80 replies
13h9m
Free content removed by previously benevolent publisher.
It's too bad they weren't able to make their free content into a profit stream.
The sad part here is that they were / are a steward to something beloved by many but through copyright they take it as hostage to the grave.
If they no longer find value in distributing it shouldn't they be obligated to waive their ownership?
Maybe copyright itself needs some reform if it grants control over the archaelogical / historical record of our civilization
I'm reminded of how trademarks work: If you don't bother to defend them, then you lose them. Maybe copyright should be the same way: If you're not distributing copies any longer, you lose the copyright protection.
I'm pretty open to doing something like this broadly, but I think this is especially important for software.
Things like video games are much harder to archive than text. Keeping them running 70 years after the death of the author is already a herculean task. Doing that, when no copies are being distributed could make that entirely impossible.
The current copyright system is going to rob the public domain of many of the cultural treasures that we are entitled to.
What makes you think you’re entitled to other people’s work?
It’s copyright. Not authorright.
The exclusive ability to copy is granted as a conceit.
The restriction only came about because publishers got mad.
It came about because archives wanted a de jure monopoly on top of their de facto monopoly.
US copyright law took a very different path though.
Sounds like Author's Rights to me.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I do think there's something like a "right to ideas". Like you can't tell someone to just forget about something, things people experience become a part of them and I think it's reasonable to expect they should be able to share that with others.
I mean, after life + 70 years you already are entitled to other people's work. And a purpose of patents was to get people to release ideas so culture as a whole can grow from them, rather than just keeping them as trade secrets or whatever.
I absolutely think people should be able to receive some money for it, maybe even for life + 70 years, and people can always not release things, but I think once it's released it's not just yours any more, as it lives in the public conscious.
Remember that guy who had made a giant website with the word counts of a whole ton of books and authors lost their collective minds over it? I think a lot of writers sincerely believe he needed their "permission" to count the words in their books.
That’s the basic premise of copyright laws.
It’s a trade. The default state of affairs is no copyright protection.
Society has decided to trade a limited duration monopoly on the copyright of the work, in order to promote more works being created so that we have more works in the public domain.
The entire purpose of copyright is to generate works for the public domain.
So, when the current copyright system fails to do that, we should change that.
You can’t seriously tell me that if we had a law that said: if you don’t make a video game available commercially for 30 years, it enters the public domain, that would have a meaningful impact on the number of video games created.
> The entire purpose of copyright is to generate works for the public domain.
Is it? Or do we just think on average, producing more copyrighted works adds to the greatness and happiness of our society?
The writing of Harry Potter has brought joy to hundreds of millions of people. The production of a renowned textbook like SICP helps educate an entire generation of professionals and raise the nation's productivity.
Because they published it; they were free not to do so if they didn't want anybody to reproduce or distribute it (in fact that seems like the easiest way to do so).
In order to encourage more people to make these works, however, our government grants them a temporary, limited monopoly on the work's reproduction and distribution, but this is a means to an end that we agree to for utilitarian reasons, not some kind of actual inherent right on their part or responsibility on mine.
Copyright protects works at the moment they are created, not when they are reproduced or distributed. Most of the works under copyright protection have never been distributed.
The same thing that makes people entitled to society expending resources on the very real, physical legal protection of intangible ideas that they 'own'.
Creative works aren't made in a vacuum, all creators take from the public domain. They have an obligation to give back to it.
Copyright and patent terms were designed to facilitate that. The endless extensions of the former were a cynical, self-serving attack on a public good.
I fail to see how anybody could profit from not having their work used at all.
What make you think the authors of these works (the workers, not the owners) would oppose this proposal?
Once it becomes a cultural artifact it becomes more than just "someone's work". The goal of legislation is / should be to figure out how to balance the different and competing needs into a system that works reasonably well.
Why can't the videos be downloaded and uploaded to the Internet Archive? There's a lot of copyrighted videos there already.
While this is a great idea, it's generally illegal for IA to share that content. And it's looking increasingly unlikely IA will be in existence 90 years from now, so it's unclear there'd be a point in them simply archiving it. If copyright were 14 years, if give IA a lot more of a chance of still being around then.
And apparently the videos are no longer available to download, so it's not an option, anyway.
Barring some change of heart by the copyright holder, these episodes are gone forever.
I think down below, they are saying the episodes aren't gone, just paywalled behind Paramount+ now.
third paragraph of the linked article
Iiuc only some of them are now on Paramount Plus.
