Copyright industry will always defeat itself. Anything short of everything humanity ever created in one place fails to compete with copyright infringement.
An anecdote: Master of Magic is one of my favorite games of all time. The company that made it was acquired; the acquirer, I think, shut down. Anyway, the upshot of all that was that the source code was literally lost. Nobody has ever found it, and people who wanted to mod the game had to do it in bytecode.
Even the license was sort of lost for a couple decades; a known company owned it but they were too large to care about deaing with this old, niche license. A few years ago, someone (Slitherine) finally persuaded them to sell. A remake of the game was then able to be released commercially, and a sequel is in the works. But it took over 20 years for that to happen.
The owner of the license cares about it.
This is not copyright being self defeating. This is copyright working as intended. If the persons who own the rights to something don't want to sell it, why do you think random third parties should suddenly be entitled to sell it instead and keep the money?
Sure it's frustrating as a consumer sometimes, and the copyright expiration periods are way too long now in the us. But how is the concept itself flawed, except to self-rationalize theft/piracy?
My latest irritation on this front is the movie Strange Days. One of my old favorites, and my partner has never seen it. The police violence narrative is powerful. Angela Bassett's performance is fire. Juliette Lewis's musical performances are great. It's not available for purchase on bluray in the US, and it's not on any streaming services in the US. Press speculation reports James Cameron owns the rights, and wants to personally oversee the remaster instead of trusting it to others. And he's not got around to that yet. Are you arguing my desire to watch the movie should override James Cameron, the producer and copyright holder's decisions on when or how to sell their artwork?
People want to buy content and yet they can't due to this bullshit. It's that simple. Nobody cares who gets paid or not, they want the thing and the copyright industry is failing to deliver. Guess who's not failing? Pirates.
You have it backwards. "Piracy" is actually the natural order of things, it doesn't need any rationalization. It's the copyright system that's self-rationalizing. Artificial scarcity is an illusion, data is infinitely abundant. It's how computers actually work and also how they should work, there is no need to justify it. It's the copyright industry that keeps ruining it for us with their eternal campaign against computer freedom just to protect their irrelevant business model.
> Are you arguing my desire to watch the movie should override James Cameron, the producer and copyright holder's decisions on when or how to sell their artwork?
Absolutely it should. That work was released almost 20 years ago now. By all reasonable expectations it should already be part of the public domain. What the creator wants doesn't matter, he's already made his fortune off of it and it's time for him to move on to new creations instead of milking past successes forever.
Sometimes tracking all of this down to even know what the pieces legal provence is would be more trouble than it would be worth.
Instead of a situation in which everyone loses (the status quo), after some point, the games would become public domain because the maximum possible copyright period has run out, enabling people to play them again.
Proving that no one owns the copyright to the satisfaction of any company or person who's even a little risk averse then becomes essentially an archeological or genealogical task that's rarely worth it.
This is why we get an endless stream of movies and books built on ideas from before 1920 and everything made since then that isn't a blockbuster of some sort languishes into obscurity. Eternal copyright is where ideas go to die.
that's why we should have kept copyright limited to human creators and not allowed them to be bought up by effectively immortal corporations who can pass, sell, or auction off those rights to other corporations. Just one more way the public is being robbed from art and creative works that should be freely and easily available to them to enjoy and build off of.
I don't see much of an issue with multiple individuals having equal share of a copyright though. We already pretty much have that now as it is. For a single recording of a song you're already dealing with a large number of rights that may not all be owned by the same people covering things like the composition, the performance/recording, synchronization, and distribution which could itself include separate licenses for different mediums (radio, physical media, streaming) or markets (domestic vs international), but somehow we manage to work it all out most of the time.
The important thing is that the problem of perpetual copyright goes away and people can start accessing and building on their own culture without fear of being sued for massive damages.
I think what we're really talking about here, if we wanted a copyright system that didn't allow corporations to own works, would be ending copyright assignment.
