> This explains why people like Jim Ryan hate retro games. They think these older games would cannibalize sales from newer releases.

I play retro games. Mostly on Retroarch.

I play those games because I genuinely think they are better and more enjoyable than the vast majority of crap released nowadays.

If they managed (they can't) to wrestle my retro game collection from me, they wouldn't get me to play whatever crap EA, Ubisoft or Blizzard puts out nowadays. They would just get me to stop playing videogames.

That was a rhetoric question, because I think they would only be happy if retro games became unavailable, so their profit grew a bit next quarter.

I don't even think retro games eat much of their profits, otherwise they would see it as a business opportunity, but their posture only makes sense if there's not much profit to be had in that niche.

> Still, the US copyright office has said no. "The Register concludes that proponents did not show that removing the single-user limitation for preserved computer programs or permitting off-premises access to video games are likely to be noninfringing," according to the final ruling. "She also notes the greater risk of market harm with removing the video game exemption’s premises limitation, given the market for legacy video games."

That quote (from the GamesRadar article) to me, makes it clear that the "[...] preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes" quote is being used as a gotcha. It's not that they don't want you to play old games, it's that they don't want copyright restrictions to be loosened. It's a very similar situation to the recent Internet Archive book. Current copyright law doesn't let you loan out format-shifted works. Copyright length is too long, but within the copyright framework, the restrictions seem sensible to me.

From a personal level, I'll just keep doing what I've always done. Help archive the things I can. Support and buy games from smaller devs or publishers who care about their games. And if you want to play something from a shitty AAA dev, nothing is stopping you from playing it anyway for free and just giving the money to your favorite charity instead. Consumers can have a lot of power if they choose to exercise it.

It was never quiet the industry wanted to preserve profits and they said it out loud multiple times.

Which is a terrible misuse of copyright that goes against even its most publisher-friendly interpretation.

Meta: I don't think the phrase is actually overused, I think it's used so much due to so many companies all discovering at once that they don't have to spend time crafting a plausible cover narrative, and that nothing will happen if they just say they're being shitty and there's nothing you can do about it.

From a certain angle it could be seen that they're backing people into a corner from which the only escape is piracy, and once the convenience of that apple has been tasted, it's difficult to go back to the sub-standard service provision and heavy usage restrictions of the 'legitimate' world.

Given the extremely long terms now available there is little incentive to quickly extract value from the copyrighted work. Patents exist for the same reason and have been similarly coopted by their holders.

Edit: if copyright terms were shorter publishers would be incentivized to keep their games in print and to update them for newer media/platforms.

The fact that it's a single fixed duration that continues to be extended for just a minuscule fraction of works is ultimately the issue.

Once it gets sold it immediately starts a shot clock of exactly 20 years.

Though honestly anything would be better than what we have now.

First 10 or so years the protection is free. Then, on the first year of paid protection, you pay $10. On the second, $20. On the tenth, $10,240. On the sixteenth, $655,360. The year you miss a payment the protection ceases.

If your IP is immensely valuable and is bringing you gobs of money, you can continue paying and keep your monopoly. But the case of keeping reams of stuff under the lock "just in case" would be largely eliminated. Anything that's not a cash cow currently being milked and paid for would get released to the public domain.

On top of that, the federal budget would receive some extra money, but only from those who is making money, and not the small guy who just has published an indie game on Steam.

It's pretty clear that the legal system mostly exists to preserve big financial interests. I spent much of my adult life watching SCO play the system...

The hard part is getting enough other voters to care. If it is just you money is more important. If it is you and many others though you beat money.

I like the current model of works becoming public domain after X years, but would prefer we shorten those timelines a bit given the speed of software.

E.g., if you write a book and realize $5,000 in sales per year, then 10 * 2^x=5000 where x is 8.97, so you only enjoy 8 years of revenues ($40,000) and you've paid Σ(1->8) 10 * 2^x = $5,100 for the privilege, for a net $34,900 or 6.98x the yearly royalty value.

