don't even think retro games eat much of their profits, otherwise they would see it as a business opportunity, but their posture only makes sense if there's not much profit to be had in that niche.
Fair case for advocating piracy. I don't think the copyright office is doing its job in service for society. I wouldn't even call it piracy if you had a licence. It is just normal usage.
I hope that if they manage to wrestle your retro games from you that you would explore some indie games instead. There are many small companies that make high quality games, usually in the spirit of popular retro games.
I do play some of those
> The specific quote is that “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.”
Wow that’s the whole purpose of why they were storm in the first place!
That and a gaming pc costs like $2000 now and burns 500W.
> “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.”
Hahahahaha. Yes, in the enshittified capitalist utopia, GAMES aren't for having FUN! They're for addicting large swathes of people and milking them financially for years and years! Stop interfering with my right to rip you off! And for god's sake stop having fun!
That's the definition of a clown world.
mkwii is so much better than most modern games it’s criminal (literally in this case I guess, badum tss)
Since we're on the topic, were there any fun games released in last 12 months? I wanted to play Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, but never actually got to.
Are you interested in 2D indie games? Nine Sols and Animal Well have been getting a lot of buzz.
As for AAA, Shadow of the Erdtree is fantastic.
The context of the quote pretty significantly changes the meaning though. It's an argument for why the rules shouldn't be loosened for the preservation foundation.
> Still, the US copyright office has said no. "The Register concludes that proponents did not show that removing the single-user limitation for preserved computer programs or permitting off-premises access to video games are likely to be noninfringing," according to the final ruling. "She also notes the greater risk of market harm with removing the video game exemption’s premises limitation, given the market for legacy video games."
That quote (from the GamesRadar article) to me, makes it clear that the "[...] preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes" quote is being used as a gotcha. It's not that they don't want you to play old games, it's that they don't want copyright restrictions to be loosened. It's a very similar situation to the recent Internet Archive book. Current copyright law doesn't let you loan out format-shifted works. Copyright length is too long, but within the copyright framework, the restrictions seem sensible to me.
This is not surprising, and unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to get better any time soon given our increasingly conservative (corp friendly) federal courts. It's really a shame because these corps have shown they can't be trusted to properly archive their own games, and any change of ownership or economic fortune can mean they are lost forever.
From a personal level, I'll just keep doing what I've always done. Help archive the things I can. Support and buy games from smaller devs or publishers who care about their games. And if you want to play something from a shitty AAA dev, nothing is stopping you from playing it anyway for free and just giving the money to your favorite charity instead. Consumers can have a lot of power if they choose to exercise it.
> This is not surprising, and unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to get better any time soon given our increasingly conservative (corp friendly) federal courts.
It's not very often that the "Both Sides" argument is valid but in this case it is: Neither major US party differs significantly in their unwavering support for corporate power and laissez faire regulatory policy. They are also largely backed by the same large corporate sponsors and do not significantly differ on their use of super PAC funding and their support of unlimited political spending from corporations.
ESA game companies are worried consumers are having too much fun playing old games instead of buying new slop skinner boxes.
Yep. That’s the primary reason they don’t still sell their old games.
IMO the primary reason is the difficulty of supporting older titles across various modern systems, for a too small of an audience. If older games were so popular GOG would dominate the market by now.
They don't *need* to support shit, I would pay for the rom dumps if there was a way for me to do so. Same with music, I like buying music but relatively few artists let me give them money for flacs.
Also GOG does really well considering the tough competition.
Stand alone executable are very easy to support for ~20 years on the windows platform. It's only dos games that need to be packaged in VMs for modern platforms. Support only becomes a problem when there's invasive drm tied to a specific os or hardware platform or required online services that require ongoing maintenance.
There is absolutely no need for them to support any of this. They don't need to spend even one cent of their money on this stuff.
The world is literally filled with people who love these games so much they learned computer hardware and programming because of it. People who love these things to the point they'll reverse engineer the consoles and make emulators to make sure they are playable again long after the hardware has crumbled to dust. People who obsess about things like cycle accuracy and undocumented hardware behavior in order to make sure even the nonsensical bugs in the system are recreated because there were games out there relying on those things to do something awesome with limited resources. People who will reverse engineer the games themselves and make open source engines for the content. These people are beyond awesome, they literally do this because they enjoy it.
All these corporations have to do is get the hell out of these people's way, for they are doing god's work.
That's literally all they have to do. They just gotta shut up, stop whining about their "lost sales" and let these people do what they gotta do.
Yeah you’re probably right. Nevermind.
I think this is the correct thing to do as far as copyright law goes, but it seems to me that copyright terms are far too long to fulfill their original purpose: incentivize the distribution of creative works. Originally copyright was for relatively short terms (20 years IIRC). It is now life of the author + 70 years or 95 years from publication if the copyright holder is a corporation. Some organizations advocate for perpetual copyright terms as well.
Given the extremely long terms now available there is little incentive to quickly extract value from the copyrighted work. Patents exist for the same reason and have been similarly coopted by their holders.
Edit: if copyright terms were shorter publishers would be incentivized to keep their games in print and to update them for newer media/platforms.
There are so many ways that copyright duration could be adjusted to dramatically reduce the duration for out-of-print not-for-sale works while simultaneously allowing Disney to keep Mickey Mouse.
The fact that it's a single fixed duration that continues to be extended for just a minuscule fraction of works is ultimately the issue.
Why do we want disney to keep mickey though? Just make it a flat 10-15 years and never extend it.
