But the copyright law in the US grants that protection for 70 years. 70 years seems like plenty of time for an art piece, a book or a piece of music to be useful to its creators and still remains useful for the public after that time. I don't think the same time frames are relevant for online multiplayer: imagine sitting down 50 years from now and trying to reverse-engineer a WOW server.
What if copyright only applied to the supported life of a game? For instance, copyright can apply to a game for up to 70 years, or whenever one of the game's core components ceases being supported plus 5 years, whichever is sooner.
They'd need to justify these 70 years really well. Which they have not.
As usual, though, once companies could have copyrights they used some of the money to bribe politicians to extend that original idea to add time and cover all sorts of things to prevent the public from benefiting at the expense of the copyright holder, while claiming the opposite.
Its not unreasonable they would do that (longer and more expansive copyright means more value for shareholders), I just wish it wasn't the only thing anyone with the power to change it was thinking about.
Copyright was originally 28 years, and has been increasing linearlyish ever since: long copyrights are a recent phenomenon. Also, it's 70 years plus the author's lifetime. There are nice charts in Wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_...
Games feel a lot more ephemeral. They're not being commercial exploited for 30 years. In some cases the franchise is, fine. In most cases, it's nowhere near 30 years.
"Not worth preserving" is basically the industry admitting this!
But we can't wait 30, 70, whatever years to preserve WoW, for example. Most of the work needs to be done while the servers are still available. Even if you wait 95 years to publish the work, the work has to be done while it's not legal. It's the only way it's possible. That disconnect seems nuts to me.
I think this is something our copyright legislation is ill-equipped for - having to admit that not all works are created equally. A book might be profitable for an entire lifetime. A game is not. Trying to pretend the same solution can solve both problems will only fracture the system.
I'd much rather hear about that then have to explain to grandma once again why, if she gets him a Roblox Card for his birthday/christmas/etc., her real $60 USD is potentially going to be spent on just one virtual hat (Dominus) or virtual sword (Godly).
My kid is finally starting to come around to the insanity behind that concept, but I feel horrible for the parents and other gift givers that don't yet understand.
I find that hard to argue with when considering that e.g. the thousands I've spent on movies over the years, while e.g. I can pretend it is for the DVDs I bought rather than for access to the movie, really is about enabling experiences too - the physical objects are now largely obsolete and just takes up space. The experiences on the other hand last.
I find myself catching up slowly to his lack of attachment to holding something physical.
Sure, that means he needs to experience some degree of loss to make him internalize the risks, but even as he's coming to terms with that, but at the same time physical objects get broken or worn or lost too.
I don't worry so much about him losing virtual items he's paid for - I think most of the disappointment comes from no longer being able to be part of a community. E.g. the game he's upset about gets mentioned because he enjoyed making me play it with him - he's never mentioned the things in it he spent money on. We play other games, but that specific experience is something he misses.
And I think that is central to what copyright holders will face: They need to realize that these communities are far more important to people than their products, even when it is the product that enables the community. And antagonizing increasingly vocal communities is not a good long term strategy, because these people are going to more and more evaluate products in terms of community and trust. My son for example care far more about the group of people he follows and plays with than the specific game.
As it currently stands, support for copyright is overall quite strong - the mainstream belief is still that a fairly substantial degree of protection is justified. But the more peoples ability to continue to access things that are important parts of their memories gets locked down, the greater the chance that more people will come to see copyright as more of a hindrance than benefit.
My son, at 8, still regularly gets upset when he thinks of a fairly inane role playing game he didn't spend all that much time on, whose online servers were shut down about two years ago, and has more than once expressed anger towards the developers for doing so.
He still has not experienced a "serious" loss in this area in the sense of a game he's invested countless hours in and made friendships in. With a culture where more and more time gets spent in these virtual worlds that people invest a lot of time, energy and even money in, if it gets taken away there will be increasing levels of anger as well (if, say, Roblox was to shut down I'll never hear the end of it)
They're going to find themselves threading a fine line here, with new generations likely to be increasingly negative to actions that will be seen not in terms of just shutting down unprofitable games, but as hostile and destructive unjustified attacks on real communities.