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New Front In The Copyright-War: Abandon-Ware
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon May 22, 2000 01:45 PM
from the can-I-emulate-joust-please? dept.
from the can-I-emulate-joust-please? dept.
Ventilator writes: "The New York Times (free login required) features an interesting story about out-of-print games and the copyright issues for dedicated Web sites. It also discusses the benefits for game developers if they would make those old games available to the public. "
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New Front In The Copyright-War: Abandon-Ware
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Re:Hmm. What about requiring regular renewal? (Score:5)
Since then, the world has become faster and the pace of change has increased. News is now minute-by-minute rather than week-by-week, technologies come and go in years rather than decades, the popularity of music waxes and wanes far faster than it did then. Yet the copyright term has become longer and longer, for some reason. It now ranges from life plus fifty years, to life plus ninety years. That's an effective copyright term of a century and a half in some cases - totally unjustified by any substantially increased incentive to create new works.
Unfortunately, international treaties prevent countries from adopting more sensible policies, even if they wanted to. Or rather, it means that greater political will is required to get past the 'hiding behind our international "obligations"' stage. (IMHO intellectual property law, like taxation, is best decided individually on a country-by-country basis.)
I reckon that the copyright term will be put right during my lifetime; if it ever became an 'issue' it would certainly provoke a lot of support for a reduction to the original 14 years, or some other reasonable term. Unfortunately, the large media conglomerates such as Disney are those who keep pushing for another twenty years every decade or so, so it's unlikely that any of the mainstream media would start actively campaigning on this issue. But sooner or later, it is bound to get attention.
Regular renewal sounds a bit bureacratic and could be an excuse to favour those who can afford the lawyers and paperwork. Having to prove (ultimately before a court) that your work is still worth copyrighting could bog the whole world down in endless appeals and wrangling. Better to have something which is clear-cut and automatic; such as, if the author is alive you can extend the copyright up to a maximum of 28 years; if a book is out of print, however, copyright expires after 10 years.
Old games == educational? (Score:4)
I find it easier to learn a programming concept by looking at a small program. Try to learn anything by looking at the Quake source. Ugh, my brain isn't that big. But I could probably learn a few concepts from looking at the source for Asteroids!
Re:Why stop at games? (Score:3)
This is why Brittney Spears outsells Frank Zappa.
So to sum it up:
New Music -> masses = MOST money for RIAA companies.
Old Music -> masses = less mindshare for new artists = less profit optimization.
Old music raped by new artists -> masses = better hype for new artists = even more money for RIAA companies = less artistic integrity overall, and destruction of human history, elimination of posterity.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
The origin (Score:3)
> I don't think you guys understand. I made something. I invented
> it. I can do with it whatever I want to,
Certainly. But so can I, without interfering physically in any way with your use of it. That's the whole problem.
> It is not something that I happened to "find",
Actually, technically, yes it is.
The fundamental schism between material property (made out of matter) and copyrighted 'property' (like your book, song, invention, or process), is that one is capable of being physically posessed, the other is not, the other is an idea. Albeit sometimes it can be a highly complicated idea, it's still at the root, just an idea. A thought. A train of logical knowledge and information.
An idea. It can be posessed by everyone at once, with almost no cost. It can be obtained by anyone independently of one another given the right circumstances. It can also be obtained by anyone through mere observation of one who already 'posesses' it.
Let us answer the question: What right does anyone have to claim ownership over an idea?
What fundamental source of thought or logic would provide the basis for the 'right' of 'ownership' over an idea?
In fact, we might want to think for a minute about the following: where does the right of ownership for anything come from? The objects in your dwelling. Your dwelling. The ground your dwelling is built on. The trees someone cut to build your house with. Trace the ownership of *all* of these physical objects back to their sources. You end up asking, who owns the the mountains? The air? The moon and mars? And how did a small part of one tree on the side of that mountain come to 'be yours'?
I find two answers. Firstly, everything belonged to everyone in the world, collectively. Society owned it all. And little by little, for society's good, parts of it were given (in return for some compensation) to individuals. Secondly these individuals added their efforts to the 'worth' of the objects, now in private hands, and so things went, until you ended up with them, having 'obtained' them in return for some of your own efforts.
Where do ideas and information originate?
Clearly the idea of a wheel, a circle, or how to start a fire existed before mankind existed. Just like the mountains. Just like the carbon that ended up in the trees, oil, and steel that became your chair.
Clearly then, society must 'own' them before any individual does. Whether society actually knows about the gold in that mountain or not is immaterial.
Remember how 'things' ended up in private hands? Society assigns 'ownership' based on what is considered best for all.