If Dreamworks sees $500M a year in Minions merchandising, then 10 * 2^x=500,000,000 where x = 25.56 and so Dreamworks realizes 25 years of revenues ($12,500,000,000) and pays Σ(1->25) 10 * 2^x = $671,088,620 for the privilege, for a net $11,828,911,380 or 23.66x the yearly royalty value.

This is backward, in my opinion.

Moreover the amount of tax paid as a fraction of total value realized is actually lower for the large owner of IP because the total tax payment is dominated by the final years, but the total revenue is determined by the number of years. In the example above, we had:

$5,100 / $40,000 = 12.75% tax for the small author, and

$671,088,620 / $12,500,000,000 = 5.37% tax for Dreamworks.

The ratios would be even worse if the small author could've just barely justified the 9th year. Pretty much unconscionable.

The fact that we're collecting tax from IP is not interesting. We have progressive income tax for this purpose.

People whose livelihoods and retirement depend on their copyright.

Or people who want to play old video-games for free.

> The 12-time Grammy Award winner made more than $780 million on the U.S. leg of the Eras Tour, according to an estimate by Forbes. The total ticket sales from Swift's 2023 Eras Tour could make her the highest-grossing female touring artist of all time, according to Billboard. The Eras Tour could gross over $1 billion, making concert history as the first billion-dollar tour, according to The Wall Street Journal.

J.K. Rowling doesn't have exclusive rights to her books, past the first couple. Lots of copyright-related suits (most?) are made by Warner Bros. She's fully capable of mobilising her fanbase (or, was, at least, before she went off on the deep end) to prevent or restrict what she considers misuse of the Harry Potter brand. (And, as you say, she doesn't need the money.)

Copyright isn't why Toby Fox need never go hungry. His work is trivial to pirate, he doesn't even bother enforcing copyright on his music; and yet he's probably a millionaire, with more works on the way.

What is the name of the law that prevents the publisher from kicking me out of the building, printing the book I wrote, and making money off it?

IP isn't the same across the board it's not like game devs are singers who have ASCAP/BMI etc protections. Game devs are code jockeys who get shit on by the corporations with NO rights to the actual work THEY produced. Why do you act like this is the same as music with perpetual rights to the actual creators? It rarely if ever is.

You can go ahead and "blame" the workers you claim to support for failing to "put that in their employment contract, it is a "free market" for labor, after all" or you can work on changing the system to at least let the past be free and open and history have a chance of being important or just let it all be locked in a vault, in disuse in the "hope" that maybe someday a corporation will "release" it again as a game. Or you can let people who ARE passionate about it work on it and let the public have the right to it.

As the parent comments point out, the LITERAL REASON OF COPYRIGHT IN THE US CONSTITUTION is to benefit the public. It has nothing to do with giant corps getting rich as fuck off other people's labor. Contract law gets in the way and lets these pricks steal the work and wealth, deny people the rights and only THEY get the benefit, this is the precise opposite of the public benefit intended.

Culture happens on faster and faster cycles than ever before, yet instead of admitting the speed of it, these behemoths who own IP, demand continual extensions (well until the most recent time when Disney finally relented and let Steamboat Willy enter the Public Domain recently).

Instead of promoting "innovation" (as phrased in the US Constitution), it promotes lethargy slouch and continued re-use of the same things. It's the exact opposite of the intent. And no, this bullshit about "livelihoods and retirement" mean jackshit in game dev. You shit your game out, you got paid for that work, and that's it. All the excess profits go to the corp, not the actual devs. IP in this case is not about humans owning/making, and it's corporations through and through, and unless you held onto the same corporation for 40 years, as the creator, it's not going to be you getting the supposed benefit of this.

And that is why some of these composers were so prolific - to keep up their payday, they had to crank out music instead of collecting on royalties of performances they were directly involved with.

Unthinkable today, really.

The current regime is a clear case of regulatory capture.

