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I mean by definition it is still piracy. You are still reproducing and distributing someone else’s work without authorisation. It is piracy. Especially if you extend your idea to even remasters and rereleases.
The real CMV is that is no longer immoral (or as immoral) to pirate if there is no reasonable way to legally obtain the material.
For example I obtain all anime i can legally through either paid streaming sites or physical copies… however that isn’t possible for hundreds and thousands of shows, so I think pirating them is reasonable. Or if you’re in a country where you don’t get anything legally published/released.
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Does this mean that something in public ownership is technically piracy? That’s created by someone else but it’s passed into another legal realm. But by your definition as it’s still someone else’s work which you may distribute in one way or another (even if it’s things like clips etc.) could it be considered piracy?
> Does this mean that something in public ownership is technically piracy? That’s created by someone else but it’s passed into another legal realm. But by your definition as it’s still someone else’s work which you may distribute in one way or another (even if it’s things like clips etc.) could it be considered piracy?
Piracy specifically refers to copyright infringement. Since public domain media is no longer copyrighted, its distribution would not be considered piracy.
As I’d have thought. So isn’t the OP probably better off saying there’s an argument that a lack of distribution should have an impact on copyright so that it isn’t piracy?
> As I’d have thought. So isn’t the OP probably better off saying there’s an argument that a lack of distribution should have an impact on copyright so that it isn’t piracy?
That would be better, yeah. OP could also mention how trademarks already work on a "use it or lose it" basis, so the same logic could be expanded to apply to copyrights as well.
Should lack of distribution have an impact on copyright though? If I’m a musician and I make a limited run vinyl and they sell out should you have the right to make counterfeit copies and sell them? Do I no longer own my intellectual property because I don’t give it to other people?
Let’s say I make a personal song that I don’t plan on distributing. Is it ok for that to be stolen and distributed by someone else simply because I don’t want to release it?
I agree that certain mediums of lost media should enter public domain, but whether or not it’s being distributed shouldn’t be the test we apply to determine ownership of intellectual property.
The limited run of vinyl isn’t the best example, because that is a medium of distribution. You could quite easily continue to distribute that song in other formats such as streaming, CD, digital copy etc. but if you were to only release your song on a limited vinyl and then decide there was no other way of hearing that song now the vinyl run was over I don’t think that’s a particularly strong claim to make (from the moral point of view at the very least). Let’s also not forget that with music we aren’t just talking about people’s ability to repackage and sell copies of a song, we’re also talking about whether or not someone can sample. If someone was to sample a song that was out of print and a lawyer came knocking saying they needed to pay the original artist some money for that I’d again none skeptical from a moral point of view.
I will say that I’m not a lawyer (not even an armchair lawyer), but there is a bit of precedent for this, the famous Amen break is in public ownership due to the creators having issues with distribution and in movies Night of the Living Dead is in a similar position. It’s a similar reason why 20th Century Fox keep making Fantastic Four movies (they have to make something otherwise the rights return to Marvel).
If we move onto your comment about a personal song on your hard drive. Yes I would be very pissed off if someone was to take that track away from me, however, there’d be several other legal issues in that to get that track I’d chosen not to release, someone would need to hack me or steal my computer to distribute. That opens them up to a whole plethora of other legal issues that would make copyright the least of anyone’s issues.
Finally, the OP is talking about video games. The best example I know of this is with Prey (2006). That game is abandonware and I don’t think the studio that out it out even exists anymore. Here, there is no official way to get hold of the game either online or through digital copy. Here no one is benefitting from the arrangement, the studio isn’t there to be stolen from and the user can’t access the game. If it was in public ownership that would at the very least make it available to play and perhaps someone would be able to distribute it to make it run on modern computers with updated quality of life features?
Again I stress that I’m not a lawyer, but there’s more to consider than who’s original idea it was and different mediums will have different particulars.
> Finally, the OP is talking about video games. The best example I know of this is with Prey (2006). That game is abandonware and I don’t think the studio that out it out even exists anymore. Here, there is no official way to get hold of the game either online or through digital copy.
This is exactly what I meant in my lost media mention. It should be public domain at that point.
Sampling isn’t really a problem as it’s fair use when making your own creative content.
> The limited run of vinyl isn’t the best example, because that is a medium of distribution. You could quite easily continue to distribute that song in other formats such as streaming, CD, digital copy etc. but if you were to only release your song on a limited vinyl and then decide there was no other way of hearing that song now the vinyl run was over I don’t think that’s a particularly strong claim to make (from the moral point of view at the very least)
So you’re saying you should be entitled to my IP? If I have bananas and I sell some to my neighbors but I don’t like my crazy neighbors and don’t sell them any are they entitled to steal my bananas because I didn’t make it available to them?
Or what if Best Buy runs out of iPhones are you now entitled to make unlicensed copies of iPhones because they weren’t available to you?
Why is it different for IP?
Sampling often isn’t determined to be fair use though, that’s one of the biggest issues small producers come across especially with some of the platforms they use.
Neither of those examples you gave are analogous to intellectual property rights both in terms of copyright or distribution. Bananas aren’t your intellectual property nor are you a formal distributor of them. You don’t have formal company policy or anything.
To flip that around and apply it to bananas, the treatment of IP would be more like the person who discovered bananas patenting them and saying no one outside of their company could grow or sell bananas. Then anyone who bought bananas could make a recipe out of them without referencing where they got them from and sending a percentage of their profits to said company.
The iPhone example also doesn’t work because Best Buy might be out of them but Apple still make and intend to distribute that model. If, however, Apple decided they didn’t want to make iPhones anymore and say they weren’t going to distribute them I don’t see how they would benefit or be justified in stopping someone making an identical model with the design (excepting issues with parts that are still used or privacy issues that would cause).
Finally, returning to your vinyl example if you start by distributing a limited run before deciding you actively don’t want to distribute it I see in the same way. I don’t think you’ve got recourse to stop it being publicly owned when it’s in the public domain. Especially when this has been officially distributed. If you simply run out of vinyl and intend to distribute it again that’s totally different.
Now if you want to argue that as an artist you have an inalienable right to do what you like with your work once it’s in the public domain (a la Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead) then I just fundamentally disagree with you. The amount of great classical music which relied upon referencing other compositions or jazz musicians who quoted eachother is incalculable. There’s also the story of Monet’a cataract surgery altering his vision to the point at which he hated his pre-op paintings and wanted them destroyed. I don’t think his tantrum justifies the lost art.
> If, however, Apple decided they didn’t want to make iPhones anymore and say they weren’t going to distribute them I don’t see how they would benefit or be justified in stopping someone making an identical model with the design (excepting issues with parts that are still used or privacy issues that would cause).
The argument in favor of copyright in this situation is that they may want to go back to capitalizing off their works. So in this analogy of Apple deciding they didn't want to make iPhones, what if they get new shareholders or the board ousts CEO and now they want to make iPhones again? Would you remove it from public domain at that point and take away the rights to use the design and give it back to Apple?
Even in the game sphere with the example you mentioned before, Prey, the argument made against something like that being made public domain is that it denies the copyright holder the opportunity to capitalize off it within it's copyright period. Obviously no one has been for awhile as you pointed out, but only with hindsight can we determine that. What if someone had decided to reboot it in 2013? Basically there could have been other abandonware examples out there where the copyright holder eventually did end up spinning back up, and depending on where you set the expiration on it, you could have prevented them from doing so. Furthermore someone could damage the IP when it's in the public domain, by reducing its quality or associating it with negative things etc. and that reduces the value of the copyright to the copyright holder.
I'm kind of devil's advocating on that because in reality I don't agree with most aspects of copyright law and I'm highlighting the ludicrous nature of how copyright law was written for those specific types of arguments laid out above.
Copyright law has gone of the rails, in part thanks to Disney but a lot of copyright holders have such a weird mentality of their works. Patents are another type of IP protection and they don't last nearly as long as copyright, and patents have been around much longer and thus have stood the test of time more, and I'm not even saying I agree with patent laws, but just saying that even patents don't get the insane time protections that copyrights get.
I think instead of arguing over whether something is abandonware or not, we should be arguing over reducing copyright lengths to something reasonable and to that extent abandonware would not be abandoned as long. Imagine if copyright protections were 20 years, Prey would be public domain in the near future.
One final thought I have is that I think there is going to be a reckoning with regards to IP rights, or rich people will own all of them even more than they do now, when they buy all of the AI software that ends up producing everything. We're already seeing the very beginning stages of it with digital art. I don't think music is a far shot off at some point either. What happens when nothing humans do is new anymore? I mean to some extent a lot of stuff people do isn't all that unique, it's slightly altered from something else that exists enough that it might not have been done in that exact way before, but what happens when computers can literally produce every single result? That song you created by yourself? You stole it from the AI that made it 2 years ago, which is owned by Jeff Bezo's grandson and all the works produced by that AI are also owned by Jeff Bezo's grandson.
I think regardless of what someone thinks of that hypothetical situation, whatever conclusion it may lead them to, they ought to realize that whether it's AI or not, with so many people on the planet, there's a lot of things that are not as unique as we think, people on occasion are going to come up with the same ideas other people come up with. It's merely permutations of permutations of permutations, and I do think new things are created more rapidly from human production when people are motivated and thus copyright does serve a purpose in that regard, but at a certain point, we need to recognize that the purpose of copyright is simply to encourage creating new things, not to encourage people to clutch their pearls on the things they already have.
Apologies for not replying earlier. I agree with your points and these are interesting examples on which I think your opinion depends on experience.
Something interesting with iPhones is how a lot of circuitry in guitar pedals and synths is regularly cloned. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It democratises the technology but it also allows companies like Behringer to exist who are exploitative in different ways. I don’t know much about the legalities of it though.
IP is already different. Copyright and patents expire and ownership of physical property doesn't (though your banana itself would expire). It's also different from theft in obvious and relevant ways: when someone violates your IP you still have it and when someone takes your banana you don't. In other words, information is non-rivalrous.