Mickey Mouse is in the public domain now (the original one at least), but I agree with your argument.
I'm totally okay with Mickey Mouse being copyrighted again if we could find a system that allowed for abandoned works to be out of copyright. It would be a huge boon to human culture.
Honestly, I'd like to see something more along the lines of the copyright lasts the lifetime of the author unless it gets sold.
Once it gets sold it immediately starts a shot clock of exactly 20 years.
Though honestly anything would be better than what we have now.
Wouldn't that give an advantage to any copyright assigned to a company, or subsidiary thereof?
Or lead to lengthy licencing deals rather than outright sales?
The idea is solid, I suspect it just needs some tweaks to the language. "It's not a sale, it's a license", ironically reminds me of sovereign-citizen "I'm not driving, I'm travelling and don't need a license, Officer" BS.
This is the wrong strategy. Every year some or the other group begs the copyright office for some minor exception and most of them get denied. This is the wrong game. To win at this, you need to create your own market and succeed in it. And then you can buy your own politicans. Imagine if uber had asked the taxi board for exceptions for ride sharing. Or if Tesla had waited till states allowed them to sell (they didn't; they started selling on Indian land). Begging for morsels from the government doesn't work.
It's funny how they keep actively pushing normal people towards, rather than away from, piracy (or copyright infringement).
From a certain angle it could be seen that they're backing people into a corner from which the only escape is piracy, and once the convenience of that apple has been tasted, it's difficult to go back to the sub-standard service provision and heavy usage restrictions of the 'legitimate' world.
The quiet part out loud cliche is overused and not relevant in this case.
It was never quiet the industry wanted to preserve profits and they said it out loud multiple times.
(This was merged from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42259040 where that phrase was in the title)
I think it fits this case. It's an open secret that despite constant public statements from games publishers about their old IP still having value that it's actually a scheme to push consumers on the new content treadmill. Now we have someone confirming in court that it's exactly that.
Which is a terrible misuse of copyright that goes against even its most publisher-friendly interpretation.
Meta: I don't think the phrase is actually overused, I think it's used so much due to so many companies all discovering at once that they don't have to spend time crafting a plausible cover narrative, and that nothing will happen if they just say they're being shitty and there's nothing you can do about it.
Obviously there is something you can do about it though: casually ignore copyright law because the government is acting illegitimately, just like people do with drugs. If you're interested in, say, ROMs, it doesn't take much work to find a community (say, a subreddit) that's interested in that topic and will tell you where to find what you want. Or if you're too lazy for that, you can search for retro games on amazon and find consoles with 10s of thousands of them preloaded.
The quiet part that citizens can say out loud is that for individuals, copyright basically runs on the honor system. If you don't think the situation is fair, you can just ignore those restrictions.
Patent, trademark, copyright, etc are all supposed to benefit society as a whole. The point isn't that corporations get to lock things away forever. The goal is to incentivize innovation, both technological and cultural. The more companies make the argument that 'thing x from a long time ago is crucial to us now' the more I think that our current IP laws are actually slowing down innovation instead of incentivizing it. Maybe we need a new system that starts costing money after a point to maintain IP rights. That system would recognize the value taken by private companies holding on to old IP to the detriment of society and force them to come up with new things to justify their existence instead of living off of that one thing they did right 100 years ago.
(Repeating for n-th time:) I like the idea of exponential cost of IP protection.
First 10 or so years the protection is free. Then, on the first year of paid protection, you pay $10. On the second, $20. On the tenth, $10,240. On the sixteenth, $655,360. The year you miss a payment the protection ceases.
If your IP is immensely valuable and is bringing you gobs of money, you can continue paying and keep your monopoly. But the case of keeping reams of stuff under the lock "just in case" would be largely eliminated. Anything that's not a cash cow currently being milked and paid for would get released to the public domain.
On top of that, the federal budget would receive some extra money, but only from those who is making money, and not the small guy who just has published an indie game on Steam.
That sounds like a really good idea, one problem though: this doesn't benefit the lawmaking and law-exploiting classes, so why would it happen?
It's pretty clear that the legal system mostly exists to preserve big financial interests. I spent much of my adult life watching SCO play the system...
Voters need to make it clear that it does benefit the lawmaking class. Votes are more powerful than money in politics - but only if you use them. If you fall for one party is all good you have lost power.
The hard part is getting enough other voters to care. If it is just you money is more important. If it is you and many others though you beat money.
This clearly benefits wealthy owners of IP (disney, movie studios, game publishers, etc) over small-time artists (self-published authors, small bands, etc) since the period of time that IP protection remains an economic choice is strongly tied to the value of the IP.
E.g., if you write a book and realize $5,000 in sales per year, then 10 * 2^x=5000 where x is 8.97, so you only enjoy 8 years of revenues ($40,000) and you've paid Σ(1->8) 10 * 2^x = $5,100 for the privilege, for a net $34,900 or 6.98x the yearly royalty value.
If Dreamworks sees $500M a year in Minions merchandising, then 10 * 2^x=500,000,000 where x = 25.56 and so Dreamworks realizes 25 years of revenues ($12,500,000,000) and pays Σ(1->25) 10 * 2^x = $671,088,620 for the privilege, for a net $11,828,911,380 or 23.66x the yearly royalty value.
This is backward, in my opinion.
Big acts grossing colossal figures can continue that for a longer time. But the growth of the fee is exponential, while sales never grow exponentially for indefinite time. I can agree that the base of 2 may be too low; let's take 4 instead.
Let's assume that Dreamworks are so good that they get $500M a year for a particular IP. For 10 years they enjoy free coverage.