In that case, it's likely that part of your employment agreement would simply include a perpetual, exclusive, licensing agreement as well for all works performed on the job. It would be important that the company keep these licensing agreements on file, and would change the legal bias from "company presumed to own" to "company must demonstrate it owns," but that shouldn't really be that onerous. Companies already have to establish contractual basis for nearly everything they do anyways.
And it would put the cards on the table and it would probably make it easier (or at least more possible) to negotiate things like royalties on work that currently almost never gets it.
Also it'd make it a hell of a lot harder to exclude someone from the credits of a game because they quit 2 weeks before it went gold.
Exactly, creators would license their work to their employers and if not much much sooner, at least when the creators have died the copyright would expire and the company (along with everyone else) would be free to continue doing what they want with it.
In the cox cable lawsuit, with billions in damages at stake, the major record labels under the RIAA had a ton of infringement claims thrown out on appeal because they didn't actually have the rights or hadn't registered them at the time of the alleged activity.
It shaved a fair amount of cash off the damages cox was on the hook for, but it must have taken them an immense amount of time and effort to check the rights on all those works to find them and as far as I can tell, the labels who falsely claimed to the courts that they had the rights didn't see any consequences for their part.
If there's no accountability for failing to keep their own records in order even in such a massive high profile copyright lawsuit why would they ever bother?
The fact that these third-party publishers are doing this despite adding basically no value (and often stripping away value, by e.g. not supporting rewind / save-states in their own emulation) is bad enough. But often they don't even actually do this; they just vaguely think about doing this, and the imagined potential upside of the option of doing this, keeps them from going with Nintendo's option.
So what would a second, smaller, pricier 'emulator store' offer over that?
When someone has 100+ games to choose from, most people will be overwhelmed by choice and end up sticking to the household names. But by limiting the choices you perversely encourage people to try games they haven’t played before.
Like yourself, I’m a massive retro gamer but at the end of the day current generation consoles make their money from games licenses. So any support they throw in for older games is strictly a loss making fan service.
Why did you change paid retro games to free retro games? Nobody was suggesting they be free. Nintendo is throwing money away by offering so little.
As for why aren't those games sold individually, Nintendo used to do this with the Virtual Console on the Wii U -- which was literally their previous console. I'd wager there wasn't enough money in it to do that again. Or that they feel the Online subscription earns them more money than selling those ROMs individually.
Let's also not forget they've relatively recently launched a range of mini versions of their classic consoles. Granted they're just (IIRC) running emulation on-top of Linux but it still demonstrates that they're aware of this market.
Much as we'd like to assume Nintendo are incompetent because they're not catering to our specific needs, I think the more logical explanation is that us retro gaming nerds are a vocal minority. We love to moan about how much money Nintendo could make but if that were true Nintendo would already be doing it because they had done it previously, recently in fact, and thus already have figures about how popular these features are. And given how successful they are as a business, and how successful they are at milking their IP, they certainly wouldn't pass up the opportunity to sell ROMs if they felt there was a market there. But when you have Switch games selling for £50+, even years after their release, it's hard to disagree with Nintendo's outlook that Switch titles are a bigger source of revenue than re-releasing the same ROMs they've already re-released several times over.
What an interesting way to spin into a feature the copyright industry's inability to give people what they want. You know what else is a good thing? Emulation. Amazing thing.
> people make things for money, not love or art. Otherwise they wouldn’t copyright it.
Not only is this false, it's a huge factor in authenticity and quality. We want creators who have an intrinsic drive to create, who something to say, who have a vision they want to realize, who would create regardless of profits. Nobody cares about cheap cash grabs. The money is meant to enable their creations.
I’ve never seen this in practice. It’s usually to fuel buying some big house that no one normal could ever afford and then acting like you were granted a lordship.
I am more than happy to change my perspective but not to have a headache by deluding myself that “everyone just has to take profits!”
Maybe that’s the world you live in. I don’t want to live in it.