It all boils down to excessive copyright durations. For something like software, even 10 years is excessive.
The copyright terms are set by lobbyist and corporations in a political process where the public interest has no representation.
StarCraft 2 is still competitive 14 years later. I’m not sure I’d personally have an issue with it becoming public domain but the game is still well-stewarded today.
Even Brood War is still satisfactorily supported 26 years after its release. Though I think that’s definitely long enough to consider the option of public domain.
Is it the same StarCraft2 as 10 years ago, or regularly updated?
If we allow the copyright for the whole work to be extended indefinitely through subsequent updates, that kind of defeats the original idea.
Does it? For single player games you can just still use and distribute the original, unpatched version.
I agree that there is lock-in with online multiplayer games, but it's more on the game servers than the distributed content. So it's only marginally a copyright issue.
I think the person above you meant “If the copyright clock for the original release keeps getting reset every time an update drops…” and you’re talking about “If each updated version gets its own copyright clock upon release”.
Copyright (and patent) law generally follows the latter in western nations, but there’s nuance because third-party derivative works can easily contain elements which the original IP owners might feel are “derivatives” of newer innovations from subsequent updates, even if the third-party feels they only based their work on the original release.
There’s often a lot of room for reasonable minds to disagree, and it can be difficult to create quality third-party derivatives which avoid any similarities to newer versions of the IP.
Think of creating a modern representation of Mickey Mouse. If you create a new version of Mickey Mouse based on the 1928 version in Steamboat Willy, it is difficult to make something that looks relatively contemporary without creating something that looks arguably derivative of the 1953 work “The Simple Things” or the 1940 work “Fantasia”. You could play it safe by using something that looks like a carbon copy of Steamboat Willy, but if your personal artistic vision involves a more contemporary art style, it is understandably difficult to make it unambiguously not a derivative of more recent depictions that are still under copyright.
For the Starcraft 2 example - in a thought experiment where the 14 year old “Wings of Liberty” version is now public domain but the 11-year old “Heart of the Swarm” expansion pack and current 9-year old “Legacy of the Void” version of StarCraft 2 are both still under copyright. You want to make a new single-player campaign which takes place after LotV and doesn’t retcon any canon events (many of which are still copyrighted). A careful creator would probably understand they couldn’t make any references to Amon being reborn and defeated by Artanis, because that plot is from the still-copyrighted Legacy of the Void. But would you be able to write a storyline that contains any acknowledgements that Zeratul died? (Zeratul died at the hand of his friend, Artanis, due to some of Amon’s mind-control machinations during that same LotV campaign)
I think a creator would have to be careful precisely how their storyline acknowledges Zeratuls death. If its just a few characters generically lamenting the loss of a great/controversial man…probably fine? What if the loss of their friend Zeratul was specified to have occurred “in battle” with no other specifics about the battle? I have no clue. If your storyline includes a tiny quip about Artanis dealing with unspecified guilt/shame over Zeratul’s unspecified death … then that might be technically infringing until LotV falls out of copyright, because some people may feel that it’s specific enough to be definitely derived from the LotV campaign.
Note that all three of these similar examples are where a creator does in fact intend to create a derivation of copyrighted materials to create a sequel campaign to the uncopyrighted work which is still “in-canon” with respect to still-copyrighted works. Its just exploring where is the line of “how much derivation can you morally and/or ethically and/or legally get away with before at least one reasonable person genuinely feels you have elements that are unambiguously derived from still-copyrighted content?”
For “legally” getting away with something you have to consider the costs of successfully defending yourself against lawsuits from notoriously overly-litigious corporations like Disney/Nintendo/Blizzard. Are you so safe that you could get a summary dismissal or is there any reason it could qualify for awards of punitive damages under Anti-SLAPP laws?
You make good arguments about derivative works on public domain works, where some other derivative works are still in copyright. That's probably difficult to maneuver legally.
However if the goal is to just distribute the original public domain work legally, then that's easy and convenient. That alone would be hugely beneficial for games.
I thought they stopped updating, but I see they are still shopping patches as recently as this March. Maybe they just stopped producing new content.
The patches are for the Ranked multiplayer - the balance patches are literally to nerf dominating pro-players who found meta-breaking strategies. They're not designed to serve their core userbase and end make the game less interesting and more frustrating for anyone other than the top 64 Worldwide bracket.
The recent resurge of interest and player activity based on a wildly unbalanced and broken but fun 'Broodwar Units in SC2' mod is testament to this [1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1cqw7hv/sc1_vs_s...