But even if on year 25 of coverage they would still have been making some money on the franchise, next year they go badly into the red.
The code:
Output: As we see, the optimum total revenue is achieved after 23 years of protection, and then it goes down fast, turning negative on year 26.And this is for a mega-popular franchise, that makes half a billion every year in a row for more than two decades. It's a very rare hit, comparable to Star Wars maybe, or the Mickey Mouse. Most IPs don't stay so staunchly popular for this long.
You can try playing with the parameters and check outcomes for different revenue shapes and fee bases.
It's not backward. It means that wealthy IP owners pay more tax to society for the privilege of earning more!
Small owners of IP get to enjoy less value from their creations due to weaker IP protections. That's backward.
Moreover the amount of tax paid as a fraction of total value realized is actually lower for the large owner of IP because the total tax payment is dominated by the final years, but the total revenue is determined by the number of years. In the example above, we had:
$5,100 / $40,000 = 12.75% tax for the small author, and
$671,088,620 / $12,500,000,000 = 5.37% tax for Dreamworks.
The ratios would be even worse if the small author could've just barely justified the 9th year. Pretty much unconscionable.
The fact that we're collecting tax from IP is not interesting. We have progressive income tax for this purpose.
I'd like to remind that IP protection does not solely exist to benefit authors. It exists to benefit the society as a whole. That is, not only the writers and actors, but also the readers and viewers. The original post, if you take a look, is about an obvious disbalance of the benefits the IP holders of old games receive vs the lost benefit of the society from preserving these games. Many games are works of art, on par with books an movies, a part of society's cultural heritage.
Unlike physical property, "intellectual property" requires quotes, and does not enjoy a constitutional protection, all for a good reason.
My proposal has a few benefits that, to my mind, outweigh the shortcomings.
* It is very simple. There's no room for any shenanigans, small print, etc.
* It is very uniform. It applies to every kind of IP (of the same class) equally. Again, no room or need for small print.
* It has a large enough free grace period, longer than the peak periods when most movies make the large box offices, most books have the first 2-3 successful reprints, most games have initial sales + DLC sales, etc. For most folks, nothing changes, because their revenues from a particular IP go to zero or near-zero by the end of the grace period.
* It's guaranteed to terminate the IP protection sooner or later, and most of the time, sooner. No demand curve stays exponential forever; the fee stays exponential as long as it takes.
* It does not depend on any accounting. No box office numbers to smear, no audience sizes to inflate. No matter how much you earn, you can pay for the protection as long as you care to afford it.
* It protects the most valuable / profitable IP preferentially. If something is really really huge, and people keep asking the authors to shut up, take their money, and produce moar, that thing can stay protected for longer. When most people stop caring enough, it becomes pointlessly costly to keep protecting it. This benefits the few that care though, the librarians and archivists of the world, and the new creators who now can build freely on top of the things that went to public domain.
So no, the small author just does not have to pay anything, small authors are just protected for 10 years for free, and may buy half a decade of protection cheaply if they care. But after that, they should admit that this particular cow is not worth milking forever.
So your argument is that something that takes in 500m in its useful lifetime shouldn't net the creator more than something that takes in only 100k in its useful lifetime? Yes, big content X that churns out mega movies that have more staying power than indy film y would make more money, but now instead of that mega company X holding onto everything for 10 lifetimes they are forced to releases it. If this is structured to kick in with normal lifespans accounted for then it shouldn't really hurt the indy side of things.
My argument is
1) that something that takes in 500m in its useful lifetime should not be subject to a lower tax rate than something that takes in only 100k in its useful lifetime (in fact it should be subject to a higher tax rate, in line with income tax policy);
2) something that takes in 500m should not automatically be entitled to a longer useful lifetime than something that takes in 100k.
Unfortunately both things are true for this proposal. #1 can be ameliorated by offering an income tax credit, but #2 is fundamental.
I honestly don't understand why #2 is bad. Can you please explain the logic and values behind your reasoning? No irony here, just a desire to learn.
It means big movie studios simply wait for small authors to give up and then release adaptations without royalty payments.
My only issue with this approach is that some people need a lot of time to start monetizing something they invent. Say I write something cool and it takes me 20 years to find someone to buy it. This punishes anyone that can't move quickly.
I like the current model of works becoming public domain after X years, but would prefer we shorten those timelines a bit given the speed of software.
OK, person A invented something, patented it, and sits on it for 20 years, unable to find an useful application.
Person B invents the same thing, and immediately sees a way to make it a big hit, with lots of demand. Should person A be blocking person B for 20 years? Why do you think person A should be entitled to that? What do you think would be more beneficial for the society?
Or just don't have IP at all. It's entirely a waste of resources. What, you won't work on a cure for cancer because you can't rent-seek discovery? No, of course not. The marginal profit is sufficient. The entire system is unnecessary and serves no public utility. It just facilitates a new form of rent on knowledge. It's as bad as the idea of privatizing land rents.
Patents were invented for a good reason. They prevent important inventions from dying as trade secrets, and being lost to the society.
A patent requires a clear explanation of an invention, in exchange for a limited time of monopoly on its use. After that, the invention enters public domain.
Before patents. important inventions would stay tightly guarded secrets, because once the invention leaks, there's no recourse, every competitor can freely use it, and put you out of business. Hence the inventions were lost forever (at best, need to be reinvented from scratch) if the original inventor went out of business somehow without sharing the secret.