- patents last for 20 years in the us

- trademarks do not have value to the rest of the world. Eg, the name “Kleenex” is (was?) a granted trademark, to help customers identify products from that specific company. “Kleenex” has somewhat become generic, but I don’t think this is really better or worse for humanity in general — it just removes some branding strength from Kleenex.

- copyright lasts life of author +70 years. This is problematic imo.

I think the concern about copyright is justified, but I think the others are honestly pretty decent. But of course different people will have different opinions.

The other issue with patents is that the whole underlying idea is questionable. You're supposed to give people access to your idea in return for protection. But what is the value of that access? In a lot of areas, the value is zero, since reverse-engineering (or just looking at something) will give you all the information contained in the patent.

I suspect that most patents are giving companies a long-term monopoly on an idea, and providing absolutely no, or close to no value in return.

There have been patents that are the result of hard work, but there is a deluge of patents that contain only ideas that are so obvious that nobody was shameless enough to attempt to patent them before.

Moreover the majority of patents contain extraordinarily broad claims, which cover many things that the authors of the patent have never succeeded to make, but they include the claims in the patent with the hope that someone else will find a way to make those things and then they will reveal the patent and blackmail those who have actually made a real device.

In the old times, for a patent to be granted there was a condition to present a working prototype embodying the claims of the patent.

Unfortunately this condition has gone a long time ago, otherwise it would have filtered most ridiculous patent claims.

The sole function of a patent is to restrict innovation. That’s the only direct result of patents. All other claims about encouraging innovation rely on beliefs about secondary and tertiary effects which I believe are incomplete, out of date, and often simply incorrect.

Edit: Even the pure capitalists don’t like it: https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk

Personally, I think copyright isn't so bad simply because of what it covers.

A patent can stop me making stainless steel razor blades. At all.

But copyright? I can write a story about a boy wizard going to wizard school and learning from a man with a long white beard and a robe with huge sleeves. The law just says I can't call him Harry Potter.

it's hard to say how enforcing against counterfeiting would work without something that looked like trademark law.

As a teenager of the 90s I have, correctly or incorrectly, been indoctrinated with the notion that RIAA/MPAA have too much clout for their own good. Sweden (Pirate Bay) and New Zealand (Kim.Com) taught us that.

But it’s not just The US — the bulk of my record collection is still digitised as Ogg/Vorbis in protest of Fraunhofer’s hold on MP3 as a non-public format.

Was I brainwashed? Did the kids of yesteryear lose in the long run? Aside from nostalgia, it’s worth remembering the history of this battle to learn for the future.

The main problems with current copyright laws, I think, is the creators need to sell their right to one of a handful of powerful corporations to make money at all, then those corporations grip on their rights and monopolize it, even if it means something isn't available at all. A better idea would be author's rights that can't be sold, and licensing that can't be denied. That way there still is monetary incentives to create, but cultural goods remain available to the public.

Assumption 2: Without IP laws, people would not produce works(aside from credits and attribution). Engineers will stop engineering. Lawyers will stop writing opinions. Scientists won't write research papers.

Assumption 3: IP laws did work to incentivize production and technological advancement, and they are only or the primary means to do so. We just need to reign in the excess.

Assumption 4: People who created useful works for its own sake are not valuable(open source software/hardware, inventors inventing things and freely publishing information, etc). Patents and copyright laws should favors the people who use copyright and patents over them, and the profit motive should reign supreme.

I certainly know that most games and movies wouldn't exist without a monetary incentive. They take too much work to make. There are exceptions. You can make pong in a few hours and you can shoot a movie of yourself talking. You can also do both as a hobby a few hours a night. But, most movies require sets, costumes, props, and lots of other equipment and labor. Most games also require many person years of work. It's unlikely people would put in that much work if they couldn't make a living from it as it allows them to do it full time so they actually have the time needed.

OTOH, music "can" take a few hours and so could be done more easily as a hobby so while not all forms of music would continue I suspect we'd still get tons of it with without monetary incentives.. Books, it depends on the type of book. People write blogs for free and compile them into a book.