It’s had 2 subsequent major changes with massive differences in units, game balance, and pacing … to the point of almost being three different games. The most recent and current era is called “Legacy of the Void” and is about 9 years old. Since then changes have been fairly conservative, mainly just unit stats changes. Though some “units” like infested terrans have been removed in the past nine years, which could be considered semi-major/semi-minor.
It gets regular balance updates. They've slowed quite a bit, but there was one in the last few months, and I believe the one before that was like 2 years or so. There's also the matchmaking, which is a service they provide.
The issue here isn't so much, "Are Blizzard allowed to charge for SC2?", but "What would happen if Blizzard pulled the plug on SC2 servers?" It would very much be a shame if a game like that were suddenly ripped out of the culture.
The question is if that stewardship would be ruined by making it free to play the offline, single player version. More generally, would Starcraft2 and similar titles still would have been made if Blizzard knew it only had 10 years to recoup the costs?
The copyright lobby frames that question in a profoundly toxic way: are there any marginal profits that can still be milked for our IP portfolio? Of course there are, you can milk pennies even from "Steamboat Willie" and Chaplin movies, but that doesn't mean we should have perpetual copyright.
What matters is the first few years where 90% of the profits are made, that's what motivates the creator; motivating the creator enough to create and "promoting the useful arts" are the purpose of copyright, there is no "natural" right to one's ideas and creation. It's a social and political compromise for the good of all.
FWIW starcraft 2 is free to play, just not “offline”. And only one single player campaign is free, the other 2.5 costs money. Continuing revenue is primarily generated via cosmetic sales.
Would Blizzard have made Starcraft 2 at all if they had predicted the paradigm-shift towards microtransactions and cosmetics, with the 'game' itself as a loss-leader? This basically forced their hand to make the game free-to-play 7 years into the initial release cycle.
Indeed, Blizzard developer Jason Hall previously revealed that a single cosmetic skin for your horse in WoW made more money than the entirety of sales from Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.
The only reason that Starcraft2 is alive at all is the late-cycle introduction of a co-op mode, with microtransaction gated cosmetics, 'commanders', and commentator voicepacks. The online is all but dead, with almost no moderation and stewardship, and plagued by maphackers at all tiers. Even something as basic as the EU MMR brackets for tier ranking are completely broken for nearly a year.
Brood War is still supported for 2 Reasons
#1 - It was LAN first, offline, distributed as Shareware. The forgiving netcode and leniency of distribution ended up with it as a standard install on any Internet Cafe on the planet in the early 00s. It also hit Korean culture at exactly the right moment for it to go so popular as to become a cultural touchpoint. There's a Malcolm Gladwell book in there somewhere - it literally became South Korea's unofficial national sport [1]
[1]https://www.wsj.com/video/starcraft-south-korea-unofficial-n...
#2 - It was subject to a high-profile remaster as part of Blizzard's "Classic Games division", who also did rushed and careless remasters of Diablo 3 and Warcraft 3. The post-release monetization here is quite telling, as it was basically all aimed at the Korean market - popular South Korean StarCraft casters and Children's TV hosts providing the available announcer packs, with the main cosmetic being a chibi-'cartoonised' version of the standard asset pack.
Most software you can buy is older than ten years. Do you want to lose copyright to every part of your product that has been stable? Imagine the useless churn as every company needs to make sure every library they use is substantially altered every couple of years to renew the copyright.
Public domain does not mean public. The source code could remain a trade secret.
More of an obstacle is competition from free past versions - a lot of people would be happy with a 10 year old version of Photoshop or MS Office. That's why I think it should be extendable to 20 years with a hefty fee (but not further, or only with a much heftier fee).
If you do not publish source code, your binaries should be ineligible for copyright protection. There is very little creative work in the binaries themselves. Keeping your actual creative work hidden (especially from things like eventually being part of the public domain) but yet still expecting to receive the privilege of copyright is inequitable. Same thing with only publishing under digital restrictions management.
Then those who wish profit without sharing will just offer SaaS instead of binaries. Exactly as they do with a significant amount of copyleft-licensed software today.
Pulling back copyright doesn't necessarily force people to share -- people can also keep secrets. A primary purpose of IP law is to encourage sharing.
Yes. People will use the official version for support and updates, like with everything else.
Let’s say I make a painting and put it in the drawer, never to be seen again. Do I lose the copyright then and someone is permitted to come to my home and take it away? That’s just one example of possible implications. My point being, trademark is directly tied to the dynamics of the free market, while copyright only indirectly. And copyright is not forever.