Patents are a boon for everyone as long as the detrimental effects from the monopoly don't outweigh the beneficial effects of sharing knowledge and general ease of business operation without thick shrouds of secrecy. That is, as long as the time of protection is set right.
Whom would you side with?
People whose livelihoods and retirement depend on their copyright.
Or people who want to play old video-games for free.
Being able to play old video games for free is not the point though, it's just a nice side effect of an intellectual property regime with a reasonable duration, say something less than 150 years.
the people who want to play old videogames for free
Reminds me about how many times I've ended up buying the same game I already own, but on another platform because the original is on something I no longer have reasonable access to anymore. (I don't have a television with a RF modulator handy and getting a proper setup working takes more effort than I'm willing to put in at this age.)
Unfortunately, the other people have more lobbying power...
With the people that understand that reality isn’t as black and white as you make it out to be and that will hopefully find better compromises going forward.
Show me an actual person whose livelihood or retirement depends on their copyright (and not, say, owning somebody else's copyright). I'm not convinced that the current state of copyright law actually benefits authors and artists.
Nearly all fiction authors own the copyrights to their books. They have an agreement with publisher to publish it and they get the royalties. If that agreement ends, they can find a new publishers. The authors get an advance and if book is popular enough, they get royalties.
Any semi-famous author would do, no? Famous authors everyone's heard of are probably rich enough that they have other investments via money they earned from their copyrights, but arguably that's still a living derived from their owning of copyright. So let's start with hearing why, say, Stephen King, Charlie Stross, and J. K. Rowling aren't actual people who's living (sizable as it may be) doesn't depend on their copyright on the books they wrote, before we look for any lesser known authors. Taylor Swift makes a living off her music, which is dependent on copyright. Or have I missed something somewhere?
Taylor Swift makes a lot of her money from being Taylor Swift (i.e., tours), per https://www.investopedia.com/taylor-swift-earnings-7373918:
> The 12-time Grammy Award winner made more than $780 million on the U.S. leg of the Eras Tour, according to an estimate by Forbes. The total ticket sales from Swift's 2023 Eras Tour could make her the highest-grossing female touring artist of all time, according to Billboard. The Eras Tour could gross over $1 billion, making concert history as the first billion-dollar tour, according to The Wall Street Journal.
J.K. Rowling doesn't have exclusive rights to her books, past the first couple. Lots of copyright-related suits (most?) are made by Warner Bros. She's fully capable of mobilising her fanbase (or, was, at least, before she went off on the deep end) to prevent or restrict what she considers misuse of the Harry Potter brand. (And, as you say, she doesn't need the money.)
Copyright isn't why Toby Fox need never go hungry. His work is trivial to pirate, he doesn't even bother enforcing copyright on his music; and yet he's probably a millionaire, with more works on the way.
Okay so say I write a book. And I go to a publisher and show them the book I wrote.
What is the name of the law that prevents the publisher from kicking me out of the building, printing the book I wrote, and making money off it?
Nobody is suggesting throwing out all copyright protections.
But someone IS suggesting that people lose copyright protections over some of their works, and eventually all of them when they don't have 10 thousand dollars to pay to keep their rights per work after just 20 years.
In your analogy with this context, the publishing company can’t print the book for ten years after being approached by the author.
That would be copyright law. Is this a deliberate misinterpretation of my request, or do I need to make GP clearer?
Your request is that I find you someone who has benefited from a law that makes entire professions viable?
Does this help? https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/
Or do you want a list of movie directors? Perhaps of authors of assets in asset stores for game development? Comic artists?
Do you want a Spotify playlist?
There are no residuals for game devs. It's work for hire, so holding on to this idea that they will get paid money for every sale (even after it's no longer sold - but maybe somehow once these assholes "resurrect" a game they never bothered to bring back after 30 years, will somehow benefit the actual people who made it is a joke). This has nothing to do "their livelihood and retirement"It's about protecting corporate profits in the very slim case they may discover that bringing something back (ha sure) will benefit the corporation that OWNS the rights.
IP isn't the same across the board it's not like game devs are singers who have ASCAP/BMI etc protections. Game devs are code jockeys who get shit on by the corporations with NO rights to the actual work THEY produced. Why do you act like this is the same as music with perpetual rights to the actual creators? It rarely if ever is.
You can go ahead and "blame" the workers you claim to support for failing to "put that in their employment contract, it is a "free market" for labor, after all" or you can work on changing the system to at least let the past be free and open and history have a chance of being important or just let it all be locked in a vault, in disuse in the "hope" that maybe someday a corporation will "release" it again as a game. Or you can let people who ARE passionate about it work on it and let the public have the right to it.
As the parent comments point out, the LITERAL REASON OF COPYRIGHT IN THE US CONSTITUTION is to benefit the public. It has nothing to do with giant corps getting rich as fuck off other people's labor. Contract law gets in the way and lets these pricks steal the work and wealth, deny people the rights and only THEY get the benefit, this is the precise opposite of the public benefit intended.
Culture happens on faster and faster cycles than ever before, yet instead of admitting the speed of it, these behemoths who own IP, demand continual extensions (well until the most recent time when Disney finally relented and let Steamboat Willy enter the Public Domain recently).
Instead of promoting "innovation" (as phrased in the US Constitution), it promotes lethargy slouch and continued re-use of the same things. It's the exact opposite of the intent. And no, this bullshit about "livelihoods and retirement" mean jackshit in game dev. You shit your game out, you got paid for that work, and that's it. All the excess profits go to the corp, not the actual devs. IP in this case is not about humans owning/making, and it's corporations through and through, and unless you held onto the same corporation for 40 years, as the creator, it's not going to be you getting the supposed benefit of this.