Investment into information property (IP) goes unseen because you only ever publicly see what happens after the success. Without a legally guaranteed return on investment on IP, investment into developing it would be stunted.
Now is usually when someone counters with open-sourced initiatives, but they themselves still have copyrights legally protecting how they are used after being developed.
That's the world we all live in, you alone are not entitled to be the only rational, self-interested person.
In other words: dude I have done things for rich people like crazy rich people, and they’re babies who can’t do for themselves and got money through generational wealth or wealthy relatives or knowing wealthy people. I have done for myself with less than most get and my lack of empathy comes directly from people who are allowed to fail in luxury.
I'm in the middle when it comes to money for creation. I'd buy a house and a car if i could because it would be nice to have a stable place to live as i get older and a way to get around, but my primary thought is always: "how can i make enough cash to give me the time i need to work on my project?" because creative projects are literally the only thing i do with my time. I can't live without creating things.
I worked for over 35 years, to have enough money to be able to work on stuff I love to do.
I'm not rich; and never will be, but I have enough, not to be worrying about starving. That's a rare luxury.
And I work on the kinds of things that I want to work on; not that someone else wants me to do for them, so they can make a bunch of money. Most of my work is given to people and organizations that can't afford talent like mine.
We can all be paid more and work less and things will get better. Now, making people actually understand that is an entirely different beast.
I can sympathize with your friend, I made digital art for a while and distribute it for free still to this day without any license whatsoever. Because I love to make art. I write with no expectation that I will get a book deal, that someone will pay to read it, or that I can convert it to some form of sellable text.
Because I love to write.
The more I’m on Earth the less I like it here.
You would think this would be the case, but I have only encountered this at one company. I was a professional web developer / designer who also learned to become a "full stack" engineer over the course of 20 years. it started out great and kept me satiated creatively for a long time but ultimately i think it lead to more trouble than it was worth (a career i mean).
The number of companies that have taken advantage of me in various ways is appalling. I decided I wanted to stop working 10 years ago but I still had debt to pay off and a number of other poor life choices that had me weighted down. I knew I wanted to make games but I also had never programmed any games (other than some qbasic stuff when i was a kid) so I quit my job and started contracting and learned c# and Unity3D and tinkered with games in my spare time.
I've also learned C++ and Unreal Engine and done a bit of just pure C++ game stuff but I haven't released anything official yet.
My current plan is to release a few well polished small games that I've been working on to multiple platforms and see what happens.
> I love to make art. I write with no expectation
This is exactly how i feel about the games. I have lost loads of money thanks to this and in reality it may never pan out financially, but at least I will get some creative projects out the door and feel satisfied that I didn't waste my entire skill set assigning scrum points to story cards, or working 18 hours a day for some other person's startup fever dream.
People make things for all sorts of combinations of various amounts of money, love, and art.
The idea that motivation must be purely extrinsic or purely intrinsic is false and toxic. It demeans paid work and discourages people from seeking meaning in their jobs.
Saying, "I don't like mint chocolate chip ice cream" does not spontaneously cause sales of it to plummet across the world.
...you're on Hacker News. A significant portion of this website is just people talking about Open Source Software, something that consistently produces case studies about people making things for love or for art or for passion instead of just for money.
Plenty of people make things for value that isn't purely financial.
> Otherwise they wouldn't copyright it.
This isn't how copyright works, at least in the US. Generalizing broadly, you own the copyright of whatever you create unless you've otherwise signed that away. It's automatic. You don't fill out a form to have copyright over a work.
Am I? I know that’s the name but it’s not really for hackers. It’s mainly for businesspeople who are very sensitive, don’t really know much of anything beyond their desk job or coding and don’t care much for the hacker ethos.
If I post like myself, really like myself, that is, extremely weird and sarcastic, I’ll get the Socrates/Voltaire/Diogenes treatment and be shown the door. I think people like to call themselves hackers, or pirates, or “code ninjas” —- it is escapism from the truth that they no longer do it for the love, it’s for the money, or they are doing it for the job, the prestige, the “do you know who I am?!” Effect.