No, because thats theft. Its more like if someone took a picture of it and reproduced it for sale. In that case you would likely lose a copyright claim in practice, even if you may have a valid claim in theory.
IIRC a part of copyright "activating" is publishing the content in the first place, so I don't think GP would have a good case to begin with, not that it matters.
Copyright does not require public publishing of the content — just "fixed in a tangible medium of expression". This would have been accomplished when the painting was created on paper.
This is exactly what I meant. That’s why I said it just one of the implications, out of many.
Ah sorry, I didn't realize your comment was in response to some hypothetical new copyright system proposed upthread.
This is essentially what I was referring to in the second sentence. Even under the current system you might theoretically have a claim, in practice you'd have a hell of a time proving it, so it wouldn't tangibly change the outcomes like OP is suggesting.
Then you own that physical painting.
Yes
No, but if you gave your friend Bob a copy of the painting, he's allowed to copy that copy as much as he wants once you lose the copyright.
The original copyright system-- you could only get the full term by extending 14 years in. That's maybe a little early. But making you pay a fee to keep the exclusivity and/or show recent use in trade makes sense.
Wouldn't this require Bob to outlive the artist by many, many years? My understanding was that copyright extends well past the death of the original creator.
EDIT: I'm curious why this is downvoted. Am I incorrect about the length of copyright being decades past the death of the creator? A quick google shows that it extends to 70 years past the life of the creator, [1] which means that it would be quite unlikely that an adult who receives artwork from the creator would live to see the time when it's not under copyright. That is, even if the artist died the next day, it would be 70 years before the copyright expires.
1: https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...
I can't downvote you, but I presume that you're being downvoted because your comment seemed to not understand the context of the thread.
A. Someone proposed making copyright "use it or lose it"
B. Someone else said this could have unintended consequences, like people breaking into your house to take a copy of a work where copyright has lapsed.
C. I pointed out that's not how copyright works: it has nothing to do with control of physical artifacts.
D. You then presumed that the copyright runs for a long time, which contradicts the premise we're talking about in "A", and is completely out of left field. (In any case, it's irrelevant to the question in B-C; if I have the one of the only extant copies of something from a century ago, you still can't come take it to make a copy).
Gotcha, thanks. This appeared so deep down in the thread when I commented that I didn't realize it was attached to an alternate-universe hypo above.
I used to make this argument until I came to know of law (at least in USA) that if you don't use your house and someone else starts using your house then they can claim the legal ownership of your entire house in as little as 10 years! It was very shocking and complete antithesis of property rights in US that are so dearly held. When you think about this, in long run, it might sometimes make sense that future generation can use what previous generation has built.
In Europe it was common to have disputes between parties with competing several hundred year old claims. Adverse possession prevents this.
many countries have variants of this, for many years/since olden times. In my country, it is called 'hævd'. Instinctively, it makes incredibly much sense to me, even more so than property law. The way I view it, it is precisely the foundation that ownership sort of rests on. (ie, i respect 'we have been using this for a long time' more than 'our ancestors whipped everyone in the village').
If you paint something, show to a few people, then decide to put it in the drawer, nobody cares. However, if you displayed that painting in galleries for the past 20 years, became semi-famous for it, and then decide to destroy your work, I'd say the public has a stake and a right to say "no", to at least make and preserve some copies. On top it being an asshole move to destroy well-known work, even if you have the right to do it.
It effectively is if you destroy the work before your copyright on it expires.
Copyright laws don’t care that nobody cares. This is a misconception of the concept.
This discussion is obviously about what the law should be rather than what it is.
The copyright cartel would fight that with their lives. They would rather destroy content forever than let it out for free, even if neither option costs them a cent.
“The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.“
For those of us not reading widely enough and/or not being raised in the American literary tradition, the quote is from John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" [1]. I have long been aware of the work, but reading this quote makes me regret not having read it yet.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath
There was a (massive) excess of food during the depression, so that is likely made up.
That particular passage, perhaps; however one can certainly believe growers destroying an abundance to control prices. It certainly doesn't sound like the purported overabundance of food was evenly distributed:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/feb/02/johnsteinbeck....
That piece was written literally by the same person.
Farmers were going bankrupt because there was so much food that they couldn't sell. It was the time when people developed the habit of eating meat daily, as people were buying out the food, and fed it to animals. There wasn't at any point a famine.
It's a tall tale.