As for assumption 3, there's SpaceX. They don't open their design of their rockets to the public where their competitors, such as the Chinese can copy them. Neither the US government nor SpaceX wants that. So there's a large amount of innovations, probably countless designs that went into these rockets. Maybe in a better geopolitical situation, patents would be respected, but why would SpaceX gives everyone the blueprint to catch up? Patents make more sense if designs are easily reverse engineered and you still want a monopoly to make back your investment. That is clearly false as people have made innovation in 3D printing where new designs are standardized for the benefit of the whole market.

Assumption 4 is the defacto state of things even if it were not the intention. People who invent useful things for the sake of useful things are clearly at a disadvantage against corporations or entities who have more money to hire lawyers.

There's already at least one case of a trivial patent for 3D printing stronger layers that expired being repatented again by another company, increasing legal uncertainty from implementing the technique in slicers and other software. Most slicer these days are open source, generally don't make money for its developers(at least not directly), but they do grow the 3D printing market through its active development. The slicers also happen to share code, unsurprising given that they are forks of one another. Clearly, this model is incompatible with the patent system as it stands.

If they weren't prohibited from sharing rocket technology SpaceX might share. Tesla patents are open. I don't see why Musk wouldn't do the same for SpaceX if the government allowed it.

As for Tesla patents, I would speculate that it's more about companies not willing copy Tesla which is why Telsa doesn't really care if they open source the information. Copying isn't always so easy especially if there are structural issues involved. Recall the superchargers that became standard. Other companies were using a different connector, but the supercharger connector was obviously superior and they relented after many years.

Patents are more useful in situation in which your designs are easily reverse engineered and there's little barrier in copying. In any case, there are firms in the automative industry that specialized in doing the teardown of cars and doing cost estimation. Such a firm would tell their competitors how Tesla actually make their cars, so there's not much value in publishing their patents anyway, other than PR stunts.

Patents are not as useful in scenarios in which trade secrets provide a strong and durable barrier to entry. They also require lawsuits to enforce, which is rather costly and imposes cost on our economy, so there's inefficiency to consider as well. Theoretically, a monopoly in this instance would incentivize R&D effort but we know that monopolies has various nasty side effects and not everybody have money to hire lawyers and enforce them.

One such example is paint & coloring in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the book - “In 1862, British firms controlled about 50 percent of the world market and French firms another 40 percent, with Swiss and German companies as marginal players. By 1873, German companies had 50 percent of the market, while French, Swiss, and British firms controlled between 13 percent and 17 percent each. In 1913, German firms had a market share of more than 80 percent, the Swiss had about 8 percent, and the rest of the world had disappeared.” Switzerland at the time had no patent protection, and Germany allowed processes to be patented in 1877 but not products themselves.

Parallels are harder to find today due to the expansion of IP law as a condition of trade with many developed nations, but the book does have some more recent examples.

I should note that there is already strong intrinsic motivation to create and there are already too many works to read, watch, or listen, and a lot of slops created clearly to make money.

People are willing to accept deplorable working conditions to pursue their dreams, such as developing video games.

Since I do improv, most of the value I created are on the spot and ephemeral anyway and I basically perform for free anyway. I would stand to gain if people go out to theaters and other avenue as opposed to consuming content on netflix.

Article I Section 8 Enumerated Powers Clause 8 Intellectual Property

        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;

Watch: I predict an author's life will end. I give it very high odds indeed.

_"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises [...] 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"_ [1]

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/

... so in a way it does benefit society. but it's the society that likes to steal from social security and then call it a scam.

> More importantly, this also ignores the fact that libraries already lend out digital versions of more traditional media like books and movies to everyday people for what can only be described as recreational purposes.

What this ignores is that libraries are not allowed to digitize in-copyright print books (or physical films) and then distribute these digital copies. This is what the Internet Archive got in trouble for. Emulating old games is not that different.