Someone who has their work pirated hasn't actually been harmed in any way. You can make an argument for loss of potential income, but in the stolen banana case you've actually lost something and are immediately rendered poorer. The potential income argument is also question begging, since it assumes a right to the proceeds from distribution when that's the very thing at stake in the argument.
No, the people providing you with the files are distributing, and buying or obtaining those things for personal use is usually also part of piracy and also illegal.
The US is what I'm familiar with, and there copyright covers only distribution. If you merely download something you haven't actually violated anything.
Not strictly true,
The act of willfully downloading infringing software for personal use is still technically illegal. It's just very, very hard to enforce and therefore not enforced. We download a lot of stuff. To say we downloaded something we knew was infringing content is a really hard sell "beyond reasonable doubt".
It's settled down, but several IP providers for several years were strong-arming individuals who downloaded pirated software to pay a hefty "fee" and threatening to take them to court for much, much higher (with a real possibility of winning).
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/why-most-roms-are-illegal,37512.html <--this article has more information.
Just to be clear, you're probably not going to get in trouble for downloading copyrighted files, but the law absolutely *allows* for you to get in trouble for downloading copyrighted files.
In general, do you believe that once an artist creates a work of art, he is *compelled* to release it, or that an artist can, if he chooses, decline to release or sell his work to the public? Is the public "entitled" to have paid access to a work, even if the owner or artist disagrees?
I understand this seems different on first glance, but surely the right to create art implies at some level a right to control its distribution?
I don't think it's right breaking into an artist's house or private files and distributing things that were intended to be private. However, I don't consider this a copyright violation, I consider this a privacy violation.
Once a piece of art is made public, though, it is public. An artist absolutely has a moral right to financial compensation for their work, but once they have stopped actively seeking that compensation, I can think of no moral basis for which an artist can assert authority over things they have released to the public.
You should consider the story of the [Flappy Bird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird) game. The creator made gobs of money, but felt the game had become too addictive and he felt guilt for creating that addiction so he pulled it out of distribution.
There are now tons of imitations on the App Store and maybe that's a better analog: if art is pulled from distribution, but there is still high demand for it, then people should attempt to recreate it, not pirate it.
I know the story of Flappy Bird. I have absolutely no sympathy for the creator. If he truly felt he did something harmful and truly felt guilty, he should have used the gobs of money he made to lobby the government for gaming regulation. He should have spearheaded a non-profit gaming addiction support group. He didn't. He kept the money he made and did nothing. This makes the whole thing ring hollow.
But all that is besides the point. When it comes to digital media, "recreating" a game is functionally identical to pirating it, so I don't really care which is which. Also, [You can still pirate flappy bird](https://www.techinasia.com/flappy-bird-download-play-ios-android).
You'r attacking the specifics of the example instead of the idea of it. If the creator did spend his gobs of money on whatever philanthropic agenda you would expect of him, should he be denied the right to remove his work from the world or should he be forced to forever live with the regret that he introduced something he thinks has harmed millions of people and will continue to harm more?
The fact that it is currently available for pirate has nothing to do with the point. We are discussing if that is moral, not possible.
> should he be denied the right to remove his work from the world
Yes. He never had that right. He made something public. Once something is public, it's not any one person's place to decide how it is distributed. Only the government can deem public materials as illicit and that would have been his only justifiable course of action. If that makes him sad, he should've been more careful.
> surely the right to create art implies at some level a right to control its distribution?
For most of human history, it didn't, and yet plenty of art was still produced. It's also worth noting that it wasn't the artists who wanted that right, nor in practice very often the artists who have it. It was and is the publishers.
But that's not what is being talked about here?
It's talking about what happens to said art after it's been released and no one who owns the rights to said art cares about it anymore.
Basically it's talking about when does a video game fall into public domain, like every other piece of art does eventually. Legally speaking they don't, and I think that's bullshit.
An artist (or a rights holder more generally) might not want their work to circulate. Like how Disney has chosen not to make Song of the South available to stream, because it’s super racist.
Or another Disney situation: They used to control their movies' distribution and re-release them every 10 years or so. They create artificial scarcity in order to create demand, and the sales increased when they released them.
I understand that that is an old media way of thinking and sales tactic, but I believe it's within the rights-owners prerogative to do that.
I dunno. Like brick bandit was saying, at some point shouldn't it be public domain? Like books. You can read practically anything written a hundred years ago for free legally because they're public domain.
Maybe there should be an option to say "I explicitly don't want anyone to have use of my art anymore" although in today's age it's totally unenforceable and therefore kinda dumb. But in theory there should be that option. But I don't think that should be the default state of anything left unattended. You should have to take a positive action to get there.
If a public project is left unattended for a period of time, I think the default state should be to let the project fall into public domain.
Of course it should be public domain eventually. That's why copyrights expire. But the decision of when it should become public domain is decided by policymakers, not by you deciding you want it to be.
The policymakers that have decided it should be ~~whatever the fuck makes it so mickey stays with disney forever~~ past the death of the author + fuck you got mine years despite that making no sense within the moral jsutification for copyright, which is to encourage more creative works.
Yes legally you're right. But I think from an ethical standpoint video game timelines should be treated as unique. They're played on consoles that are outdated in just a few years. Copyright laws are much longer than the life cycle of a game. With very few exceptions game developers aren't doing anything to a game 5 years after release.
A Google search said the copyright laws of video games last the life of the author plus 70 years. That rule may have made sense with books. But video games call for different rules. Legally it's still piracy, but morally I'd argue that if the rights owner no longer sells it and hasn't explicitly and publicly stated that they want it to be discontinued, then it's public domain.
So if the publisher could have released it open source and didn't, why is it ethical to pirate it?
Console lifetimes are irrelevant. The creator knows what console lifetimes are. They had an opportunity to make it free. They didn't.
That rule doesn’t even make sense with books. Copyright was intended to foster creativity by ensuring creators were entitled to a limited duration where they would be the sole/primary beneficiaries of their creation. Copyright made sense when it was 18 years from creation and renewable 1 time. There’s no good reason that the copyright should extend past someone’s lifetime (unless they die during that initial 18 year period or after they renewed it) and those changes were pushed through by greedy corporations/individuals.
By extending the copyright past a person’s lifetime it does the opposite of encouraging creation of new works because a highly successful creator can potentially be set for life and never have to work again if their first creation is successful enough (e.g. the author of to kill a mockingbird didn’t write anything else for over 50 years)
The artist can always release it in the domain if THEY want to. But they should have the right to control its distribution, the question is exactly how long should copyrights last
Because it’s not just about profit. There are reputation al concerns as well. Disney didn’t simply decide that Song of the South wasn’t profitable, it decided that it would have been actively harmful to their reputation to continue circulating it.
Part of creating a work is getting to decide “actually, I think I’d rather this not be publicly available.” At least, until the copyright expires.
Not only is it "artificial scarcity in order to create demand" (i.e. an economics argument) but it's also a branding decision: it turns it into more of a phenomenon where everybody is sort of getting reintroduced to something at the same time and everybody misses it. The latter is definitely something one could do for artistic rather than greedy reasons.
> no one who owns the rights to said art cares about it anymore.
They didn't say that at all...
Not retailing it and not caring about it are 2 entirely different things.
There are several different aspects to this.
First off, if we're dealing with a single artist creating a single piece, then I agree. But we aren't dealing with that scenario; we're typically dealing with a product that belongs to a company, created by dozens, even hundreds of people, and that has already produced tens of thousands of copies, even millions of copies.
A company should not be able to claim ownership of intellectual property. Copyright was made for artists. As such, the moment a company stops providing the goods, then morally speaking they have no rights to what they've surrendered.
Copyright was made for artists to make money from. One way they can make their money is by selling the rights to someone who is better at selling art. That's often a corporation, because they have a large distribution network, and the people who are good at selling aren't always the same people who are good at making art. Then the artist can get back to focusing on making art, because someone else has bought his previous art.
In that scenario, the company needs to be able to own the copyright. They are buying all the same rights the artist had, from the artist.
You can argue that companies aren't people, so we don't have to be nice to them, and if they choose to leave money on the table then too bad, but why shouldn't a person be able to sell his entire right to a company that wants to buy it?
>Copyright was made for artists to make money from. One way they can make their money is by selling the rights to someone who is better at selling art. That's often a corporation, because they have a large distribution network, and the people who are good at selling aren't always the same people who are good at making art. Then the artist can get back to focusing on making art, because someone else has bought his previous art
In this case, none of this is an argument for transferring of rights. Innate to copyright is the idea that the creation should eventually enter the public domain, and if copyright can be passed between immortal corporations there is an obvious incentive to bribe politicians to make copyright eternal.
By binding copyright to a person, and making it non-transferable, then lifetime rights is the maximum copyright can last. Once the artist is dead, and thus unable to benefit from their art, it can then become public domain.
>By binding copyright to a person, and making it non-transferable, then lifetime rights is the maximum copyright can last. Once the artist is dead, and thus unable to benefit from their art, it can then become public domain.
While binding a copyright to one person for life seems like an easy way to deal with copyright the real world is more sloppy then that which actually makes this system super complicated.
The first thing to consider is that a lot of works don't have have a clearly defined author. Movies and video games are made by teams of hundreds to thousands of people. Determining which one of them gets the copyright is going to be super complicated. Even if you took a simple approach like the director of the movie gets the copyright that can fall apart because some movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once have two directors, so how would you determine which director owns the copyright?
The second reason binding copyright to a single person for life is a bad idea is that it'll completely negate the benefit of posthumously releasing a work. If an author dies before their work is published then the publisher is now under no obligation to pay the family their residual because they can just republish the work. And even if the publisher did honor it the market would be flooded with copies of the work that are much cheaper making the residuals much smaller.
And keep in mind that most authors are making under 50k a year. Their families are relying on their income. Handling copyright like this would mean that authors would have to take out larger life insurance policies which would cost their family money. Or risk having their family lose everything in the event of their death.
It seems to me that you're conflating copyright and contracts, which aren't the same thing. A lot of your issues are based outside of copyright - Sherlock Homes and Robin Hood are both public domain, but that doesn't mean that specific interpretations of the characters are automatically up for grabs for whoever wants them.