Would it feel right to you, to have a system where someone could be given the right to derive benefit, in perpetuity, from the 'innovation' of concentrating heat with a combustible and a flow of oxygen to create a self perpetuating combustion reaction? Certainly it would have been worth it to reward the individual who first comes up with the idea. But to give his descendents a large share of the rewards of its use by *all* mankind, forever? Surely someone else would have come up with it sooner or later.
Clearly we cannot allow someone to 'own' an idea in perpetuity, no matter how innovative nor complex. It would be too potentially damaging to the good of mankind.
In the long long long run, your descendents will completely and utterly mix with all of mankind. In the end, your 'innovation' *will* belong to everyone else. (unless there's some moderate inbreeding or abstenance in your family... :) When all of this logic is applied to something simple like fire or the wheel, it all makes perfect sense. I guess it could get a little more complicated when we're talking about highly complex 'ideas' like a musical composition or your book. But they are still merely 'information'. We're simply left deciding how *much* of a *finite* reward one should get(*).
Physics tells us that quite literally, one immortal monkey with one arm tied behind his back would eventually re-create your work. Some of us are a lot smarter than monkeys. And there are four billion years until the sun goes out.
Damn I'm good.
-NH
BTW: I've raised this point before, but I don't think we got a good answer. Without doubt mankinds greatest philosophers and thinkers have gone over this idea before. Where can we find a definitive summary of their train of thoughts and conclusions? Any historians out there who can point out the way? Clearly it would be idiotic to have to work this out from first principles all by ourselves over again.
It would be most efficient if we could just re-educate ourselves, our politicians, and everyone else, with what mankind has already likely learned, from a definitive respected source of information.
(*) I'd agree with you about 10 years being too short for your book. But I CLEARLY think that the life of the author PLUS 50 years is WAY too much. I liked the original 28 + 28 year terms. I don't mind *automatically* assigning copyright to the creator.
Personal note: It almost feels like the wisdom with which our society was created hundreds of years ago is being torn down by mediocre elected morons at the behest of the naked greed and aggression of bureacratic corporations. Anyone else feel this way?
OT: Request to Slashdot editors... (Score:5)
Muchas gracias...now back to our program already in progress...
raunchola (at) hushmail (dot) com
Problems with copyright (Score:5)
Congress is authorized by the Constitution:
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;
The purpose of copyright is not "to provide for the welfare of artists," or "to secure the intellectual property of artists." The constitutional authorizes copyright strictly to promote the creation of more creative speech. The fact that some people and companies can get rich from copyright is a side effect of copyright, not its purpose.
Copyright doesn't come for free, and more isn't necessarily better. Copyrights are a restriction of free speech. They are a constitutional compromise. Copyright temporarily trades away part of the natural right of free speech -- the right to repeat and build upon other people's speech -- in exchange for what is hopefully a public benefit -- the creation of more speech by artists.
The original copyright laws reflected this. Up until 1978, if you published something, but neglected to include a correct copyright notice, your work immediately entered the public domain. This forced artists to identify the works that they considered valuable, and provided protection for those specific works. Furthermore, after 28 years had passed, the work would revert to the public domain unless the copyright had been renewed. This took care of the abandoned-works problem. Works that were abandoned would enter the public domain faster.
The idea that everything you create is automatically your property protected by copyright is a very, very new idea. 1978 exactly.
In 1978, the law was changed so that everything that anyone creates is automatically copyrighted. This was a great deal for publishers, because instead of having to keep track of all of their copyrighted works, and renew them when necessarily, their copyrights would just take care of themselves.
What was lost was the public domain. Prior to 1978, vast amounts of material were published without copyright notice, or even registration, and immediately entered the public domain.
This was 22 years ago; which probably corresponds to the age of the average slashdotter. This is the first generation to come of age in a world with no contemporary public domain of ideas -- where all ideas are someone's private property, and will remain so long past all of our lifetimes.
It isn't surprising that the new generation is philosophically rejecting the theory of "near-perpetual copyright on everything ever published." There is no moral or ethical basis for functionally perpetual copyright on anything and everything. The copyright terms and conditions are, at this point, simply out of proportion to any possible public benefit to be gained by them. No surprise that many people are very dissatisfied with copyright law. Right now, it mostly exists to benefit the large media monopolies, and is being used to destroy our culture as fast as it is created. The DMCA makes it illegal to make a preservation copy of a copy protected diskette. Most old Apple II games are on copy protected diskettes. In a few decades, as those disks decay, the only records of the early days of home computers will be illegal records. Same for DVDs, and anything else that is distributed on encrypted media.