Ip rights should just end after a relatively quick slice of time. You made your money off it, now it’s time to pass it on to the public. A payment model just ensures the only entities who can hold ip long term are corporations.
That's how it was originally but over time the terms have been extended (largely due to advocacy from organizations that own large catalogs of copyrighted material). It's now tied to the life of the creator rather than the time since creation or publication.
Yep. It needs to be restored or even shortened beyond the original window.
IIRC, early copyright (say, during Mozart's time) required royalties to only be paid out for the first performance of a work.
And that is why some of these composers were so prolific - to keep up their payday, they had to crank out music instead of collecting on royalties of performances they were directly involved with.
Unthinkable today, really.
This is the simple solution. 10 years seems fine to me, 20 years at a stretch.
The current regime is a clear case of regulatory capture.
So musicians should not be compensated when their old songs play on the radio? You made your money in 1974 now move along while my company exploits your work for free.
Nope, guess not
I see this sentiment frequently, but I think it is missing some of the crucial details:
- patents last for 20 years in the us
- trademarks do not have value to the rest of the world. Eg, the name “Kleenex” is (was?) a granted trademark, to help customers identify products from that specific company. “Kleenex” has somewhat become generic, but I don’t think this is really better or worse for humanity in general — it just removes some branding strength from Kleenex.
- copyright lasts life of author +70 years. This is problematic imo.
I think the concern about copyright is justified, but I think the others are honestly pretty decent. But of course different people will have different opinions.
The big problem is that none of these laws have been updated to deal with digital property. We simply get new interpretations based on the whims of random judges who may not even be familiar with how the technology works. Software patents are the perfect example of this. Digital piracy/lending is another. And let's not even get into AI/LLMs.
Patents last too long, given the current speed of technological advancement. 20 years ago, we looked at CRTs, we carried dinky Nokias, and data came on shiny disks. Giving somebody a monopoly on an idea for that amount of time is a huge impediment on the free market.
The other issue with patents is that the whole underlying idea is questionable. You're supposed to give people access to your idea in return for protection. But what is the value of that access? In a lot of areas, the value is zero, since reverse-engineering (or just looking at something) will give you all the information contained in the patent.
I suspect that most patents are giving companies a long-term monopoly on an idea, and providing absolutely no, or close to no value in return.
I think it's the other way around. Patents are hard work, often you make a physical product and you get a measly 20 years. Meanwhile, copyrighted material flows out of my ass and gets 70+ years. Ridiculous. Why bother making anything?
I think that you have not read many patents.
There have been patents that are the result of hard work, but there is a deluge of patents that contain only ideas that are so obvious that nobody was shameless enough to attempt to patent them before.
Moreover the majority of patents contain extraordinarily broad claims, which cover many things that the authors of the patent have never succeeded to make, but they include the claims in the patent with the hope that someone else will find a way to make those things and then they will reveal the patent and blackmail those who have actually made a real device.
In the old times, for a patent to be granted there was a condition to present a working prototype embodying the claims of the patent.
Unfortunately this condition has gone a long time ago, otherwise it would have filtered most ridiculous patent claims.
These sorts of patents do exist, but they are not made “correctly”. Patents are supposed to contain novel ideas that are not obvious to experienced practitioners in the field. I think I agree with your criticism, except I feel it is a criticism of the execution of the law/system, rather than the law itself.
The law itself is broken, at least when combined with trade secret law. When you look at the incentive structure, you see the no one would apply for a patent if they thought it was actually difficult for others to independently figure out or reverse engineer; it's better to simply keep it a secret, and anyone sharing it will be liable for civil action and criminal prosecution. If you believe that others will figure it out on their own anyway, then it makes sense to patent it to deny them the ability to do so. Pretty much the entirety of IP law is a farce.
The whole story about wanting to incentivize companies to share their secrets doesn't even make sense. If we want the body of public knowledge to grow, don't legally protect secrets. Make non-competes illegal and make NDAs have a short maximum time limit, and you won't need to do anything special for knowledge to proliferate. The nerds that actually make things tend to like talking about how it works.
The problem with patents is not the length, it is that they are being applied to a general ideas and not implementations of those ideas. You patent your mouse trap, not all mouse traps.
20 years is an eternity in terms of innovation. This has an extreme effect compared to the natural state (no IP restrictions). I argue that the effects of patents is actually poorly understood, and most arguments for how they work fail to explain how and why open source works, revealing serious flaws in the foundational theories of IP restrictions.
The sole function of a patent is to restrict innovation. That’s the only direct result of patents. All other claims about encouraging innovation rely on beliefs about secondary and tertiary effects which I believe are incomplete, out of date, and often simply incorrect.
Edit: Even the pure capitalists don’t like it: https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk
trademark is also supposed to protect against misleading copies of reputable goods.
it's hard to say how enforcing against counterfeiting would work without something that looked like trademark law.
> copyright lasts life of author +70 years. This is problematic imo.
Personally, I think copyright isn't so bad simply because of what it covers.
A patent can stop me making stainless steel razor blades. At all.
But copyright? I can write a story about a boy wizard going to wizard school and learning from a man with a long white beard and a robe with huge sleeves. The law just says I can't call him Harry Potter.
I think this is accidentally a bit misleading. You _could_ write a story similar to Harry Potter without infringing copyright, but it isn’t just the name “harry potter” or some other substring that’s protected. There is a degree of similarity after which you’d be guilty of copyright infringement. I don’t know how that criteria is decided though.