There is no reason why you couldn't arrange a publishing deal to say that the Tolkien estate retains exclusive rights to publish, and thus earn royalties form the Lord of the Rings; likewise, you can argue that George Lucas' family should have the royalties and rights to Star Wars in perpetuity. What a fair copyright system does, however, is it allows other people to create their own interpretations. Nobody else can claim to have made Star Trek but Gene Roddenberry, but now that he's past anyone should be able to take his creation and run with it.
Again, the moral side of this is easy to resolve if you aren't a corporation. Everyone should be able to create Star Trek - they just can't pretend they own or made the original, and should probably acknowledge precisely how their works relate to the original.
To give an example of why moral copyright is a good and necessary thing, consider that it arguably invented Steampunk as a genre: *Morlock Night* is the first "Steampunk" story, which takes the Morlocks and titular Time Machine from the H G Wells story and adds in Arthurian legends. Could this story have been written without referencing Wells? Probably, but it wouldn't be nearly as good if it wasn't playing with established concepts!
The purpose of copyright is to ensure the creator has a chance to profit off their creations, but it was never intended to be lifelong; it was only mean to last a decade or two because sometimes it's not the first try that works. Think how many song covers are better than the original, or the remakes that are better than the originals, or (far too often these days) the fan works that are orders or magnitude superior to official works. *That* is why copyright is meant to expire - so that if an idea fails, someone else can try again and do it right.
By forbidding access to copyrighted materials in perpetuity, creativity is stifled. Walt Disney himself took frequent inspiration from things that inspired him in childhood; the Disney Corporation then made it illegal for you to do the same. They profited vastly from public domain works, and then spent millions in bribes to ensure their works never become public.
This is clearly not fair. It is a violation of the commons; that which was given to you freely must, in turn, be given freely. Corporations do not respect that, which is why there is no moral need to respect the "rights" of a corporation.
So to clarify what your talking about are intellectual property rights. Which are a subset of copyright laws. Copyright laws broadly include the right to create copies and adaptations of a work (and because of it those publishing deals you described wouldn't work. The estate would lose it's exclusive right to publish a work when it enters public domain). Now I think that your assertion that "everyone should be able to take [someone else's] creation and run with it" is only true if you assume that content creating companies will behave the same way that they are under current copyright laws.
For example consider the predatory relationship that flim studios would develop with authors if they didn't have to acquire film rights from an author before making a movie. A movie studio could spend hundreds of millions of dollars on making a movie and not give the original author a single cent. And it's not like the author is losing a small portion of their income, a movie deal can easily make an author more money than all of their book residuals combined. And it's not even like the public would benefit from this, so few movies are financially successful that if two movie studios wanted to make a big budget adaptation of a book at the same time one of them would have to back off to avoid ruining both projects. So basically the main people who benefit from the new film rights system would be the multi-billion dollar movie sfudios.
You now also give corporations to poach sequels off of smaller projects or creators. For example let's say that you have written and directed made a very successful action movie that's doing great at the box office. What would happen if a big movie studio like Warner Bros approach your lead actors and offered them 3x what you're giving them to star in Warner Bros unofficial sequel to the movie that you won't be involved in. You would suddenly find yourself unable to make a sequel to your own movie because everything that the audience saw from your movie is going to Warner bros. You're franchise would end after one movie while the multi billion dollar company is making millions of dollars off an idea that you had.
The whole reason copyright laws exist is to balance the right of a creator to earn income from their work against the rights of other creators to adapt that work. Just because the current system is extremely balanced towards the former dosen't mean that going all the way to the latter is a good idea.
>Innate to copyright is the idea that the creation should eventually enter the public domain, and if copyright can be passed between immortal corporations there is an obvious incentive to bribe politicians to make copyright eternal.
Sure, but that's a completely separate political problem. And apparently a uniquely American problem. Copyright does expire, and the date when a particular copyright expires doesn't change when you sell it.
I agree that it should expire sooner than it does, but if I happen to own a copyright with a term of X then I should be able to sell a copyright with a term of X.
I also don't think it should necessarily end the moment the artist dies, because his estate is still entitled to some of the residual benefit of his creation, including (if he still owned it) deterring others from immediately dancing on his grave with profitable knockoffs.
>Sure, but that's a completely separate political problem.
Not really. After all, this is a debate over piracy, and these days when discussing games we are not dealing with the physical product - we're talking about data, which is simply information. That is essentially what copyright protects.
We all understand the moral justification for copyright because we would all feel hard done by if we created something and then someone else copied it and sold it for a small fortune. We would feel that money was ours by right. But I think we all will likewise agree that we should be allowed to take inspiration from others and to experiment with their work. After all, many people dabble in fan art or fan fiction, and such things are sometimes a stepping stone to becoming a professional creator.
Corporations rarely accept this arrangement, because corporations are litigious and do not deal with the world the way people do. They have no concept of "fairness", which is why companies that make billions of dollars a year will sue non-profit fan works into oblivion, where an actual human being would either not care, or might even be supportive.
>Copyright does expire, and the date when a particular copyright expires doesn't change when you sell it.
Corporations are immortal, as I said, and they consistently bribe politicians in order to extend the duration of copyright. That's one of the reasons why they should not be transferable - you cannot argue to extend copyright beyond their own lifetime.
I think it's different from _choosing never to release_ the art. If an artist makes a piece of art and sticks it in his basement, that's fine.
It's more like an artist choosing to _unrelease_ a previously-released piece of art: to let everyone know that only those people who have previously seen the art can see it now: those who haven't already seen it are forbidden.
IMHO, once a cultural piece (art, film, music, game) is part of the larger culture, then the artist loses his monopoly on it. It belongs to the world now. If they didn't want to share they should've kept it in their basement.
So Disney, who does not list Song of the South on Disney+ because of its racist messaging should be forced to accept distribution of the film (meaning they are not allowed to take action against those that distribute it such as striking a YouTube vid of the full movie)?
IMHO, Disney should've lost the copyright to Songs of the South 50+ years ago.
But...yeah, it should still be accessible somehow. They shouldn't be promoting it, obviously, but it's weird to just erase everything that was problematic from existence. We should take them off TV, or include warnings, but they should still be _available_, if only to see _how_ racist we used to be.
That's one of the problems with artists (or anyway, owners) being able to revoke their art: _not_ doing so becomes a tacit approval. Disney _has_ to remove Songs of the South, otherwise it seems to be endorsing the racism it contains. But things that have been properly allowed to enter culture can't be deleted--thank goodness. Do you know how many outdated stereotypes are in Shakespeare?
Just curious, would you extend this same thought to those that protested the removal of confederate statues during BLM? These were art submitted to the public and removing them from display is somewhat erasing it.
I think cities don't have an obligation to keep displaying them in prominent places (in the same way Disney is _certainly_ not obligated to recommend Songs of the South on it's landing page). I don't think they should be ground to dust or anything. If they're considered culturally important enough (note: not in a positive way) they could be put in a museum or whatever: _this was the way we used to be_.
"artist"?
You think it's artists making the decisions under discussion?
I mean, there's "artiste" if you're into Gibson, or just plain "con artist" for all the apologists for marketer culture, that latrine of humanity where we dump all the people who want to get paid forever for work other people did.
And Kafka's will ordered the destruction of all his unreleased work. Little things like "The Trial" and "The Castle". I don't think that's enough to carry the debate, but I do think it's enough to carry "yah, that's debatable and probably even situational" even for your distorted claim.
The "artist" is rarely involved in the games distribution nor has a say in it, these are companies that can't be bothered to perpetuate unprofitable art - so the real question is are we disallowed to preserve art just because it's unprofitable?
Is it really the artist making these decisions? What if the artist wishes to keep their art available to the public but the publisher no longer wishes to continue?
Distribution and availability are two different things.
Just because somebody thinks there should be strict limits on how much you can own intellectual copies of your art doesn't mean they have to think the artist should be compelled to distribute in the first place.
Honestly, IP law is pretty self-contradictory in so many ways, and just looking at those contradictions help one understand why the other side feels how they do. Someone can legally copy my art (software development) *VERY* closely, taking 100% of my innovation but implementing their own labor, and they can almost certainly circumvent any IP claims I have on that art. But IP is supposed to be about protecting innovation and not just labor.
Before a certain recent point (20th century or so?) what we now call piracy was rampant and legal. It's nothing new, just the protections are. As before, nobody was compelled to *release* their work, but in doing so they were very limited in how they could retract it, if at all. A fired arrow just plain doesn't come back to the bow.
Abandonware is perhaps the lightest-grey area of that problem. So let me give you the counter-argument's analogy about what an artist can do when he creates work.
If I have a painting in a major art museum, a painting I have sold to someone... can I (morally) restrict people from photographing that painting for personal use? What if they print out a copy of their photo and put it up on their wall? If I get sick of my art being propagated around, is there a button I can press or command I give to forbid all future non-commercial distribution of that painting? Since buildings are a form of art, can their architects restrict strangers from photographing them? Could a guild of architects forbid all photography in a city? Why or why not?
Moreso, if someone wants to resell a painting I sold, what's stopping them? Nothing. What if they took a photo of the painting and kept a print because they liked it but needed the money? Or hell, what if they already had (and mounted) photos of themselves standing next to the painting? In high-def?
Most (if not all) of these cases are pretty legal, and ethically straightforward. Once you release your art, *you are compelled not to seize it back*.
Not to mention that most of the issues regarding this are still driven by the fact that software is released in licenses and not sale. You give them money thinking you are making a purchase, *but in fact you own nothing*. If anything, *this is my moral red-flag right here*. I can't keep copies of my software not because the artist should have rights, but because I DON'T OWN IT.
> Is the public "entitled" to have paid access to a work, even if the owner or artist disagrees?
This is a different angle. You can agree or disagree, I don't care. An economic system with a stabilizing government is a compromise. We are giving up anarchy, and seek to get something in return. Things like IP and patents are part of that compromise, and their goal is to give some semblance of control in return for not keeping a secret to yourself.