How can you preserve history and learn from it, when the very act of preservation and dissemination of abandoned historical material is illegal?
The destructive effects of the DMCA will be most acutely felt when future generations seek to study our era, and discover that most of our contemporary culture no longer exists in any form because our Congress outlawed its private preservation at the request of the RIAA and MPAA. At that time, our grandchildren will be awash in a sea of deteriorated, encrypted media from the early 21st Century, unable to read any of it, and the "benefits gained" from the DMCA will seem very small indeed. The only traces of our culture that will remain will be the few works that were continually preserved and restored by their copyright owners, and those works that have been illegally decrypted and preserved, using programs like DeCSS.
That is why the copyright problem is the most important issue of our generation.
Re:Hmm. What about requiring regular renewal? (Score:4)
Part of the idea is that things that end up making a lot of money will justify their continued copyright, whereas things that weren't able to, enter the public domain.
The numbers could be tweaked, certainly, but I'd like to know what people think of this idea.
Re:Copyrights expiring (Score:4)
No item has been placed into the public domain due to expiration of copyright since (IIRC) 1923. The US Congress has extended copyright terms every single time that the issue is about to come around. (The conspiracy theorist will point out that new copyright bills are introduced at the same time that Disney's copyright on Mickey Mouse is about to expire.)
As it stands now, something is copyrighted for nearly 100 years from date of creation. I believe you're thinking of patents, which are protected for 17 years from date of filing.
(keeping my opinion out of this; I don't need to get tagged as flamebait.
Copyrights don't expire anymore. (Score:5)
Why stop at games? (Score:5)
For example, music. How many old LPs are out there, mildewing in somebody's basement, that will be destroyed and unusable in another decade? Quite a few, I'd guess. This music should be allowed to be digitally recorded and publically displayed, for example, on Napster (another good use for that medium).
Or, say, old tapes. They don't last very long, and most aren't being produced any more. If I want to go find a tape of some obscure 80's artist, I'm usually SOL. Once again, these should be encoded and put online.
Modern CD's probably come the closest resembling the situation with games of anything I've mentioned so far. There are plenty of old CD's that nobody buys anymore, that will be obsolete when, say, DVD-Audio comes about, and that have not been updated in YEARS. This is music that has been left by the side of the road - nobody has remastered or rerecorded or remixed it for years or even decades. Why let this music die in its staleness when everyone who wants a copy owns it? Digitally redistribute it!
Or, even better, just like the optimal solution would be to Open Source abandoned games so that they can be further improved, we should Open Source abandoned music. I propose that any music that has not been rerecorded in any form within the past five years should have all the masters freely made available so that the public will have an opportunity to improve and enhance the original, and add features that have been requested for a very long time (for example, adding definition to "'scuse me, while I kiss the sky" on Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix). Many ears make bad mixing shallow, and somebody unknown may have the perfect sample for you out there if you'd only let him play with your master copies and make his contribution.
So why let your favorite music grow stale and die when it could be made fresh again every single day? Sleep on that thought, and I guarantee you'll agree with me.
Software Copyrights Gone Mad. (Score:3)
However, what is befuddling is why those software companies would refuse to release the copyright to those games. That is, it is befuddling at the first glance. After all, nobody is making games for the original NES or Colecovision any more. The 8-bit graphics of the NES seem laughable to the N64 and the Dreamcast, and so the mass market would dismiss these products right away. Clearly, there is no money to be made in keeping up these copyrights.
We must remember, though, that a software company is driven (generally) by profits first. As silly as it sounds to us, Nintendo is right when it says that the old games directly compete with its newer lines. Remember--the old gaming platforms (and old PCs, for software based on PCs instead of consoles) were ridiculously limited by today's standards, and so the programming involved probably used a lot of nifty software hacks to squeeze every drop of performance out of those machines. Those same hacks, while not useful in their native form, could point the way towards design philosophies and methodologies that would enable a software company to create a product that is a little better, a little faster than its opponents. That is what the software companies fear.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps there is something else in those old ROMs that software companies don't want anyone finding out about. After all, it is easy to denounce a few gaming enthusiasts as misguided, paranoid, or wrong. It is much harder to denounce the majority of your target market, and much harder on profits.
Think of how many children and adolescents were turned into zombies by those old games. I know people that, even though they haven't touched a NES in years, can still remember where all the secrets in a particular game were. If that isn't brainwashing, then I don't know what is.
What are they hiding?
It's the fun factor, stupid. (Score:3)
It's not 1985 anymore, and we demand higher quality from games today than any of these "classics" provide.
