Shouldn't we want anyone to make all-new Need For Speed or Final Fantasy games? Isn't more creativity literally supposed to be the point of copyright? Is Square harmed if someone makes their own story in the FF6 setting 32 years later (and even if they were, why should we care)? Or even if some random person wants to maintain an old piece of software that they didn't originally write: good!

▲

mrandish 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Isn't more creativity literally supposed to be the point of copyright?

Yes. The original idea of copyright was to encourage more original creation AND later modification by granting exclusivity for a limited time in exchange for making it non-exclusive forever after.

The Copyright Act of 1790 set the duration at 14 years, with a 14 year extension if the author was still living after the first 14. It's been extended 4 times and is now 70 years after the death of the author or 95 years after publication / 120 years after creation. I agree it's now a cruel mockery of the original intent.

I have no hope this is fixable in any major way because it's now a fully bi-partisan issue. For decades now, RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobbyists have demonstrated absolute, long-term control of both major party's IP-related votes (despite what any politician claims while campaigning). There are only a handful of politicians for whom this is a hill they're willing to shed political capital on. And, in an honest moment, they'll admit the congressional process is stage managed such that regardless which party is in power at the moment (or even a super-majority), meaningfully restricting copyright closer to its original intent will always lose by at least one vote as long as the two-party duopoly controls the U.S government.

Given that sad, disgusting reality, my post was trying to suggest a way to claw back the smallest, most limited win for non-commercial retro preservation that might: A.) Have the slightest chance of actually happening, and B.) Actually be the slightest bit better than the shit sandwich we have now. The ironic part of making any constructive suggestion to improve things even 1%, isn't that even THAT will almost certainly be killed by the RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobby anyway, it's that those who agree with me will bury it under objections it doesn't do enough (or doesn't abolish all IP rights).

▲

userbinator a day ago | parent | next [-]

For decades now, RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobbyists

They now have an opposition which might have the $$$ and will to fight against copyright: AI lobbyists. The world's richest man owns an AI company. As AI makes people realise just how much everything is a derivative work, and remixes of this nature become easier, I suspect the whole concept of IP is going to change dramatically and more people will question its necessity.

or doesn't abolish all IP rights

While that might not happen fully, AI might be the catalyst driving things in that direction.

▲

WhrRTheBaboons a day ago | parent [-]

american ai companies are hypocrites on that front. they want copyright to not exist when it's them using copyrighted material, but afterwards they fight tooth and nail to enforce their own.

otherwise there is no moat and all that fortune that you envision them spending on anti-IP lobbying would not exist in the first place.

	▲	mrandish 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yep. Now that they've bootstrapped their businesses on 'Free IP', they're happy to pull up the ladder to stop new competition from having the same advantage. While they don't like paying IP lawsuit settlements of a few billion here and there, AI leaders can raise gobs of capital now and the silver-lining is those settlements are setting a high barrier to entry.

▲

ndriscoll 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's why we should simply normalize breaking the law. The war on use of our own cultural history is the same as the war on drugs: indefensible. Our predecessors have decided to make our government into a mockery of what it was supposed to be. So give their laws the respect they deserve: none.

▲

mrandish 2 days ago | parent [-]

> That's why we should simply normalize breaking the law.

Sure, and that's what anyone into retro gaming or preservation has to do. The problem is that "law" is a legal monopoly on the use of force. So far, the retro preservation community has managed to preserve most of electronic gaming and computing's history up through around ~2010. But only because the technology didn't yet exist to make most 'legacy' digital IPs worth exploiting. There are signs the tacit truce that's existed between retro preservation and rights holders is crumbling.

Interest in retro is booming and Nintendo, EA, Sony and others are increasingly releasing new 'remasters' of retro IP. The same AI tech making decomps/recomps faster and easier for enthusiasts is also shifting the economics of retro monetization for IP rights holders. We can no longer rely on them "looking the other way" and tacitly allowing retro preservation. Rapacious media corporations are determined to squeeze every dollar from the expanded IP rights they paid a lot of political donations to purchase (California senator Nancy Pelosi is retiring a multi-hundred-millionaire). The DMCA and other provisions they bought into law are incredibly expansive. In the past, they had little reason to use them against retro gaming. Now they do.

	▲	cowlevel a day ago \| parent [-]
		Sharing tiny ROM files is one of the easiest illegal things to not be caught doing. So is emulator development. If the Switch emulator people had put their git forge on Tor, it'd still be up.

▲

miki123211 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I think this basically happened because the cost of creation (of what people want to consume, regardless of how you feel about it) went up significantly.

When copyright was invented, it was mostly applied to books (not even book series / franchises), which don't cost that much to write, even if you take printing into account, and are usually written by a single author or a small team.

Nowadays, copyright is applied to huge cinematic and video game universes, which cost hundreds of billions of dollars to make, and don't have a single "author" behind them. It's a very different law for a very different reality.

When Moby Dick was written, Moby Dick was all it was. Nowadays, every new movie in a given universe is intended to bring profits on its own, but, by making that universe more popular, it increases future profits for other things in the franchise too. This is all reflected in the accounting, and requires copyright to be much longer than it once was.

▲

johnnyanmac a day ago | parent | prev [-]

>Shouldn't we want anyone to make all-new Need For Speed or Final Fantasy games?

We are currently seeing a microcosm of this in the indie space as we speak. I think the answer is a resounding "no". Not unless you can out-advertise all the fake or slop copies out there. The issue is less about the idea of building a moat and more about how it's clear that 99.999% of efforts will be anything but that.

>Or even if some random person wants to maintain an old piece of software that they didn't originally write: good!

Sure. That's pretty much done regardless of publisher intent. Modding is too much of a cat and mouse game to really bother with financially, and online games avoid it by owning the server to operate on.