Maybe ever, but currently…?
It can, if some laws are changed. Which is possible, although the largest video game producers will probably raise hell to not release any control they have.
Probably, in the same way Steamboat Mickey is.
Just part of the whole valuing property, in this case intellectual, over actual labor and people that our species loves so fucking much.
Imagine if IP from drugs to technology to fiction had a 5-10 year max window before other people could work with and expand on it. It would be a better world for most.
Oh you only get to make exclusive income on that thing you came up with for SEVERAL YEARS OF YOUR LIFE before you need to contribute in other ways to keep making money, boo fucking hoo. Where’s the sympathy for people working 2 jobs, burning their life up to meet basic needs, who don’t get several years of passive income on an idea that popped into their head 4 years ago.
Drugs do use patents with reasonable time limits.
For some reason they are allowed to make miniscule changes and get new patents, but the old ways are then available for generics.
It would be great if copyright switched back to reasonable time limits. Media companies would still live on as repositories that could sell access to high quality source copies and remasters to make income. They would only lose the control over other people using what is already in the public domain.
Exactly - the poor and working class are constantly told they need to evolve to keep up, why shouldn’t that apply to rich people too?
Ethically, it should apply. In practice, it doesn’t because the rich make the rules.
Yeah it could be since copyrights have an expiration date before the thing becomes public domain. In order for, say, E.T. for Atari for become public domain, Howard Scott Warshaw would have to die and then 70 years later the copyright on E.T. would end. And that’s assuming HSW maintained the copyright himself, and isn’t held by Atari. I don’t know how it works in the case of a company that can’t technically die. If it just becomes 70 years and the author’s life has no bearing on it, then it still would be 28 years until Atari’s E.T. is public domain.
When it comes to works for hire like most commercial games, the term is 95 years after publication, or 120 years after creation, whichever comes first. In another 50 years or so, you can legally fall down all the holes.
Imo it should be shortened to hard 15-30 years regardless of life or author.
Disney might boeing you if you keep up with this nasty attitude lol
They spent good money on this.
I guess Antstream is kind of such a library? (Just answering the question in the headline. I haven’t read the article.)
I don’t understand why these legacy game license owners don’t start licensing out their old games on the cheap to game services like Apple Arcade or Steam to get extra revenue on them. They learned that lesson in video streaming and it gave a ton of mostly dead IP new life.
Cause selling new games is more profitable.
If a new games costs €60 and older games €5 or less (which would be a lot less on streaming services), they’d have to sell at least 12 old games for every new game they sell less cause of this change. And if gamers spend more time on older games, it’s highly possible that they’d buy, even just a single game, less.
It’s the same with movies or TV. They would only loose money if they make the whole archive available as there is just so much of it that some of the new things could become irrelevant.
Not that I’m against archiving, but it is caused by the creative sector having to have to make money, which isn’t easy for smaller players, and greed.
The old games are already made and the new ones are yet to be made.
So one has costs to come out of the profits. The other doesn’t.
I don’t understand your argument.
That’s a great frickin idea…never crossed my mind
Because there’s a chance Sintendo will release another port of that one obscure NES game that absolutely nobody is buying their online service for on their next Gen console. If they license any of their games, how can they rape the consumer financially? Can’t you think of the hungry employees at this small indie company that is going bankrupt because little 5 year old Timmy downloaded a copy of a game on N64 Sintendo doesn’t even have the rights to anymore?
/S
Video games were such a wild west back in the 80s and 90s that it’s often not clear who even owns the copyright anymore.
There is a lot of abandonware and stuff where the companies just dissolved and ownership of any IP is questionable at best.
But also I don’t think there’s a way to give Nintendo/Game Freak money to play Gen 1 Pokemon at the moment? There’s plenty of stuff like that. Sega and SquareEnix and some others have done a decent job of licensing/re-releasing some games. But there’s plenty out there that they ‘could’ release and seemingly have no interest.
And ironically when they do offer it, it’s always an unplayable buggy mess. For example, Saints Row 2 (2009) on steam appears completely unplayable judging by recent reviews, it crashes to desktop when a mission ends, and they’re selling it on sale.
It’s because of how shit saints row 2 and gta 4 are on PC that I use my Xbox to play Xbox 360 games.
Saints Row 2 basically requires the Gentlemen of the Row mod to function on PC. The devs actually hired the modder, IdolNinja, to fix the game proper, but sadly he passed away and the project was scrapped.
I actually couldn’t even get that to work for me, TBH. Also, all of the latest versions of GotR got flagged on the Nexus for some reason. Its still clean according to most up to date antivirus, though.
After the expiry of the copyright i assume.
Explicitly yes. Archiving is absolutely 100% legal and anybody who says otherwise is an idiot.
(Citation needed)
Title 17, section 108 of the U.S. Code, Archives and Libraries are exempt from Intellectual Property rights and do not require permission.
To be clear, this is in addition to section 107 which outlines fair use
That’s just one country, and only covers archiving and privately storing your own media. It also doesn’t technically allow for breaking DRM IIRC, which almost all media now utilises, so what you say unfortunately isn’t true.
Well yeah, it’s just one country, were you expecting an essay on the Global legality of Archives? You didn’t ask for a specific country, numbnuts.
Lmao what’s up with the hostility? Can you not just talk like a normal, civilised person? If you behaved like this in real life, people would very quickly either stop talking to you, or knock you out.
You said that it’s blanket legal, in all cases, and that anybody who says otherwise is an idiot. I said that not only is that not the case in the one country you brought up, it also isn’t in others.
Nobody asked you to list the laws of every country, or of any specific country. You said archiving is always legal in every case, everywhere, and said anybody who says otherwise is an idiot. Unfortunately your perception and reality don’t quite line up with one another.
Me calling you numbnuts is the absolute height of my courtesy.
Yes, I can believe it. Some people lash out and become extremely adversarial once they have anonymity. I imagine you’re not this rude in person.
Thank you.
Abandonwares anyone ?
Has abandonware ever been legal?
Abandonware isn’t really legally defined
only because doing so would cost money and not immediately benefit capitalists.
Oh, for sure. Would be pretty good if there was an actual definition of what constitutes abandonware; say, if the game has been out of print for at least 2 years or whatever.
Abandonware amounts to “the rights holder no longer exists or no one knows who owns the rights anymore” or, more clearly “no one is enforcing their rights to this game anymore for whatever reason, so it’s de facto public domain.”
Depends if it can go into public domain, I have no knowledge on copyright law so Im just guessing
If copyright law is involved then you’re looking at 70 years after the author’s death or 95 years depending on which expires first for it to be public domain and only the original iteration is released into the public domain. That’s for the USA and different countries have different laws and I’d imagine that would complicate things massively as an online library would have to be compliant with various laws of different countries
So take Mickey Mouse for example he’s now in the public domain but only in his original form in the Steamboat Willie cartoon, anything that uses something more recent than that like his red shorts for example would be taken down.
Who counts as the author of a game? The publisher? The dev team?
In works for hire like that, it’s a different standard. Basically 95 years from publication.
In the US or Germany: Straight to jail
In Japan: Your organs are now the property of Nintendo to repay this heinous crime.
Rest of the world: it depends.
I thought there was a site that let at most x number of people play games where x is the number of physical copies the site creator had on hand for that game. The industry doesn’t like this either, but the industry can go fuck itself. They’ve already practically taken away the public domain by making the period for copyright expiration too damn long.
Not as long as copyright holders believe it is better to sit on a property unused than sllow it to expose future generations to the technologies that gave birth to their current way of life
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