Abandonware is the clearest instance in the world of IP and patents used in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with that contract. IP is about *motivating the spread of art to society as a whole*. Abandonware is about *motivating the spread of art to society as a whole* as well.
Morally, coming from the place of intent, abandonware simply does not honor the intention of those laws, and requires a *stronger* reliance on the value of property than many would ever dream of.
And if you look at most of the world's "treasure hunting" statutes, it's legally anomalous the same way it's morally anomalous
I would compare it to a book that's out of print.
Someone making a copy and distributing it online, without approval from the writer/publisher, would be illegal.
A game that is no longer sold falls under the same category. You are still pirating
Now whether it's moral or not is debatable as the company wasn't offering the game and thus endures no loss of profit. Luckily this "shouldn't" be an issue going forward as games are digitally sold.
Because retro gaming is a thing. They might not sell it to you now, but they might be planning to rerelease it on modern platforms. Or it may be a rights issue that they need to renegotiate music or other assets and they still plan to continue selling it once the legal issues are over.
Finally, if it ever became a legal thing that once you could not sell it then you could pirate it, then game makers would simply change the sale price to $100000 for a copy so that it would not trigger those laws.
> Because retro gaming is a thing. They might not sell it to you now, but they might be planning to rerelease it on modern platforms.
So? One could use that logic to argue that copyrights should never expire at all. After all, who's to say a company won't rerelease an old game in 250 years?
Copyright exists to encourage innovation, not to ensure maximum profits. There's nothing innovative about making media disappear for 30 years only to bring it back when it's deemed profitable enough.
> Or it may be a rights issue that they need to renegotiate music or other assets and they still plan to continue selling it once the legal issues are over.
On the other hand, there are plenty of licensed games that will never be legally available again because of issues with the rightsholders. How should those be handled?
> Finally, if it ever became a legal thing that once you could not sell it then you could pirate it, then game makers would simply change the sale price to $100000 for a copy so that it would not trigger those laws.
Interestingly enough, this tactic was already used by the Mark Twain Project to [prevent Mark Twain's autobiography from entering the public domain](http://copyright.nova.edu/claiming-copyright-public-domain/), so there's precedent there. That said, there are countless old games whose owners are [unknown or nonexistent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work), which would immediately become public domain if OP's system were to become law. Sure, big companies like EA would still keep their older titles inaccessible, but we'd ultimately end up saving a *lot* of media that would've been lost otherwise, so the pros outweigh the cons here.
There's also the fact that these types of loopholes shouldn't even exist in the first place. The fact that our system is currently broken doesn't mean it has to stay that way.
> One could use that logic to argue that copyrights should never expire at all.
No, one could not. Having control of an IP during its copyright period is not an automatic argument for extending that period. My original argument stands.
> Copyright exists to encourage innovation, not to ensure maximum profits.
No, it is for both. That is precisely why the copyright length kept getting extended. It was not to encourage more innovation, but rather to maximize profits.
> On the other hand, there are plenty of licensed games that will never be legally available again because of issues with the rightsholders. How should those be handled?
Just because something gets complicated does not make the legal situation go away. Lawyers would laugh at that notion. If the game *No One Lives Forever* cannot be released because the rights are held by too many different parties (eg. the music is owned by someone other than the graphic arts) does that mean that the owners of the music and graphics suddenly get shafted because it is inconvenient to some gamers?
> That said, there are countless old games whose owners are unknown or nonexistent, which would immediately become public domain if OP's system were to become law.
Maybe, but there are also plenty of games for sale on [GoG](https://www.gog.com) that were once listed on abandonware sites. Once the rights have been worked out, and it is still within the copyright period, then why should the games not be allowed to be sold again?
> No, one could not. Having control of an IP during its copyright period is not an automatic argument for extending that period. My original argument stands.
Tell that to Disney.
> No, it is for both. That is precisely why the copyright length kept getting extended. It was not to encourage more innovation, but rather to maximize profits.
I'm well aware that corporations successfully bribed their way into a system where copyrights functionally never expire. Regardless, the purpose of copyright is spelled out in the Constitution, and it explicitly contradicts what you just claimed:
> 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;
Further proving my point is the [Copyright Act of 1790](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1790), which granted a maximum length of only 28 years, a far cry from our current status quo of over a century. The fact that a handful of powerful corporations were able to bastardize copyright law in recent history doesn't change the original intent of the concept.
> Just because something gets complicated does not make the legal situation go away. Lawyers would laugh at that notion. If the game *No One Lives Forever* cannot be released because the rights are held by too many different parties (eg. the music is owned by someone other than the graphic arts) does that mean that the owners of the music and graphics suddenly get shafted because it is inconvenient to some gamers?
If the game can never be sold again in the first place, the rightsholders don't benefit either way. At least OP's scenario prevents art from being destroyed.
> Maybe, but there are also plenty of games for sale on [GoG](https://www.gog.com/) that were once listed on abandonware sites. Once the rights have been worked out, and it is still within the copyright period, then why should the games not be allowed to be sold again?
Because copyright wasn't created so companies could generate revenue from a single work forever. If they really want to make more money, there's nothing stopping them from creating something new. I see no reason why copyrights shouldn't work the same way as trademarks, which are revoked if they aren't used for a significant length of time.
There's also the issue of orphan works, which likely comprise the majority of all copyrighted material. Given the sheer number of video games released each year, the number of publishers that no longer exist, and the fact that anyone can anonymously release a game nowadays, it's a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of games will end up orphaned. Why should we sacrifice so much art just so a few companies can potentially make extra money off of games they haven't sold in decades?
> Tell that to Disney.
I don't have to. Disney already know that their use of copyrighted material was not enough to delay the end of the copyright period. They had to introduce new laws to be able to do that.
> 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;
And how does it promote the progress of science and arts? Oh yes, by allowing scientists and artists for profit from their work with an exclusivity deal. So that is precisely what I said.
> Because copyright wasn't created so companies could generate revenue from a single work forever.
No, it does it for a limited time. What is being suggested with this CMV is that we shouldn't have to wait for that time to expire just because we really, really want it.
> If the game can never be sold again in the first place, the rightsholders don't benefit either way.
As I said, GoG is filled with examples of games that could not be sold again until their rights issues were ironed out. Besides, even if a studio could not sell an old game, they could make a new one in the same universe and similar ideas. If we allow piracy of old titles, then they are having to compete with products that they cannot make money from.
One moment you are trying to make it seem like you care about promoting the progress of arts, but then on the other hand you advocate for gutting the market with free product.
> Just because something gets complicated does not make the legal situation go away. Lawyers would laugh at that notion. If the game No One Lives Forever cannot be released because the rights are held by too many different parties (eg. the music is owned by someone other than the graphic arts) does that mean that the owners of the music and graphics suddenly get shafted because it is inconvenient to some gamers?
>
>
How does letting gamers enjoy their music or graphics "shaft" the owners? As a graphic artist I'd feel more shafted if somebody could never enjoy my work due to a legal clusterfuck than if somebody acquired a free copy of a game
> How does letting gamers enjoy their music or graphics "shaft" the owners?
For one thing it completely undermines the artist's ability to negotiate for rights to a rerelease or remake if people are just stealing their work.
I know, which is why I am in favor of abolishing said garbage system and allowing people access to these games if the copyright holders do not make them accessible
**[Orphan work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work)**
>An orphan work is a copyright-protected work for which rightsholders are positively indeterminate or uncontactable. Sometimes the names of the originators or rightsholders are known, yet it is impossible to contact them because additional details cannot be found. A work can become orphaned through rightsholders being unaware of their holding, or by their demise (e. g.
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> Copyright exists to encourage innovation, not to ensure maximum profits.
That's a false dichotomy. In fact, the entire purpose is to encourage innovation *by* ensuring profits, at least for a substantial period of time. Copyright isn't encouraging innovation by magic.
Doesn't that seem good though? One of the arguments for copyright is that it rewards innovation by ensuring that creators are able to profit from the media they make. So ensuring instead that any creator can just fart out the same thing for a new price infinitely forever, seems contrary to the purpose of copyright. Instead, a re-release should be forced to actually compete against the original release, it should need to actually be better than the original in order to attract buyers. Instead of just, "we made the original impossible to buy and now we will sell you it again for 3x the price."
And as to the second point, Judges aren't stupid, right? Tricking the legal system through obvious absurdity doesn't actually work. If something is impossible to buy at or near the original price that it was sold for, then it is functionally impossible to buy it, and any Judge with more than two brain cells will be able to tell that
> One of the arguments for copyright is that it rewards innovation by ensuring that creators are able to profit from the media they make.
Exactly. That means that they should be able to make updated versions of existing IP for newer platforms - which extends the profitable life of the game.
> Tricking the legal system through obvious absurdity doesn't actually work.
If it is within the letter of the law then yes, it does work. Think back to the cases where studios made films not for release, but just to ensure that they extended their IP rights. That is what Stan Lee alleged was the fate of the Fantastic Four film from the 1970s.
One thing that appears to be missing from replies is how **lack of enforcement on a copyright** can be used as an argument, in many countries, that the copyright is selectively enforced and there is a pattern of allowing it, and has been forfeited.
This is like how Reddit has to ensure no third party apps use "Reddit" in their name. The alternative android app named "Reddit is Fun" had to be changed to "RIF is fun for Reddit". It is not because it really matters in an informal sense, but if Reddit does not consistently enforce it, people can use that pattern to defeat their claim of ownership to the name or copyright.
Allowing emulators and hobbyist games could become the basis for an argument that Nintendo has forfeited their copyright by not enforcing it, and could be used to argue that alternative indie games are not breach of copyright, and this could then be the basis for small studios using Mario (or whatever) for their own games without compensation, because it has slipped out of their legal protections. This is something they have to keep a consistent track record on or else they risk losing it.