Assumption 1: Commercialization and incentivization(beyond what is already achievable in our market system) of the production of media goods are a good thing and we would be poorer culturally-wise.
Assumption 2: Without IP laws, people would not produce works(aside from credits and attribution). Engineers will stop engineering. Lawyers will stop writing opinions. Scientists won't write research papers.
Assumption 3: IP laws did work to incentivize production and technological advancement, and they are only or the primary means to do so. We just need to reign in the excess.
Assumption 4: People who created useful works for its own sake are not valuable(open source software/hardware, inventors inventing things and freely publishing information, etc). Patents and copyright laws should favors the people who use copyright and patents over them, and the profit motive should reign supreme.
Is this meant to be a rewording of the parent comment as a critique, or is it meant to be an expression of your views? I’d probably contest assumptions 3 and 4, but I’m not sure if you yourself even support them.
How about both? You are welcome to critique my opinion.
As for assumption 3, there's SpaceX. They don't open their design of their rockets to the public where their competitors, such as the Chinese can copy them. Neither the US government nor SpaceX wants that. So there's a large amount of innovations, probably countless designs that went into these rockets. Maybe in a better geopolitical situation, patents would be respected, but why would SpaceX gives everyone the blueprint to catch up? Patents make more sense if designs are easily reverse engineered and you still want a monopoly to make back your investment. That is clearly false as people have made innovation in 3D printing where new designs are standardized for the benefit of the whole market.
Assumption 4 is the defacto state of things even if it were not the intention. People who invent useful things for the sake of useful things are clearly at a disadvantage against corporations or entities who have more money to hire lawyers.
There's already at least one case of a trivial patent for 3D printing stronger layers that expired being repatented again by another company, increasing legal uncertainty from implementing the technique in slicers and other software. Most slicer these days are open source, generally don't make money for its developers(at least not directly), but they do grow the 3D printing market through its active development. The slicers also happen to share code, unsurprising given that they are forks of one another. Clearly, this model is incompatible with the patent system as it stands.
On the SpaceX example, they couldn't release their designs even if they wanted to. ITAR prohibits it.
If they weren't prohibited from sharing rocket technology SpaceX might share. Tesla patents are open. I don't see why Musk wouldn't do the same for SpaceX if the government allowed it.
I don't see Musk doing that as he directly stated it himself.
As for Tesla patents, I would speculate that it's more about companies not willing copy Tesla which is why Telsa doesn't really care if they open source the information. Copying isn't always so easy especially if there are structural issues involved. Recall the superchargers that became standard. Other companies were using a different connector, but the supercharger connector was obviously superior and they relented after many years.
Patents are more useful in situation in which your designs are easily reverse engineered and there's little barrier in copying. In any case, there are firms in the automative industry that specialized in doing the teardown of cars and doing cost estimation. Such a firm would tell their competitors how Tesla actually make their cars, so there's not much value in publishing their patents anyway, other than PR stunts.
Patents are not as useful in scenarios in which trade secrets provide a strong and durable barrier to entry. They also require lawsuits to enforce, which is rather costly and imposes cost on our economy, so there's inefficiency to consider as well. Theoretically, a monopoly in this instance would incentivize R&D effort but we know that monopolies has various nasty side effects and not everybody have money to hire lawyers and enforce them.
There's lots mixed up with IP laws. Are talking inventions (patents) or works of art (books, movies, music, games)
I certainly know that most games and movies wouldn't exist without a monetary incentive. They take too much work to make. There are exceptions. You can make pong in a few hours and you can shoot a movie of yourself talking. You can also do both as a hobby a few hours a night. But, most movies require sets, costumes, props, and lots of other equipment and labor. Most games also require many person years of work. It's unlikely people would put in that much work if they couldn't make a living from it as it allows them to do it full time so they actually have the time needed.
OTOH, music "can" take a few hours and so could be done more easily as a hobby so while not all forms of music would continue I suspect we'd still get tons of it with without monetary incentives.. Books, it depends on the type of book. People write blogs for free and compile them into a book.
I mostly agree that there are assumptions built into IP law that may not be true. Are there good examples of history where a society that didn't have some similar system out-innovated one that did? Are there good parallels today?
Highly recommend the book “Against Intellectual Monopoly” which argues against IP law with a lot of historical references.
One such example is paint & coloring in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the book - “In 1862, British firms controlled about 50 percent of the world market and French firms another 40 percent, with Swiss and German companies as marginal players. By 1873, German companies had 50 percent of the market, while French, Swiss, and British firms controlled between 13 percent and 17 percent each. In 1913, German firms had a market share of more than 80 percent, the Swiss had about 8 percent, and the rest of the world had disappeared.” Switzerland at the time had no patent protection, and Germany allowed processes to be patented in 1877 but not products themselves.
Parallels are harder to find today due to the expansion of IP law as a condition of trade with many developed nations, but the book does have some more recent examples.
How could we have gotten great works like Canterbury Tales or Beowulf without rent-seeking copyright protectionism?
I am not a die-hard supporter of IP protection laws, but your examples are classic survivorship bias, as well as falling victim to the broken windows fallacy.
It is not a given that we should incentivize the production of cultural good beyond of what is already achievable.
I should note that there is already strong intrinsic motivation to create and there are already too many works to read, watch, or listen, and a lot of slops created clearly to make money.
People are willing to accept deplorable working conditions to pursue their dreams, such as developing video games.
Since I do improv, most of the value I created are on the spot and ephemeral anyway and I basically perform for free anyway. I would stand to gain if people go out to theaters and other avenue as opposed to consuming content on netflix.