And the originally-quoted passage is about farmers destroying crops as part of price controls due to overproduction.
Could you provide any kind of evidence that the supply of food was evenly shared? Steinbeck spent a lot of time with impoverished farm workers before writing the Grapes of Wrath, so I'm inclined to believe his description of them.
So, farmers destroyed their crops and starved. Is that how you understand it?
I'm not obligated to find a proof against fiction, when all real accounts show food prices almost halving in a decade, in fact I would be willing to speculate that the dust storms that came were in fact caused by the abandonment and large areas being left unsown, with no cover to hold the soil together.
Interesting, given that I remember from history lessons that it was more-less exactly as quoted.
Curiously, this also happens today. Grocery stores dump a lot of perfectly good food and other goods, and some of them figure that it can't be that someone dumpster-dives instead of buying, therefore they instruct employees to make the trash unusable. Example I've seen first-hand was when throwing away a perfectly good box of laundry detergent, they would open it and spill it into a container of perfectly good fruits and veggies, to make both unusable.
I'm not a freegan, but I knew a few at some point, and the stories I heard even in my local area, makes the quote feel 100% believable.
Oh boy, this book was very popular in the USSR, depicting a complete failure of a capitalist society.
The irony is that the soviet socialist society failed way, way harder and that average soviet family was far more impoverished than the evicted farmers from the book: those gringos had a car!
But copyright isn't just for publicly distributed mass media made by corporations -- it is for all works made by anyone.
Copyright also protects work that people wish to keep private, or work that people want to share at some times, with some people, but not all people.
(Also depending on how that idea might be implemented, it could cause some strange situations for copyleft software)
So limit the changes to works the copyright owner intentionally distributed to more than $threshold people. Have it only apply to situations where the number is tracked already, e.g. due to commercial obligations. Or something. This does not seem like an insurmountable problem.
Then you're bringing into the question why the rights that someone gets is different depending on how people exercise them. What's the right threshold? What does it mean to intentionally distribute? Are we going to have protracted court battles over what tracking numbers are accurate or valid? Could those who want to abuse this (big business) simply work around it by making it infeasible to directly measure?
And also, the copyleft complication too: If Bob writes a FOSS app with a GPL license, and it becomes popular, but then Bob retires and stops distributing it, does the copyright expire?
I don't think the problem being discussed here is insurmountable to solve, I just think the proposed solution opens a whole new can of worms. I think a good start at a solution is to first shorten the duration of copyright.
So if someone makes a painting, or a sculpture, she would have to create and distribute copies or risk losing protection?
I could see how this might make sense for things that can be perfectly copied, but not so much for anything that is even slightly 3D.
Lookalike sculptures and paintings are not copyright able.
So then make the rule just for cheaply copiable media. Copyright already has lots of specific rights that only appear to certain forms of media, e.g. the right to broadcast exists for movies, but not for statues.
A better fix would be to make copyright last 5 years from the date of publication. I'm betting that for the vast majority of copyrighted content the vast majority of the money is made in the first five years.
Copyright is a tax on society. It's not an inalienable right. We keep it for the noble purpose of encouraging authors to create. We don't want them to rest on their laurels. So why are we locking up all of our content for life plus 70? It sounds like a prison sentence.
The model where copyright has a short automatic duration plus increasing costs to renew every n years is better.
I don't know about that. Regarding "free", it was always under copyright and distributed restrictively (DRM, ads, and geo-blocking). And no comment necessary for "benevolent".
Free as in beer, not free as in speech
The amount of shared cultural history which has been preserved thanks to piracy is frankly astonishing.
Or we just reduce the length of copyright.
Back when Walt Disney started, copyright was 28 years. That was good enough for him to get started producing a media empire. The Berne Convention requires 50 years-why not just go back to that standard instead of the 95 years today?
95 years for works for hire; 70 years + life of the author if they make it themselves.
There are very few pieces of work that their authors are still getting benefit from, but could be lost to history. Documentaries have to be censored to remove elements now that require licensing of materials.
Walt Disney got his start remaking old works (public domain) into new ones. How many Walt Disney's are we preventing from letting them make better use of Mickey Mouse? We will find that out soon when the trademark Disney has been trying to impose gets challenged.
This has the nice benefit of encouraging companies to make good use of their works as much as possible in the limited time instead of holding out to get a better deal.
perhaps they want to get their material out of the training set feed trough of all the Sora-style models consuming anything and everything not nailed down with an as-yet non-existant source watermarking scheme that can pass through the most tormented AI digestive tract.