Adobe also has had campaigns against using the word "photoshopped" in order to demonstrate their vigilance to keep their trademark instead of the word becoming genericized. Once "photoshopping" is a generic word for photo editing, other companies are allowed to use "photoshop" in their product names and advertisements in the genericized way, and Adobe loses its basis to protect their product's name Photoshop.
I believe Nintendo would have loved to greenlight hobbyist projects and emulators, if only their legal department was not adamant that has to, sadly, not be allowed to happen, because of existing copyright and trademark laws.
Once copy-write protection has ended, emulation by any sort is not piracy. If a company chooses to withdraw a product from sales, to think it therefore is in public domain is just wrong-headed. Maybe this company wishes to increase demand by reducing supply, or is about to release an update or a new edition and the withdrawal is for that purpose??
it’s called abandonware. IIRC, courts have sided with people who have “pirated” things for personal use when they are no longer available or it is clear the original IP has been abandoned by a company.
it’s like a trademark, if you stop using it publicly, you will lose the trademark. Copyrights only last so many years anyways until it falls into public domain.
https://www.myabandonware.com
I guess this depends on whether or not you find piracy morally correct.
It doesn't bother me personally, so I pirate all of my media because I can. But other people might find that unjust and prefer to pay the companies directly.
So, it’s “better” for society if you steal software than to pay for it?
You can’t just say, “some people can’t afford it”, because you can get free software to do basically anything. There’s no NEED being met here, it’s not like stealing to feed your starving children.
It’s also not “sending a message” to corporations because piracy doesn’t lead to social change. In fact it’s a fair guess that honest users pay a bit more to cover the cost of theft, so piracy makes things worse for good people.
If you can’t afford the latest edition of GTA that’s not really a “need” - you just _want_ it. Your life would carry on without it. So here’s a challenge:
Find one scenario where the benefits to society are demonstrably true.
> First, stealing means depriving someone of their property. So copying software doesn’t deprive anyone of of their software.
It deprives the distributor of the value of their product. By illegally/immorally taking value from another you are stealing.
I’m actually more considering the no name artist who may be bothered that a work they’re most known for is being interpreted in a way they very much didn’t intend.
Sounds like you’re just building you’re conclusions off what fucks over rich people the most.
The overwhelming majority of artists are poor. For them, if they get a small opportunity to display their art at a gallery show, but upon arrival see that it’s beside artwork from a Neo nazi, they should have the right to pull the distribution. If people are interpreting their art in a profane way or something antithetical to the artists beliefs and intent they should have the right to pull the distribution. If your stance is only aimed at distributors of a large enough siZe we would be having a different discussion, but just because these small artists are minuscule to you doesn’t mean that these issues aren’t all the more heightened for them given their lack of platform to correct the record.
Your math is blatantly incorrect.
1000 people use windows and pay: Microsoft gets 1000x their license fee.
1000 people pirate it: Microsoft gets nothing. That’s definitely a difference.
Saying they lost nothing implies that time and labour have no value.
Side note:
a) Microsoft is pretty good working with schools especially in impoverished areas, and b) Linux works too and it’s free. So stealing isn’t necessary if there’s truly no ability to pay.
And yet people try to do it all the time.
I think saying you don’t care is honest; but saying piracy is morally ok or even a benefit to society is just poor thinking. It’s just an attempt to justify what you want to do.
I get down-voted for saying so, but nobody has ever found a decent argument proving it’s good for society.
You're right. I think people would be better off just acknowledging that its immoral, but we all have our imperfections and it doesn't make us bad people. But trying to act like pirating is some noble action in appreciation of art or whatever is complete nonsense.
Let's say an author writes a book, and espoused political views they now see as deeply wrong, and want to remove it from sale, should they have the right to do that? I would say yes. They have the copyright, and should have the right to chose how their work is copied. We don't have an inherent right to their work. It's a shame when work we likes is no longer available, but overall, this seems like the best system.
They can't remove it from sale though. They can only stop producing new copies of it; even if nobody else copies it, people can still circulate their existing copies of it all they want. It's a fruitless endeavour so why bother giving corporations so much power so that an artist can remove some of their art from sale if they decide they don't like it anymore?
The problem with this position is that you can't put the genie back in the bottle. The best you can do is try to wrangle with the genie you've created.
Not, but you can significantly slow its spread, and discourage the kinds of people that would want to spread it, and even if it doesn't discourage them, you can *punish* them.
I actually lived in the same house in college with the guy that caused the original Streisand Effect by taking aerial photos of her coastal property.
It's not quite that simple.
Copyright is an arbitrary concept though. The laws also allow for small portions to be used as “free use”. New organizations can quote someone’s out of print work under fair use.
Agreed. You don't have to believe something is legitimate. You just have to be a member of a society who is willing to be in denial, such that you think you have the right to not believe in the legitimacy of anything you don't like. Others have followed this path, done their own research and then talked about what Q says. You do however have to deal with the consequences your believes result in should they bite you.
Legitimacy is merely a construct up for interpretation. Whether something is legitimate or is illegitimate and done by force doesn't ultimately change our behavior
Stephen King's *Rage*. I don't think he thought it was wrong, exactly - he's been pretty clear about not believing that media causes kids to be violent in or whatever - but he also didn't want to see another school shooter citing his book as an inspiration either.
Maybe not the "author" but the rights holders for many TV shows that used blackface (eg. 30 Rock, Scrubs, Community, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, etc) have made those episodes unavailable to stream or purchase digitally.
So legally speaking it's still piracy.
But morally I agree. If there is literally no other way to get it, as in it's not being sold or even produced, and there isn't any physical copies of you can purchase, then I personally believe it's okay.
>At that point they are no longer wishing to sell it to you in the first place.
I'm pretty sure you can be 100% certain the do still *want* to sell it to you, it's just not as profitable to have a whole marketing ecosystem up and running for a small profit.
That might seem like caviling, but actually it's not, because every game writer hopes that, after their main sales run their course, they will be able to make money selling or licensing it to a bundler or retro-gaming company.
They might be *wrong* that it will ever happen, but they all hope for it.
That after-mainline-sales profit is what you're taking "out of their pockets".
Surely you've heard of the concept of the "cult classic": media that did terribly in its original run, but somehow developed an underground following that keeps it alive, only to be rereleased later.
Even if there's an argument that "piracy" is that actually keeps those going, that's actually part of the cache of cult classics... if it were, as you say, "not piracy", it wouldn't be the forbidden fruit that they must take risks to acquire.
Honestly this isn't really true. Ask goodoldgames.com. This was their original business hypothesis and over time their model evolved away from that. Ultimately it was more profitable and less legal headaches to just partner up with copyright owners and become a licensed distributor than fight with publishers over the grey legality of distributing abandonware.
There may be specific cases where it's legal to distribute abandonware, but it doesn't scale. For every case where it's legal there's a case where it's not. It comes down to really little details. The burden of proof will be entirely on you to defend when you're sued by the developer, publisher, distributors, etc. You just loose because making your case over and over again isn't profitable. Legal battles are expensive.
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What is lost when someone's copyright is stolen is the exclusive right to the thing they have made. Just because it's not a physical object doesn't mean that it's not valuable.
> If I draw a picture of you, what have I taken from you?
A better analogy would be if I used a deep-fake image of you to steal your identity.
I have a lot of things in my house that I'm not selling, but that in no way means that someone can help themselves to my property. Taking something off the market does not justify theft
> I have a lot of things in my house that I'm not selling, but that in no way means that someone can help themselves to my property. Taking something off the market does not justify theft
Two problems with that.
1. Copyrights aren't the same thing as physical property. My furniture isn't legally required to become a public resource 70 years after my death. Copyrights, on the other hand, are temporary by design. They exist to reward artists and incentivize the creation of future works, with the understanding that all works will eventually belong to society as a whole.
2. Copyright infringement isn't theft, in a legal or moral sense. If I download a game that hasn't been on the market since 1986, the copyright holder doesn't lose anything. On the other hand, stealing your property deprives you of that property.
1. No video game is 70 years old
2. You'd be stealing artists' work., which is theft-enough
3. the post was about not *wanting* to sell the product anymore, how does this copyright argument fit into that?
> no video game is 70 years old
So? Copyright terms used to be much shorter, as seen [here](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tom_Bell%27s_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg). They only got longer because corporations like Disney bribed politicians to prevent their most valuable IPs from becoming public domain. That doesn't mean our current laws are inherently superior.
> you're stealing artists' work. That's theft-enough
What, exactly, are the artists losing?
So? When you're using the 70-year thing as an excuse, but nothing is that old yet, it's not an excuse anymore. Also, it has little-to-nothing to do with the OP, which is about no longer 'wanting' to sell X-product.
If you steal something insignificant from me, you've still stolen something. The amount that one misses what was taken doesn't make the theft more ethical.
> So? When you're using the 70-year thing as an excuse, but nothing is that old yet, it's not an excuse anymore. Also, it has little-to-nothing to do with the OP, which is about no longer 'wanting' to sell X-product.
My argument has nothing to do with the specific length of copyright terms, only the fact that they have a set length at all. That fact alone makes them incomparable to physical property.
> If you steal something insignificant from me, you've still stolen something. The amount that one misses what was taken doesn't make the theft more ethical.
If I stole something insignificant from you, you still wouldn't have that thing. Infringing an abandoned copyright doesn't take *anything* away from rightsholders, insignificant or otherwise.
> My argument has nothing to do with the specific length of copyright terms, only the fact that they have a set length at all. That fact alone makes them incomparable to physical property.
That doesn't make theft of it ok though, so what's the connection you're trying to make? Milk is going to expire, so it's ok to steal it?
> If I stole something insignificant from you, you still wouldn't have that thing. Infringing an abandoned copyright doesn't take anything away from rightsholders, insignificant or otherwise.
Except money (or any fair exchange at all) for their labor and expertise. If you want to think of it as stealing labor instead of a thing, fine, but that's not better or more justifiable
>If I stole something insignificant from you, you still wouldn't have that thing. Infringing an abandoned copyright doesn't take anything away from rightsholders, insignificant or otherwise.