The moderators will probably say that parent is (f)lame-bait, but I'll take the hook, line, and sinker:
Those games are still fun. Graphics don't make the game; otherwise, the GIMP [gimp.org] would be the hottest selling game. What makes the game is the fun factor. Super Mario Bros. was fun. Tetris® (1988 or so) was fun. And they're still played.
Losing our culture to copyright laws (Score:5)
Clearly, the laws must be changed. Any sane government should recognize that even popular culture items are part of the overall culture and it's in the public interest to preserve them. The duration of copyright protection needs to be shortened. One way to do this which would quell the corporate fear of having a money-maker torn from them by the law and given to the public domain, would be to tie some sort of "marketability burden of proof" on the item -- if it hasn't been sold, made money, etc, in several years, and it's past the expiry, off it goes into public domain. If it's still selling, then the copyright holder gets an extension.
But regardless, something must be changed. We lose enough information on a daily basis as it is, we don't need laws that force us to lose our culture to bit rot.
Hmm. What about requiring regular renewal? (Score:3)
Subject to renewal.
In other words, if I create a copyrighted work, it's only legally protected for five years. When the five year deadline arrives, I have to renew my legal protection.
If I fail to renew the copyright, then my work is automatically placed in the public domain.
If we then place a cost (say $100) on the renewal process, we force companies to think about whether or not they really want to renew that copyright. The renewal fee is low enough that a regular person can afford it, but high enough that gigantic corporations with thousands of items under copyright protection will want to think twice before just blindly renewing everything they own.
. . . or at least that would be the theory.
Re:More misuse of words (Score:3)
We can steal the term from them they way they've stolen "hackers" from computer enthusiasts.
"Bill Gates said that he repected the efforts of open-source programmers? Man, is he a journalist or what?"
Jay (=
Re:piracy (Score:3)
Now, that said, I don't condone piracy. Once in a while, you'll see a disc of these old games for sale from a legitimate source. Somebody could make some money if they'd put together a web site and charge something like $5 or less to download the ROMs to old games. Give the emulators away for free, since most of the best ones are free anyway, but sell the ROMs. The game company that wises up to that clue will be making money for nothing. Yes, no support, other than install instructions on the web site, and a BBS for the users. Now, that's a business model that would work for older games.
If someone at Midway (or whatever they are now) is reading this, please do it!
What someone should do: (Score:4)
A week later, the Nintendo of America lawyers would send a letter to Slashdot telling them to remove the post. This would stir a censorship debate throughout the country.
Slashdot will gather their lawyers together, and then send a letter back to Nintendo saying that
a) "Donkey Kong" is obviously taken from "King Kong", so Nintendo doesn't really have a trademark anyway.
b) The tricks in Donkey Kong were lifted from Highland Gorilla training tricks originally developed by animal trainers at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology, and therefore the game belongs to all taxpayers.
c) Since the game can be gotten so easily on the Net anyway, how can Nintendo claim that the game is copywrited?
Mattel Inc will respond by blocking the Slashdot or any Donkey Kong related site with their censorware. A brave group of librarians will then prove that what they have done is block access into any site that mentions donkeys, or even horses, ponies ,zebras and unicorns.
This, will of course, cause even more controversy, especially when rival toy maker Galoob claims that Mattel only did this so they could prevent children from getting to their "My Little Pony Web Site"
Bank of America claims that they have a janitor working in their St. Louis branch with the name and likeness of "Mario", and would Slashdot please take this down?
I think I have run out of silliness. Thank you for listening to my silly rant.
Re:Some Points to Consider (Score:5)
Not that I disagree with the underlying point, but I think that there's an important thing that you're missing, here. You're fundamentally comparing the cream of the crop from the good old days with the run-of-the-mill games from today. Sure there were some really great games available back then that involved creativity, good design, and great hacking to get the most out of the system. But there were also a ton of lousy knock offs and lame brained games that were boring after you tried to play them for more than a few minutes. We just forget about the ones that sucked and remember the great ones.
Re:Why stop at games? (Score:3)
Re:No Login Required! (Score:3)
--
Copyright law (Score:3)
This of course doesn't say anything about formats, but it seems to *POTENTIALLY* cover the net-libraries of ROM images, IMHO. However, this law also has some specific requirements the library has to follow to avoid infringing, and the one ROM archive I've seen wasn't following those rules. A library trying to set itself up to use this defense should get an attorney, 'cause I ain't one...
Re:Copyrights, Abandonware, Legalese, oh boy (Score:4)
So it's retroactive. BFD. The change to 95 years was in itself retroactive. If it wasn't, Mickey Mouse would've been in the public domain a LONG time ago.