cross-posted from: https://radiation.party/post/41704
[ comments | sourced from HackerNews ]
This is why I say, with not a single drop of irony, that piracy is a public service.
Copyright laws desperately need to be updated to account for scenarios like these. Although, to many people piracy is undesirable, I take no issue with anyone using this method to acquire content that is otherwise unavailable.
Yep. A lot of streaming services recently have been taking shows and films off the service and burry them as a tax write off. In my world if they write it off they should have to put it in public domain. If they can still sue people who copy it then it obviously has value to the rights owner still.
The regulatory and legal system is mostly reactionary. Eventually someone will be sued or sue one of the services about it and it will be settled and become precedent. Which way is hard to say, but I can definitely see your argument being persuasive.
The problem is essentially how do you define ownership? Is there a right to not make something the copyright holder owns publicly available?
I think in the cases of abandonware or more recently the moves by media companies to delist certain media for tax benefits, there’s a good argument to be made over forfeiting the copyright, so it’s now public domain and fair game. But I also think for something like the Star Wars Holiday Special, where the creator/copyright holder (not sure about that status post-Disney acquisition) genuinely hates it and does not want it available to the public, the owner should be allowed to restrict access to it.
Unfortunately I’m not expecting those laws to ever change for the better.
The only times I allow it myself are in this case (zero legal availability) and for unofficial/fan translations of games not available in your home region/language. Nobody would be getting your money anyway, no theft of compensation/profits there. If any games do become available, though, then we should support them. The more we put our money where our mouth is for a return to market for these games, the more incentive there is for companies to bring more of them back.
I’m also ok with pirating anything that now sells for more than original retail value due to scarcity. Looking at you, $1k SNES cartridges…
This may be hot take, but I think games are art and are part of our cultural legacy, and making steps that stops us from enjoying us from that legacy should be considered a crime, especially when they put at risk art disappearing forever.
I would start with simple rules:
- 5 years after last new copies of the game stops being sold, pirating it stops becoming a crime
- 10 years after platform (console?) stop being produced, if there is no official emulator available, all emulators of that platform become legal
- intentionally trying to stop people from buying a game without breaking above rules (for example, selling one copy for price of 9999$) is a crime
As a result, I would expect all companies to either invest in backward compatibility on unprecedented level, or more likely start porting their games to PC (because they will keep being produced), even if that meant selling copies to be used with emulators. When there is money on the table, or perspective of losing money, corporations are really quick to find solutions.
There are legal problems when creating emulators, sure people work hard to avoid them, but I don’t think they should have to do that in those cases, so I specifically wrote “all emulators” should be legal. For example, Dolphin to work requires cryptographic keys that technically belong to Nintendo, so they may be sued for providing them. Some emulators require you to find bios on your own because they can’t legally provide them, and their emulator doesn’t work without it.
This isn’t necessarily always true. PCSX2, the main PS2 emulator, for example needs a BIOS file that can only be obtained from an actual PS2 (or “illegally”). I’m not sure why that emulator requires it when others don’t. The closest thing to an explanation I could find online just said “legal issues”, but didn’t go into details. That makes me suspect that there was pushback from Sony about the emulator. So if such emulation laws were to be written they absolutely should protect in stone the right to create and use emulators. If a company can find a loophole to block you, they will.
The closest thing to an explanation I could find online just said “legal issues”, but didn’t go into details.
I don’t think that makes sense, or at least it doesn’t properly qualify the problem. BIOS is a set of baked-in software routines that mediate certain operations between software and hardware. In theory it could be reverse-enginereed and thus emulated just like the rest of the hardware is. In fact, many of the more simple systems (like 8 or 16-bit consoles) have their BIOS emulated. But for more advanced or poorer documented systems, there are, in my view, two problems with that:
- If your reversed engineered version of the BIOS has bugs (and during early stages of development, it would have a lot), the ways in which these bugs could present themselves makes the situation ambiguous, because it may be hard to know, from the symptoms, whether the bug is on the BIOS or on the hardware emulation. So developers just use the official BIOS because then if you see bugs, you know for sure the problem is on the hardware emulation. And also, reverse engineering the BIOS would require a lot of effort that developers would probably rate as low priority given they could use a perfectly functional BIOS and avoid a whole lot of other technical problems as per above. I mean, for many systems, hardware emulation is a problem already complex enough;
- Depending on the system, the BIOS code could be so simple that a reverse engineered version of it could conceivably be so close to the actual official code that it could, yes, trigger a copyright suit from the creator.
We need a use-it-or-lose-it clause for all copyrights. If the rights holder is not making a good faith effort to sell copies, they should forfeit their copyright entirely and the work in question goes straight to the public domain. 5 years is generous, I’d make the grace period 6 months.
I’d take it a step further and say we need a good default license that kicks in after a certain amount of time has passed until the end of the copyright (at which point no license at all is required).
The price of the license will just be based on a formula that takes revenue and portion of the end product that uses the copyright material into account. So someone issuing their own print of a book that came out would pay more than someone who publishes a fan fic sequel and just uses the characters.
And trademarks still strictly enforced, since copying that is trying to pass yourself off as another producer, or fraud. Trademarks are how the original author and the good derivative works will be differentiated from the shitty ones.