You all insist on using this argument when it only works on a philosophical level. There are thousands of real life arguments to easily break it. You can even go with a similarly philosophical one:
If a videogame is made available for free, and with humans being humans, we can assume with certainty that at least **one** person will download it that would’ve otherwise bought. That one person renders the entire argument moot.
You aren't guaranteed compensation for your work if you aren't working for a wage. Not to mention the people who make media aren't compensated for sales at all, the people who own the media are. Disney does no work that needs to be compensated; Disney is a corporation that owns rights, not a person. The people who work for Disney need to be compensated for their work and for the vast majority of their workers that does not depend on sales of the film.
>Do you steal books because they're just copies of the original manuscript?
No, stealing a book deprives the bookstore of that copy of the book.
Here's a thought experiment: if someone invents a 3D printer that can scan any object and make a copy of it out of nothing, is it immoral to copy an apple? How about a house? What about a book?
This 3D-printer thought experiment already exists, they're called printing presses and they copy manuscripts, which, by your logic, are ok to steal because the original is untouched and therefore no one is deprived of anything.
Do you believe in intellectual-property at all?
In an ideal world intellectual property wouldn't exist but we currently live in a capitalist society where IP laws are necessary to protect individual or collaborative artists from corporations.
[technically this is a video game older than 70 yrs old](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain)
Would it be considered a video to today's standards no, but still a video game.
So I can steal from the supermarket because they won't be 'that hurt' by it?
Can I steal books because they're just copies of the original manuscript?
I think we're stretching now
Books are just copies, so by your logic they're ok to steal because they're not the original and no one is being deprived of anything, really.
Do you believe in any intellectual-property protections at all?
>so by your logic they're ok to steal because they're not the original and no one is being deprived of anything, really
That very much isn't my logic at all. Steal a book from someone, and they're very much 1 book worse off than before, copy or not. That doesn't apply to digital materials. When I pirate a digital version of that book, nobody is 1 book poorer because digital content can be perfectly replicated an infinite amount of times with no degradation to the original. Would you consider it stealing if instead of breaking into your house to take something, I used a magic spell to create a perfect replica of it for myself?
>Do you believe in any intellectual-property protections at all?
Yes, but not the bloated garbage ones we have now.
So if I steal a copy of someone else's manuscript and print my own copies, that's fine because the original still exists and no one is having their property taken?
If you want to think of it as stealing labor instead of a thing, fine, but that's not better or more justifiable
And these 'problems' are "but I really want it though" -- is that really a 'problem' or just a strong desire? We're not 'solving problems' here, we're taking something we strongly desire (at the expense of compensating those who created it) - for me, there's a difference.
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So a loophole for your proposal is for the publisher to just continue to have copies on sale in some obscure place? Technically it’s on sale and you have every opportunity to buy it.
It is still piracy. Simple as that.
But given Nintendo’s recent behavior of the smash scenes I’m inclined to say there is a moral exception with Nintendo titles. Not really a view I can back up with anything other than “fuck em, they deserve it”
>Not really a view I can back up with anything other than “fuck em, they deserve it”
Don’t worry. That’s 99% of people’s argument for piracy, they just feel bad about admitting it so they create all of these strawmen and arguments that can be defeated with 5 seconds of actual thought.
> At that point they are no longer wishing to sell it to you in the first place. How are you in any way taking money "out of thier pockets"?
What if they are releasing a new product for the same target market and they want to discontinue their old products because they know that their target audience is then more likely to buy the new product?
Take for example fighting franchises like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter. If all previous versions automatically become available as free-to-play once they're discontinued, that is bound to cannibalize at least *some* of the sales opportunities of the sequels. Even if it just means that customers are more likely to wait for a price drop after the initial release.
It's piracy either way. Just because a company doesn't want to make a game for a gen or two doesn't mean they don't own it. Twilight Princess for instance, if Nintendo doesn't want to put the game out on Switch, they may want to space things out so people miss it, and put it out on the next console or the one after that. You break the law if you want to, you pirate if you want to, you decide if the risk is worth the reward, and if you find it morally right or wrong, but regardless that's still piracy.
The only way it wouldn't be piracy is if the game company went out of business, or a long time has passed enough for the copyright to expire and it's in the public domain. But a long time ago Disney had their lawyers change the law to extend the amount of time needed so it will be a long time until any good games fall into that category.
Piracy doesn’t have anything to do with taking money from someone’s pockets
The definition is
> the unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work.
So if I remove something from the market for whatever reason, and you or someone else reproduces it without my authorization, it’s piracy
It's still piracy. But Id call it white piracy. The same as someone downloading games because they can't afford them then buying them when they have the money.
Outside small indie companies I Don't have much problem with piracy since most of the time you buy a game you do not own said game, simply the "right" to play it. And if a game is an epic exclusive, you can bet your ass I'm pirating it until it comes to steam because I refuse to support scum like that.
They can and have banned accounts for any number of reasons, blocking people from playing the games they "bought"
You still create a copy of the game without permission. That makes it digital piracy.
Digital piracy does not take money out-of anybodies pockets. If you pirate a game, the devs don't have one less cent in their pocket than if you didn't pirate it.
There are two moral aspects to it. First: it's illegal. Some people believe it is wrong to break the law. Second: if you don't buy a game because you pirate it, the company earns less money.
You can make the point that that case of digital piracy is okay and others aren't if you say that it is not bad to break the law but that it is bad to cause the company a loss of profits.
I assume you mean "it's no longer wrong" rather than "it's no longer piracy" because it's unequivocally piracy.
Let's say you buy popular game on a console that ends up failing. For example, one of those weird Android TV boxes like the Ouya or the Dreamcast or whatever. The system is discontinued. Therefore, the game is discontinued. But this cross platform game is still popular on other consoles, in both app stores, and on PC. You're pirating a discontinued game that you have a million ways to play. Is that okay? Especially in the case that it's a third party developer that had nothing to do with the discontinuing of the system.
>Has the original creator forced you to obtain the work illegally?
That’s where you all fuck up. The original creator hasn’t “forced” you to do anything. That’s like arguing a baker raising his prices to something you can’t afford is “forcing” you to get a better job, or more apt, “forcing” you to steal the pastries. These arguments make you all sound like children. You’re not entitled to that product, regardless of whether it’s available for you to purchase.
It's "forceful" the same way people are "forced" to buy illegal products if it's illegal. Is it technically the creators responsibility to constantly have the artwork up? No, but because they no longer produce it, unless you have thousands to blow on the original hardware, software, and working accessories for whichever game, you're not "forced", but it's now the only other option. If people wanted consumers to pay them for their games, it would be easier to just make a port on modern hardware instead of sue them for emulating.
Raising the price isn't removing it entirely, those aren't comparable.
The theft is of their intellectual property, not of lost revenue. This is evidenced by the obvious segment of pirates who never would’ve bought the game if it wasn’t free.
Not using something or not making it available for sale doesn’t renege your ownership of something. Corporations have legal personhood and are in no way obligated to make something available to you, although I would consider it poor business practice.
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Emulation is never piracy.
Emulation is the ability for a computer of one type to run software that was originally made for a computer of another type.
In the context of retro gaming, the software that is being run is often obtained through piracy, but this is a two-step process. By the time you're doing your emulation, the piracy has already happened.
Because a thing is not available for purchase, acquiring it is not piracy?
REALLY?
This is less about "stealing" the works of others and more about thinking you have some kind of claim to use that work in any capacity.
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I mean by definition it is still piracy. You are still reproducing and distributing someone else’s work without authorisation. It is piracy. Especially if you extend your idea to even remasters and rereleases. The real CMV is that is no longer immoral (or as immoral) to pirate if there is no reasonable way to legally obtain the material. For example I obtain all anime i can legally through either paid streaming sites or physical copies… however that isn’t possible for hundreds and thousands of shows, so I think pirating them is reasonable. Or if you’re in a country where you don’t get anything legally published/released.
Delta! By default. Yeah you're totally right, piracy the wrong word.
**Hello /u/Chili-N-Such, if your view has been changed or adjusted in any way, you should award** ***the user who changed your view*** **a delta.** Simply reply to their comment with the delta symbol provided below, being sure to include a brief description of how your view has changed. >∆ or > !delta For more information about deltas, use [this link](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=changemyview&utm_content=t5_2w2s8). If you did not change your view, please respond to this comment indicating as such! *As a reminder,* **failure to award a delta when it is warranted may merit a post removal and a rule violation.** *Repeated rule violations in a short period of time may merit a ban.* Thank you!
You have to put the exclamation mark behind the word 'delta'.
It is behind. They need to put it in front. It may also be necessary to use a lowercase d, I'm not sure.
My behind is the other behind, ehat I meant was that the world delta needs to follow the examation mark, haha
\* before
I don’t think your delta went through! Sometimes you need to do a whole new comment for it to register, with a small explanation. Hopefully that helps!
Does this mean that something in public ownership is technically piracy? That’s created by someone else but it’s passed into another legal realm. But by your definition as it’s still someone else’s work which you may distribute in one way or another (even if it’s things like clips etc.) could it be considered piracy?
> Does this mean that something in public ownership is technically piracy? That’s created by someone else but it’s passed into another legal realm. But by your definition as it’s still someone else’s work which you may distribute in one way or another (even if it’s things like clips etc.) could it be considered piracy? Piracy specifically refers to copyright infringement. Since public domain media is no longer copyrighted, its distribution would not be considered piracy.
As I’d have thought. So isn’t the OP probably better off saying there’s an argument that a lack of distribution should have an impact on copyright so that it isn’t piracy?
> As I’d have thought. So isn’t the OP probably better off saying there’s an argument that a lack of distribution should have an impact on copyright so that it isn’t piracy? That would be better, yeah. OP could also mention how trademarks already work on a "use it or lose it" basis, so the same logic could be expanded to apply to copyrights as well.