In a free market of ideas, copyright would have perished long ago.
As a teenager of the 90s I have, correctly or incorrectly, been indoctrinated with the notion that RIAA/MPAA have too much clout for their own good. Sweden (Pirate Bay) and New Zealand (Kim.Com) taught us that.
But it’s not just The US — the bulk of my record collection is still digitised as Ogg/Vorbis in protest of Fraunhofer’s hold on MP3 as a non-public format.
Was I brainwashed? Did the kids of yesteryear lose in the long run? Aside from nostalgia, it’s worth remembering the history of this battle to learn for the future.
I like that your solution to corporations locking things away forever is a new system that would immediately excludes individual citizens and ties the capability to remove a cultural good from the public to wealth.
The main problems with current copyright laws, I think, is the creators need to sell their right to one of a handful of powerful corporations to make money at all, then those corporations grip on their rights and monopolize it, even if it means something isn't available at all. A better idea would be author's rights that can't be sold, and licensing that can't be denied. That way there still is monetary incentives to create, but cultural goods remain available to the public.
Why do you think that? Can you point to some early philosopher of law that made such utilitarian arguments?
The actual text of the US constitution maybe?
Article I Section 8 Enumerated Powers Clause 8 Intellectual Property
Seems like the idea is to promote innovation by making sure it is for a limited time only seems pretty ingrained in the idea.If it says 'for a limited time', then wouldn't tying itmto the lifetime of the author be unconstitutional? Because strictly speaking it's impossible to predict whether an author's life will end.
Decided in Eldred v. Ashcroft. As long as Congress stipulates a non-infinite copyright term, it's constitutional. Given that the chance of a human being eventually ceasing to live has been 100% so far, it's legitimate to assume that life + n years is still a finite period of time.
It's in fact trivially easy to predict whether an author's life will end.
Watch: I predict an author's life will end. I give it very high odds indeed.
Corporations can hold copyright and can be undying.
If the author is a real person, it's life of the author plus. If it is a corporation it is a fixed amount of time.
"Progress of Science and useful Arts" isn't utilitarian in the sense "benefit society as a whole".
For Americans, the utilitarian argument is made in the Constitution:
_"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises [...] 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"_ [1]
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
Doesn't say anything about "benefit society as a whole".
https://www.copyright.gov/timeline/
Because that's the stated purpose of patents in the US constitution.
half of your sp500-based-retirement is munching off ancient standards patents in media/tech/health. the rest is split between selling you disposable devices and sugar water.
... so in a way it does benefit society. but it's the society that likes to steal from social security and then call it a scam.
the entirety of all roms and emulators are probably in the hands of those who actually want to play them, this only prevents research archives from being operated.
i find it interesting that OG retro games actually are considered threatening to modern AAA games.
Yep. The games are already being archived. It's kind of silly to strike down an official archival at this point, and only brings risk to consumers that seek out illegally distributed ROMs on malware-infested sites.
And shout out to Red Viper on the 3DS for letting me experience the Virtual Boy without needing to deal with a second hand market that gets more expensive as the years go by.
The web platform can help mitigate this risk - while native emulators might be malicious or attacked by malicious roms, emulators written to run on the web platform are practically safe.
Plus you get the bonus ability to run on iOS :)
Why would it be anything other than expected that the top 10 or so percent of the whole history of games would compete favorably against any other subset of games, like whatever happens to be releasing this week?
The problem is that the copyright period is too long, and it is not dependent on whether or not the copies are still being actively sold.
Gamers are once again let down by the shameless ignorance and dishonesty of games journalists:
> More importantly, this also ignores the fact that libraries already lend out digital versions of more traditional media like books and movies to everyday people for what can only be described as recreational purposes.
What this ignores is that libraries are not allowed to digitize in-copyright print books (or physical films) and then distribute these digital copies. This is what the Internet Archive got in trouble for. Emulating old games is not that different.
Maybe the laws should be changed. But pretending that there's one set of rules for books and then a higher scrutiny for games is utterly backwards. Game publishers want the protections afforded to books and movies; it is archivists and emulators who want a double standard because of the unique technical challenges around old games. I am sympathetic to this position[1]. But I am not sympathetic to what has felt like 20 years of smarmy, dishonest games journalism around copyright. Too many journalists are completely in the tank for emulation, and they intentionally mislead readers with useless articles like this. It drives me crazy.
[1] Although note the dishonest conflation of "games publishers" and "game copyright holders." Game journalists simply ignore that small indie devs also want copyright protection, focusing on Nintendo and Playstation for naked political reasons.
> Maybe the laws should be changed. But pretending that there's one set of rules for books and then a higher scrutiny for games is utterly backwards
Is it pretending? There actually were different rules in this area for rentals, though it didn't necessarily translate to digital transmission:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_of_America,_Inc._v._B....
> Soon after the settlement, the United States Congress passed the Computer Software Rentals Amendment Act prohibiting software rentals, excluding Nintendo cartridges from similar protections. Although Nintendo criticized the game rental business, they came to accept it, even working with Blockbuster to offer exclusive rental versions of their games. The first-sale doctrine was eventually subverted by end-user license agreements, which describe that the consumer is purchasing a singular, non-transferable license to the software, thus limiting the sale of used software.
Computer Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990
https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/senate-bill/198
> Excludes certain home video game software from the prohibition (including a computer program embodied in a machine or product which cannot be copied during the ordinary operation of such machine or product).