Which I don’t care about cuz I’m a hacker. I didn’t get your fancy 4 year degree. I’ll write your code dude but I’m not going to fawn over wealth like it’s valuable because to me it isn’t.
I’ve seen many people get sensitive or bristly attitudes here, report the post, downvote, because they don’t have much to say or engage with.
They disagree, and that’s it.
I am “man you disagree with” and “bad man” because you disagree.
The simple truth here is this: I don't have a four year degree. I don't even write code for a living. I work in IT, in a role that you would probably best describe as just 'IT guy.' I don't make more than $60,000 a year in the role I'm currently in. I care about money to the extent that I need money to live, to feed my car gas, to feed myself food, and to feed my computer at home electricity.
You're getting the cold shoulder here because you don't seem to have the nuance to understand how people actually interact with and care about their work. I feel like we live in a nightmarish hellscape where a significant portion of work is driven by nothing but desire for profit, but this doesn't suddenly make me think that everyone involved in making things is only there because they get paid. On the other hand, you appear to think any person who sells anything is going through this whole process purely for money.
The replies to you have been perfectly amicable, and encourage discussion. YOU have been shutting that discussion down because people don't agree with you.
I also don’t think that what I wrote is an ad-hominem. It’s the truth.
“ I feel like we live in a nightmarish hellscape where a significant portion of work is driven by nothing but desire for profit, but this doesn't suddenly make me think that everyone involved in making things is only there because they get paid.”
I feel this is true but I disagree with your second part of the statement because that’s all that motivates me to go to work, ever.
To me merely being forced to attend some building or talk to some people at a certain time is said nightmarish hellscape.
I further disagree with your framing at the end. I think that it’s a challenging discussion but I’m not shutting people down, I am responding to them with my thoughts and letting them respond in kind. If anything your framing has these elements, but if you disagree just say so. It’s really not a heinous crime to disagree with me. Many have done so.
You're responding with your thoughts in ways that could seem calculated to inspire ire and to offend. Most folks don't consider that good-faith discussion.
I don't think you're doing it on purpose. But maybe you'll find more constructive responses if you more deeply consider the emotional charge of how you choose to put words together.
Now that I have all these real nice screwdrivers lying around, I can sell them to other people who might want a really nice screwdriver. Not only did I get to do the thing I enjoyed doing: making screwdrivers, but I also made some money off of it. Some of that money can be used to cover cost of materials on the screwdriver I made, the rest of it can be used to enrich my personal life, or maybe grant me access to stronger tools to do the thing I enjoy doing.
Making something and selling something are two different tasks. I can love making things and still sell those things for a profit, and my love for making things can have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I get money out of it. Where do you get the presumption that you can't possibly do something good that you like and still make money off of it?
You would only see these actors using these certain types of products and appearing in movies where the action or entertainment incorporates product.
Presenting The 90s, brought to you by Amazon. Beige computers, everyone has the same hairstyle, small town Americana!
I think most people are tasteless enough to really like this.
You really can’t imagine how disappointing it is and how little it makes me want to engage in the future.
It's pretty horrifying that someone really believes "people make things for money, not love or art." and frames it as "let’s be honest here," implying that to hold any other belief is lying to yourself. That's textbook expecting everyone to agree with you.
If you're not joking, then I've met someone who disregards my entire career and background as a lie. You really can’t imagine how disappointing it is and how little it makes me want to engage in the future.
I'll be up front - I do disagree with your take, at least partially. I quite like the screwdriver analogy used elsewhere in the comments.
I love working with computers. I have for years.
Recently, I turned that into a job. I enjoy my job, though I wouldn't say I love it. However, it does allow me 5o practice and learn, so that I can improve my skills when I do perform a labor-of-love project.
If I were to make a labor of love project, and then someone were to pay me to support it, why would that project atop being a labor of love? There would be extra workload that would not (billing, other business cruft, etc), but I think the core of it would be.