Maybe the laws should be changed. But pretending that there's one set of rules for books and then a higher scrutiny for games is utterly backwards. Game publishers want the protections afforded to books and movies; it is archivists and emulators who want a double standard because of the unique technical challenges around old games. I am sympathetic to this position[1]. But I am not sympathetic to what has felt like 20 years of smarmy, dishonest games journalism around copyright. Too many journalists are completely in the tank for emulation, and they intentionally mislead readers with useless articles like this. It drives me crazy.

[1] Although note the dishonest conflation of "games publishers" and "game copyright holders." Game journalists simply ignore that small indie devs also want copyright protection, focusing on Nintendo and Playstation for naked political reasons.

Is it pretending? There actually were different rules in this area for rentals, though it didn't necessarily translate to digital transmission:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_of_America,_Inc._v._B....

> Soon after the settlement, the United States Congress passed the Computer Software Rentals Amendment Act prohibiting software rentals, excluding Nintendo cartridges from similar protections. Although Nintendo criticized the game rental business, they came to accept it, even working with Blockbuster to offer exclusive rental versions of their games. The first-sale doctrine was eventually subverted by end-user license agreements, which describe that the consumer is purchasing a singular, non-transferable license to the software, thus limiting the sale of used software.

Computer Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990

https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/senate-bill/198

> Excludes certain home video game software from the prohibition (including a computer program embodied in a machine or product which cannot be copied during the ordinary operation of such machine or product).

Libraries had a specific carve out as well over software in general "Authorizes nonprofit libraries to lend computer programs if a copyright warning has been affixed to the computer program packaging" which probably wouldn't apply to digital. But, it is wrong to say there weren't different rules for software vs books vs specifically game console software.

The DMCA had lots of flexibility for administrative law to make specific carve outs treating different media circumvention stuff differently for things like preservation:

> Lawmakers opted to create a rulemaking mechanism through the United States Copyright Office to review the state of copyrights and fair use to make limited classes of allowance for fair use which would be considered lawful means of using circumvention technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

i find it interesting that OG retro games actually are considered threatening to modern AAA games.

And shout out to Red Viper on the 3DS for letting me experience the Virtual Boy without needing to deal with a second hand market that gets more expensive as the years go by.

Plus you get the bonus ability to run on iOS :)

I have an RPi which has over 10k games from my youth. I play those games, some arcade, some from early consoles when I want to play those games. Just like sometimes you want to listen to music from when you were a teen.

I also have many consoles and games which I will hook up to my TV when I want to play those games - SSX Tricky anyone?

I have a PC and a Steamdeck with almost 9k licenses to play games.

So what do the ESA want?

Kill off music older than x years? KIll off games older than x years? (MAME would like a word there)

The ESA argument - as quoted above - is bullshit.

I got it running using PCX2 with a few graphical tweaks including upscaling and widescreen, running it over sunshine/moonlight so I could play it via an Android box on the TV. It looked and felt like a modern game. Great work by the community to keep it up to date like that.

I'm not sure if I could have gotten it working with the actual PS2 and disc, whether those devices are still working and whether the TV could accept RCA cables as input.

More to the point, everyone involved with the creation of the game is retired or dead.

/s in case.

Shame they care more about capturing my attention by any means necessary than they do about providing the world with a new fun game.

Good thing nothing like that could ever happen with the pharmaceutical industry, then I might have to go to Mexico to get OTC drugs…

Even if the DRM-protected media is being used for purposes not protected by copyright (e.g., fair use), 1201 makes it illegal to crack to the DRM unless there's been a 1201 exemption.

To make this explicit: If rightsholders believe you are infringing on their copyright, they can sue you for copyright infringement no matter what. 1201 acts as another layer preventing fair use and other non-infringing works.

If you don't like the current state of copyright, write your Congressman.

As an aside, what game company do you work for?

it's not like we have a lot of agency in elections

That they ruled that this specific case is not covered by that exemption is unfortunate, and the argument is not the slam dunk you appear to think it is.