Libraries had a specific carve out as well over software in general "Authorizes nonprofit libraries to lend computer programs if a copyright warning has been affixed to the computer program packaging" which probably wouldn't apply to digital. But, it is wrong to say there weren't different rules for software vs books vs specifically game console software.
The DMCA had lots of flexibility for administrative law to make specific carve outs treating different media circumvention stuff differently for things like preservation:
> Lawmakers opted to create a rulemaking mechanism through the United States Copyright Office to review the state of copyrights and fair use to make limited classes of allowance for fair use which would be considered lawful means of using circumvention technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
Suddenly thousands of voices cried out as one. All retro gamers together said "oh, well anyway" and continued to pirate old games
1201 in general is a frustrating process.
Even if the DRM-protected media is being used for purposes not protected by copyright (e.g., fair use), 1201 makes it illegal to crack to the DRM unless there's been a 1201 exemption.
To make this explicit: If rightsholders believe you are infringing on their copyright, they can sue you for copyright infringement no matter what. 1201 acts as another layer preventing fair use and other non-infringing works.
Retro games are certainly fun for many. I hope that the ruling proves irrelevant to the sharing of these games.
> That ruling cites the belief of the Entertainment Software Association and other industry lobby groups that "there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes."
I have an RPi which has over 10k games from my youth. I play those games, some arcade, some from early consoles when I want to play those games. Just like sometimes you want to listen to music from when you were a teen.
I also have many consoles and games which I will hook up to my TV when I want to play those games - SSX Tricky anyone?
I have a PC and a Steamdeck with almost 9k licenses to play games.
So what do the ESA want?
Kill off music older than x years? KIll off games older than x years? (MAME would like a word there)
The ESA argument - as quoted above - is bullshit.
I just recently had a mini obsession with SSX Tricky after ~20 years away.
I got it running using PCX2 with a few graphical tweaks including upscaling and widescreen, running it over sunshine/moonlight so I could play it via an Android box on the TV. It looked and felt like a modern game. Great work by the community to keep it up to date like that.
I'm not sure if I could have gotten it working with the actual PS2 and disc, whether those devices are still working and whether the TV could accept RCA cables as input.
Did you buy all 10k of the games from your youth?
In installments of $.25
More to the point, everyone involved with the creation of the game is retired or dead.
But what about the publishing company?! Think of the publishing company!
/s in case.
Probably not, but are all 10k still available for sale? and if not, why not? And why should people be denied the ability to archive them?
Just a friendly reminder to everyone that a challenge of the DMCA has not reached the Supreme Court in over 25 years of its existence.
it would be fine if they had to provide those games and platforms at a reasonable price, unless they allow the libraries to do it.
It’s funny because you never hear authors complaining that people might read classic literature for entertainment as if it was some kind of threat to their new book and that says a lot about the gaming industry.
Shame they care more about capturing my attention by any means necessary than they do about providing the world with a new fun game.
Good thing nothing like that could ever happen with the pharmaceutical industry, then I might have to go to Mexico to get OTC drugs…
The next step will be to bombard indie game developers making modern “retro” style games with patent infringement for the most trivial and basic game concepts, so that no one could ever hope to truly make a game.
Sometimes it really does become apparent that politicians and their appointees don't represent citizens.
This is why we have direct democracy in Switzerland, and I wonder why it is not used anywhere else.
You also have a strict process of granting citizenship, and service requirements for citizens. Plus you are small.
25% of Swiss population are foreigners. It is 60% in Geneva where I live. Yes, non-citizens cannot vote (except in some municipal and cantonal referendums). But neither can they in the US.
Plus, all neighbors of Switzerland are NATO members, so they can neither attack each other, nor Switzerland. Moreover, Switzerland is recognized as a NATO "partner".
This allows them to handle internal matters with more concentration.
Heh, they even had the luxury to "close" their air force on weekends until very recently.
Well, we had the same system while surrounded by enemies during WW2. It still served us well.
And what, the United States are surrounded by superpowers willing to wage war? That is news to me.
Yeah the US is about 33 Switzerland's in population and probably double that in size.
From the other end, Switzerland has roughly 30 times the pop of classical Athens which I guess was then the largest democracy. It's not super obvious their governance could not evolve to scale to U.S. size.
Switzerland is about 16,000 sq miles.
That makes it bigger than Maryland, but smaller than West Virginia. It's about half the size of South Carolina.
You could fit Switzerland in Texas 16 times and still have enough room to squeeze in a Belgium.
Does that size difference matter? I see the wisdom in having a Senate to give different geographical locations some independence and control. But maybe it is possible to have more direct democracy while also balancing that concern?
more like 38x population and 233x area!
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What exactly about "exclusive right to copy or distribute" do these people not understand?
If you don't like the current state of copyright, write your Congressman.
I suppose that begs the question, what part of "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" do you and the US Copyright Office not understand?
People worked to try and get an alteration made to the law; they “wrote to their congressmen” already. This was functionally the result of that process.
As an aside, what game company do you work for?
Congress punted this issue to the librarian of congress like how they punt most issues these days.
what do I do when my congressman doesn't care, and I can't find q candidate to vote for who promises to change it?
it's not like we have a lot of agency in elections
Then you need to politically organize and get the votes together to vote in people who will effect the desired changes to the law. Till that happens, tough. The law is the law.
That's not what the 1201 process is about.
An existing research exemption for copying materials has existed for many decades. Libraries have copiers.
That they ruled that this specific case is not covered by that exemption is unfortunate, and the argument is not the slam dunk you appear to think it is.