Emulators are not illegal. ROMs are illegal if you didn’t rip it yourself. If you did rip it yourself it’s a gray area. See https://youtu.be/yj9Gk84jRiE
I think that these rules are unnecessarily over-complicating the problem. IMO, the best solution would be to amend copyright legislation to include a similar clause to the one found in the ‘fair dealing’ exemption of many Commonwealth countries - i.e “Can the work or adaptation be obtained within a reasonable time at an ordinary commercial price?” If not, copying the game is not an infringing act.
This strikes me as weird and unnecessarily convoluted. IMO the best solution would be to limit corporate held copyrights to 10 years after first publication or 15 years after creation, whichever is sooner, and limit individually held copyrights to the life of the creator. After that’s up, the work becomes public domain, and people can freely post it without repercussions, meaning the masses will handle archival and distribution essentially without prompting. Simple, with very few loopholes as far as I can see.
As a result, I would expect all companies to either invest in backward compatibility on unprecedented level, or more likely start porting their games to PC (because they will keep being produced), even if that meant selling copies to be used with emulators. When there is money on the table, or perspective of losing money, corporations are really quick to find solutions.
We’re already there. Backwards compatibility is the highest it’s ever been. With the rise of digital stores, popular retro games are on every platform that publishers think they can make money on. Re-releases of popular classics seem to happen all the time.
However, the sad reality is vast majority of those 87% wouldn’t be profitable to release. They are the games that sold poorly on release or have been out of the spotlight for so long that most people have forgotten they even exist. There needs to be work porting the release to new platforms, there are licenses to pay for music and licensed characters. I have no idea if residuals are a thing for video games but if they exist they cost money too. If a game hasn’t been re-released at this point, it’s not becuase there is some backwards compatibility issue; it’s because the bean counters have decided the cost of porting outweighs any sales it may generate. There is no “money left on the table” for them as it would cost more to port than they believe the game’s re-release would ever make. Those games will never be legally re-released and should fall into some sort of public domain.
This may be hot take, but I think games are art and are part of our cultural legacy, and making steps that stops us from enjoying us from that legacy should be considered a crime, especially when they put at risk art disappearing forever.
How can I reconcile it with, say, as a private entity, I have the right to withhold sharing my ideas or creations for whatever reason?
You have the right to withhold sharing your creations. If you never release anything at all then the above would not apply. This is about if you release something then years later stop making it available and prevent anybody from ever making a copy again.
(And the reason for that distinction is sound: the unreleased work is like nothing ever existed, the released work is part of the public culture.)
That hinges on the idea that nontangible assets are not scarce (which IMO applies or might just as well apply if it’s in the internet). You are not entitled to a boxed copy of ET (1982), but the same arguments can’t be applied to electronic copies of it.
Why should the government be enlisted to prevent the distribution of work?
The whole reason for copyright to exist is to provide a means for people to make money on their cultural work. How is society made better by removing works from the public?
In theory, a way for an artist to independently sustain continuous output of creations.
This kind of thing (and e-waste in general) is why I think we need radical laws about unsupported hardware in general.
If an electronic device (phone, laptop, etc) stops receiving software support, the most recently available firmware should be made freely available under public domain.
Apple is obviously the worst offender, but it’s just horrible when you have really great hardware that’s 100% worthless just because the software is unsupported and proprietary.
The number of iPads, smart home products, and other devices that become e-waste every year is unsustainable. If companies were forced to release the code for free when they stopped supporting devices, maybe they would support them longer. Or at least bother innovating for a change.
This is only going to get worse with modern games. Always online to servers that won’t exist. Digital only copies you won’t be able to download.
Not only should the firmware be made available, I think if you are taking servers offline you should be required to release the source code.
I can still play my N64 and PS3 games with physical copies, but many on PS4 are basically unplayable without the day one patch at least
Ubisoft has made it clear, “Well, if you want to play Assasins Creed, or Farcry, we expect you to play the new ones”.
Well, in both cases, the new ones are ass and I want to play the old ones, that I paid for.
As others have said on here, once the product is no longer supported, I feel the rights to that software should pass to the community.
I write code for a living, and when I’m done, the client owns that software. I hand over all the source code as part of close out. If they want me to maintain it, fine. If the want to go with someone else, its theirs to do with as they please.
Apple is obviously the worst offender, but it’s just horrible when you have really great hardware that’s 100% worthless just because the software is unsupported and proprietary.
How so? Because they produce hardware that one would actually like to use after firmware updates cease? They provide updates the longest and are evidently not worthless, as they have higher resale values than Android devices the same age.
None of that matters. Open hardware from 2003 still works because of course it still works. Apple is artificially bricking hardware for profit.
What is Apple bricking and in which way is it worse than any other android OEM that provides updates for shorter?
Jesus that’s depressing. Thank god for the Internet or wonder how much of that 87% would already be lost forever.
Think of everything lost from even recent eras without the internet! Like 99% of what we’ve made, even in the domain of awesome impactful stuff, must have been lost to time
A lot of it got lost because we invented newer technologies, sure we can’t work stone with the same methods the ancients used to but that’s because we have bolts, steel, and concrete now.