Similarly for art/music - if I producea song because I like writing music, and people are willing to pay for a high quality download, would it stop being a labor of love at that point?
Curious to hear your thoughts on these edge cases.
Which isn’t to say you aren’t having positive feelings at your job, I think that’s possible and in general ideal.
Enjoyment out of spending more time the way you want to as opposed to the way others have dictated it be spent is very natural, I believe. But I have to draw the distinction between love and enjoyment. Love (to me) is the expression of an idea from the soul, and the willingness to nurture this idea from the perspective of nature and harmony. There is a harmony in creating order (code, poetry, music), and there is a harmony in creating a roughness around which order and harmony form. (Clouds, fractals, abstract ideas, natural patterns) to experience this as the self with the world and with others in the world is how I believe love exists and comes to be.
When you’re paid for this process it diminishes love with the element of time, and space. You have to do it by so and so time, or there will be a material consequence. (Even if the time is very far away)
I don’t think that your labor of love becomes undone, but it’s something else. It’s enjoying the fruits of your labor, and that is not the same as laboring for love. Not to me at least.
I even would say you can enjoy making things others love. But for you yourself, it’s not possible.
And for me, in practical experience, I don’t get many who love what I do, and I don’t really enjoy the climate around me full of people doing nothing but stacking up money for no purpose.
I suppose my real gripe here is that I wish things were good or meaningful.
Due to licensing, this isn’t possible. So there‘a going to be an infinite amount more days like this.
https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/detail/2021/the-classic-ga...
But I just wanted to let my son Mario 64, and $80 per year is too much for that.
Sure, Nintendo isn't pricing their franchises at the price point you want, but in context to the discussion they're at least re-releasing what they can and making them accessible.
(And if it was really about letting your son play Super Mario World, you can pay $8 and he can play it for three months)
(I could be wrong about this. If so, please correct me.)
Also it may be easy to link digital purchases right now, but proving past cartridge purchases would be very difficult.
Nintendo obviously agrees, since they charge less than that for Mario 64 on the Switch.
https://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-3D-All-Stars-Nintendo-Swi...
It even comes bundled with Galaxy.
https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/detail/2021/super-mario-3d...
Are they still manufacturing the cartridges, or did it just sell really poorly?
I don't see any problem with the content, though.
If this were the actual reason, Ocarina of Time would not have released on it with so many graphical glitches and input lag which they eventually fixed later.
It's like buying a book that's set to self-destruct a decade from now - no sane consumer would buy such a product.
There are good arguments to be made against subscriptions in comparison to purchases, but lots of "sane consumers" do buy in to such subscriptions with volatile content libraries that might have pieces of content self-destruct at any time (Netflix and Hulu).
Plus, an NSO subscription is needed for online play, so many consumers have subscribed to NSO to play online with their friends, and access to the NES and SNES libraries is a freebie bonus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Virtual_Console_games_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_Online...
Plus the article mentions that NSO service has some games that weren’t available elsewhere.
Late 2006 I bought the Wii and then the Wii U in 2014 and now I pay the family plan at maybe $70 a year?
Doesn’t seem different to buying songs on iTunes in 2006 and now paying for Apple Music every month now.
I disagree. You should as far as I'm aware be able to still use those songs
Does anyone do this as you’d like to see it with software? Maybe Valve?
Well, it's not that anyone is necessarily perfect. But the other major console players certainly seem better - if I bought a PS4 game a few years ago then I can reasonably expect to still play it on PS6 and probably onwards. X360 games have been brought back to life by MSoft.
Steam is generally pretty good yeah but it doesn't have the issue of consecutive consoles to deal with.
What percentage of eg Super Mario bros players, play the game on original hardware and how many emulate it? Or legend of zelda, link to the past? Wario land?
If you want to play these old games, emulation is currently the best and cheapest option for most people.
Yes yes I know the workarounds I'm not willing to switch phone OS or substantially modify my current one though.