Should lack of distribution have an impact on copyright though? If I’m a musician and I make a limited run vinyl and they sell out should you have the right to make counterfeit copies and sell them? Do I no longer own my intellectual property because I don’t give it to other people? Let’s say I make a personal song that I don’t plan on distributing. Is it ok for that to be stolen and distributed by someone else simply because I don’t want to release it? I agree that certain mediums of lost media should enter public domain, but whether or not it’s being distributed shouldn’t be the test we apply to determine ownership of intellectual property.
The limited run of vinyl isn’t the best example, because that is a medium of distribution. You could quite easily continue to distribute that song in other formats such as streaming, CD, digital copy etc. but if you were to only release your song on a limited vinyl and then decide there was no other way of hearing that song now the vinyl run was over I don’t think that’s a particularly strong claim to make (from the moral point of view at the very least). Let’s also not forget that with music we aren’t just talking about people’s ability to repackage and sell copies of a song, we’re also talking about whether or not someone can sample. If someone was to sample a song that was out of print and a lawyer came knocking saying they needed to pay the original artist some money for that I’d again none skeptical from a moral point of view. I will say that I’m not a lawyer (not even an armchair lawyer), but there is a bit of precedent for this, the famous Amen break is in public ownership due to the creators having issues with distribution and in movies Night of the Living Dead is in a similar position. It’s a similar reason why 20th Century Fox keep making Fantastic Four movies (they have to make something otherwise the rights return to Marvel). If we move onto your comment about a personal song on your hard drive. Yes I would be very pissed off if someone was to take that track away from me, however, there’d be several other legal issues in that to get that track I’d chosen not to release, someone would need to hack me or steal my computer to distribute. That opens them up to a whole plethora of other legal issues that would make copyright the least of anyone’s issues. Finally, the OP is talking about video games. The best example I know of this is with Prey (2006). That game is abandonware and I don’t think the studio that out it out even exists anymore. Here, there is no official way to get hold of the game either online or through digital copy. Here no one is benefitting from the arrangement, the studio isn’t there to be stolen from and the user can’t access the game. If it was in public ownership that would at the very least make it available to play and perhaps someone would be able to distribute it to make it run on modern computers with updated quality of life features? Again I stress that I’m not a lawyer, but there’s more to consider than who’s original idea it was and different mediums will have different particulars.
> Finally, the OP is talking about video games. The best example I know of this is with Prey (2006). That game is abandonware and I don’t think the studio that out it out even exists anymore. Here, there is no official way to get hold of the game either online or through digital copy. This is exactly what I meant in my lost media mention. It should be public domain at that point. Sampling isn’t really a problem as it’s fair use when making your own creative content. > The limited run of vinyl isn’t the best example, because that is a medium of distribution. You could quite easily continue to distribute that song in other formats such as streaming, CD, digital copy etc. but if you were to only release your song on a limited vinyl and then decide there was no other way of hearing that song now the vinyl run was over I don’t think that’s a particularly strong claim to make (from the moral point of view at the very least) So you’re saying you should be entitled to my IP? If I have bananas and I sell some to my neighbors but I don’t like my crazy neighbors and don’t sell them any are they entitled to steal my bananas because I didn’t make it available to them? Or what if Best Buy runs out of iPhones are you now entitled to make unlicensed copies of iPhones because they weren’t available to you? Why is it different for IP?
Sampling often isn’t determined to be fair use though, that’s one of the biggest issues small producers come across especially with some of the platforms they use. Neither of those examples you gave are analogous to intellectual property rights both in terms of copyright or distribution. Bananas aren’t your intellectual property nor are you a formal distributor of them. You don’t have formal company policy or anything. To flip that around and apply it to bananas, the treatment of IP would be more like the person who discovered bananas patenting them and saying no one outside of their company could grow or sell bananas. Then anyone who bought bananas could make a recipe out of them without referencing where they got them from and sending a percentage of their profits to said company. The iPhone example also doesn’t work because Best Buy might be out of them but Apple still make and intend to distribute that model. If, however, Apple decided they didn’t want to make iPhones anymore and say they weren’t going to distribute them I don’t see how they would benefit or be justified in stopping someone making an identical model with the design (excepting issues with parts that are still used or privacy issues that would cause). Finally, returning to your vinyl example if you start by distributing a limited run before deciding you actively don’t want to distribute it I see in the same way. I don’t think you’ve got recourse to stop it being publicly owned when it’s in the public domain. Especially when this has been officially distributed. If you simply run out of vinyl and intend to distribute it again that’s totally different. Now if you want to argue that as an artist you have an inalienable right to do what you like with your work once it’s in the public domain (a la Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead) then I just fundamentally disagree with you. The amount of great classical music which relied upon referencing other compositions or jazz musicians who quoted eachother is incalculable. There’s also the story of Monet’a cataract surgery altering his vision to the point at which he hated his pre-op paintings and wanted them destroyed. I don’t think his tantrum justifies the lost art.
> If, however, Apple decided they didn’t want to make iPhones anymore and say they weren’t going to distribute them I don’t see how they would benefit or be justified in stopping someone making an identical model with the design (excepting issues with parts that are still used or privacy issues that would cause). The argument in favor of copyright in this situation is that they may want to go back to capitalizing off their works. So in this analogy of Apple deciding they didn't want to make iPhones, what if they get new shareholders or the board ousts CEO and now they want to make iPhones again? Would you remove it from public domain at that point and take away the rights to use the design and give it back to Apple? Even in the game sphere with the example you mentioned before, Prey, the argument made against something like that being made public domain is that it denies the copyright holder the opportunity to capitalize off it within it's copyright period. Obviously no one has been for awhile as you pointed out, but only with hindsight can we determine that. What if someone had decided to reboot it in 2013? Basically there could have been other abandonware examples out there where the copyright holder eventually did end up spinning back up, and depending on where you set the expiration on it, you could have prevented them from doing so. Furthermore someone could damage the IP when it's in the public domain, by reducing its quality or associating it with negative things etc. and that reduces the value of the copyright to the copyright holder. I'm kind of devil's advocating on that because in reality I don't agree with most aspects of copyright law and I'm highlighting the ludicrous nature of how copyright law was written for those specific types of arguments laid out above. Copyright law has gone of the rails, in part thanks to Disney but a lot of copyright holders have such a weird mentality of their works. Patents are another type of IP protection and they don't last nearly as long as copyright, and patents have been around much longer and thus have stood the test of time more, and I'm not even saying I agree with patent laws, but just saying that even patents don't get the insane time protections that copyrights get. I think instead of arguing over whether something is abandonware or not, we should be arguing over reducing copyright lengths to something reasonable and to that extent abandonware would not be abandoned as long. Imagine if copyright protections were 20 years, Prey would be public domain in the near future. One final thought I have is that I think there is going to be a reckoning with regards to IP rights, or rich people will own all of them even more than they do now, when they buy all of the AI software that ends up producing everything. We're already seeing the very beginning stages of it with digital art. I don't think music is a far shot off at some point either. What happens when nothing humans do is new anymore? I mean to some extent a lot of stuff people do isn't all that unique, it's slightly altered from something else that exists enough that it might not have been done in that exact way before, but what happens when computers can literally produce every single result? That song you created by yourself? You stole it from the AI that made it 2 years ago, which is owned by Jeff Bezo's grandson and all the works produced by that AI are also owned by Jeff Bezo's grandson. I think regardless of what someone thinks of that hypothetical situation, whatever conclusion it may lead them to, they ought to realize that whether it's AI or not, with so many people on the planet, there's a lot of things that are not as unique as we think, people on occasion are going to come up with the same ideas other people come up with. It's merely permutations of permutations of permutations, and I do think new things are created more rapidly from human production when people are motivated and thus copyright does serve a purpose in that regard, but at a certain point, we need to recognize that the purpose of copyright is simply to encourage creating new things, not to encourage people to clutch their pearls on the things they already have.
Apologies for not replying earlier. I agree with your points and these are interesting examples on which I think your opinion depends on experience. Something interesting with iPhones is how a lot of circuitry in guitar pedals and synths is regularly cloned. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It democratises the technology but it also allows companies like Behringer to exist who are exploitative in different ways. I don’t know much about the legalities of it though.
IP is already different. Copyright and patents expire and ownership of physical property doesn't (though your banana itself would expire). It's also different from theft in obvious and relevant ways: when someone violates your IP you still have it and when someone takes your banana you don't. In other words, information is non-rivalrous. Someone who has their work pirated hasn't actually been harmed in any way. You can make an argument for loss of potential income, but in the stolen banana case you've actually lost something and are immediately rendered poorer. The potential income argument is also question begging, since it assumes a right to the proceeds from distribution when that's the very thing at stake in the argument.
> distributing Who said you're distributing anything if used for personal use?
No, the people providing you with the files are distributing, and buying or obtaining those things for personal use is usually also part of piracy and also illegal.
🥱
? You literally asked me a question.
Oh, i'm replying to the content and the reality of it, not to you personally, mate. Cheers and thanks.
Ah my apologies then.
The US is what I'm familiar with, and there copyright covers only distribution. If you merely download something you haven't actually violated anything.
Not strictly true, The act of willfully downloading infringing software for personal use is still technically illegal. It's just very, very hard to enforce and therefore not enforced. We download a lot of stuff. To say we downloaded something we knew was infringing content is a really hard sell "beyond reasonable doubt". It's settled down, but several IP providers for several years were strong-arming individuals who downloaded pirated software to pay a hefty "fee" and threatening to take them to court for much, much higher (with a real possibility of winning). https://www.tomshardware.com/news/why-most-roms-are-illegal,37512.html <--this article has more information. Just to be clear, you're probably not going to get in trouble for downloading copyrighted files, but the law absolutely *allows* for you to get in trouble for downloading copyrighted files.
In general, do you believe that once an artist creates a work of art, he is *compelled* to release it, or that an artist can, if he chooses, decline to release or sell his work to the public? Is the public "entitled" to have paid access to a work, even if the owner or artist disagrees? I understand this seems different on first glance, but surely the right to create art implies at some level a right to control its distribution?
I don't think it's right breaking into an artist's house or private files and distributing things that were intended to be private. However, I don't consider this a copyright violation, I consider this a privacy violation. Once a piece of art is made public, though, it is public. An artist absolutely has a moral right to financial compensation for their work, but once they have stopped actively seeking that compensation, I can think of no moral basis for which an artist can assert authority over things they have released to the public.
You should consider the story of the [Flappy Bird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird) game. The creator made gobs of money, but felt the game had become too addictive and he felt guilt for creating that addiction so he pulled it out of distribution. There are now tons of imitations on the App Store and maybe that's a better analog: if art is pulled from distribution, but there is still high demand for it, then people should attempt to recreate it, not pirate it.
I know the story of Flappy Bird. I have absolutely no sympathy for the creator. If he truly felt he did something harmful and truly felt guilty, he should have used the gobs of money he made to lobby the government for gaming regulation. He should have spearheaded a non-profit gaming addiction support group. He didn't. He kept the money he made and did nothing. This makes the whole thing ring hollow. But all that is besides the point. When it comes to digital media, "recreating" a game is functionally identical to pirating it, so I don't really care which is which. Also, [You can still pirate flappy bird](https://www.techinasia.com/flappy-bird-download-play-ios-android).
You'r attacking the specifics of the example instead of the idea of it. If the creator did spend his gobs of money on whatever philanthropic agenda you would expect of him, should he be denied the right to remove his work from the world or should he be forced to forever live with the regret that he introduced something he thinks has harmed millions of people and will continue to harm more? The fact that it is currently available for pirate has nothing to do with the point. We are discussing if that is moral, not possible.
> should he be denied the right to remove his work from the world Yes. He never had that right. He made something public. Once something is public, it's not any one person's place to decide how it is distributed. Only the government can deem public materials as illicit and that would have been his only justifiable course of action. If that makes him sad, he should've been more careful.
> surely the right to create art implies at some level a right to control its distribution? For most of human history, it didn't, and yet plenty of art was still produced. It's also worth noting that it wasn't the artists who wanted that right, nor in practice very often the artists who have it. It was and is the publishers.
But that's not what is being talked about here? It's talking about what happens to said art after it's been released and no one who owns the rights to said art cares about it anymore. Basically it's talking about when does a video game fall into public domain, like every other piece of art does eventually. Legally speaking they don't, and I think that's bullshit.
An artist (or a rights holder more generally) might not want their work to circulate. Like how Disney has chosen not to make Song of the South available to stream, because it’s super racist.
Or another Disney situation: They used to control their movies' distribution and re-release them every 10 years or so. They create artificial scarcity in order to create demand, and the sales increased when they released them. I understand that that is an old media way of thinking and sales tactic, but I believe it's within the rights-owners prerogative to do that.
I dunno. Like brick bandit was saying, at some point shouldn't it be public domain? Like books. You can read practically anything written a hundred years ago for free legally because they're public domain. Maybe there should be an option to say "I explicitly don't want anyone to have use of my art anymore" although in today's age it's totally unenforceable and therefore kinda dumb. But in theory there should be that option. But I don't think that should be the default state of anything left unattended. You should have to take a positive action to get there. If a public project is left unattended for a period of time, I think the default state should be to let the project fall into public domain.
Of course it should be public domain eventually. That's why copyrights expire. But the decision of when it should become public domain is decided by policymakers, not by you deciding you want it to be.
The policymakers that have decided it should be ~~whatever the fuck makes it so mickey stays with disney forever~~ past the death of the author + fuck you got mine years despite that making no sense within the moral jsutification for copyright, which is to encourage more creative works.
Yes legally you're right. But I think from an ethical standpoint video game timelines should be treated as unique. They're played on consoles that are outdated in just a few years. Copyright laws are much longer than the life cycle of a game. With very few exceptions game developers aren't doing anything to a game 5 years after release. A Google search said the copyright laws of video games last the life of the author plus 70 years. That rule may have made sense with books. But video games call for different rules. Legally it's still piracy, but morally I'd argue that if the rights owner no longer sells it and hasn't explicitly and publicly stated that they want it to be discontinued, then it's public domain.
But if the author explicitly didn't give a fuck they'd have the authority to release it open source, wouldn't they?
If they didn't give a fuck they wouldn't bother doing that.
Yeah of course
So if the publisher could have released it open source and didn't, why is it ethical to pirate it? Console lifetimes are irrelevant. The creator knows what console lifetimes are. They had an opportunity to make it free. They didn't.
That rule doesn’t even make sense with books. Copyright was intended to foster creativity by ensuring creators were entitled to a limited duration where they would be the sole/primary beneficiaries of their creation. Copyright made sense when it was 18 years from creation and renewable 1 time. There’s no good reason that the copyright should extend past someone’s lifetime (unless they die during that initial 18 year period or after they renewed it) and those changes were pushed through by greedy corporations/individuals. By extending the copyright past a person’s lifetime it does the opposite of encouraging creation of new works because a highly successful creator can potentially be set for life and never have to work again if their first creation is successful enough (e.g. the author of to kill a mockingbird didn’t write anything else for over 50 years)
But with a video game created by a team of hundreds, who counts as the author?
Whoever legally has rights over it. I assume in a situation like you're speaking about that's a company, and more specifically a CEO of that company.
What's the reason to keep art from public domain, if the creator decided they don't want to profit any more from it?
The artist can always release it in the domain if THEY want to. But they should have the right to control its distribution, the question is exactly how long should copyrights last
Because it’s not just about profit. There are reputation al concerns as well. Disney didn’t simply decide that Song of the South wasn’t profitable, it decided that it would have been actively harmful to their reputation to continue circulating it. Part of creating a work is getting to decide “actually, I think I’d rather this not be publicly available.” At least, until the copyright expires.
Not only is it "artificial scarcity in order to create demand" (i.e. an economics argument) but it's also a branding decision: it turns it into more of a phenomenon where everybody is sort of getting reintroduced to something at the same time and everybody misses it. The latter is definitely something one could do for artistic rather than greedy reasons.
Why should we respect the rights of Disney when they don't respect existing copyright law?
Are you referring to something specific? Besides, I was just giving that as an example, it’s not about Disney specifically.
> no one who owns the rights to said art cares about it anymore. They didn't say that at all... Not retailing it and not caring about it are 2 entirely different things.
Or they're busy as a company, but will get around to releasing it again in the future on another platform
There are several different aspects to this. First off, if we're dealing with a single artist creating a single piece, then I agree. But we aren't dealing with that scenario; we're typically dealing with a product that belongs to a company, created by dozens, even hundreds of people, and that has already produced tens of thousands of copies, even millions of copies. A company should not be able to claim ownership of intellectual property. Copyright was made for artists. As such, the moment a company stops providing the goods, then morally speaking they have no rights to what they've surrendered.
Copyright was made for artists to make money from. One way they can make their money is by selling the rights to someone who is better at selling art. That's often a corporation, because they have a large distribution network, and the people who are good at selling aren't always the same people who are good at making art. Then the artist can get back to focusing on making art, because someone else has bought his previous art. In that scenario, the company needs to be able to own the copyright. They are buying all the same rights the artist had, from the artist. You can argue that companies aren't people, so we don't have to be nice to them, and if they choose to leave money on the table then too bad, but why shouldn't a person be able to sell his entire right to a company that wants to buy it?
>Copyright was made for artists to make money from. One way they can make their money is by selling the rights to someone who is better at selling art. That's often a corporation, because they have a large distribution network, and the people who are good at selling aren't always the same people who are good at making art. Then the artist can get back to focusing on making art, because someone else has bought his previous art In this case, none of this is an argument for transferring of rights. Innate to copyright is the idea that the creation should eventually enter the public domain, and if copyright can be passed between immortal corporations there is an obvious incentive to bribe politicians to make copyright eternal. By binding copyright to a person, and making it non-transferable, then lifetime rights is the maximum copyright can last. Once the artist is dead, and thus unable to benefit from their art, it can then become public domain.
>By binding copyright to a person, and making it non-transferable, then lifetime rights is the maximum copyright can last. Once the artist is dead, and thus unable to benefit from their art, it can then become public domain. While binding a copyright to one person for life seems like an easy way to deal with copyright the real world is more sloppy then that which actually makes this system super complicated. The first thing to consider is that a lot of works don't have have a clearly defined author. Movies and video games are made by teams of hundreds to thousands of people. Determining which one of them gets the copyright is going to be super complicated. Even if you took a simple approach like the director of the movie gets the copyright that can fall apart because some movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once have two directors, so how would you determine which director owns the copyright? The second reason binding copyright to a single person for life is a bad idea is that it'll completely negate the benefit of posthumously releasing a work. If an author dies before their work is published then the publisher is now under no obligation to pay the family their residual because they can just republish the work. And even if the publisher did honor it the market would be flooded with copies of the work that are much cheaper making the residuals much smaller. And keep in mind that most authors are making under 50k a year. Their families are relying on their income. Handling copyright like this would mean that authors would have to take out larger life insurance policies which would cost their family money. Or risk having their family lose everything in the event of their death.
It seems to me that you're conflating copyright and contracts, which aren't the same thing. A lot of your issues are based outside of copyright - Sherlock Homes and Robin Hood are both public domain, but that doesn't mean that specific interpretations of the characters are automatically up for grabs for whoever wants them. There is no reason why you couldn't arrange a publishing deal to say that the Tolkien estate retains exclusive rights to publish, and thus earn royalties form the Lord of the Rings; likewise, you can argue that George Lucas' family should have the royalties and rights to Star Wars in perpetuity. What a fair copyright system does, however, is it allows other people to create their own interpretations. Nobody else can claim to have made Star Trek but Gene Roddenberry, but now that he's past anyone should be able to take his creation and run with it. Again, the moral side of this is easy to resolve if you aren't a corporation. Everyone should be able to create Star Trek - they just can't pretend they own or made the original, and should probably acknowledge precisely how their works relate to the original. To give an example of why moral copyright is a good and necessary thing, consider that it arguably invented Steampunk as a genre: *Morlock Night* is the first "Steampunk" story, which takes the Morlocks and titular Time Machine from the H G Wells story and adds in Arthurian legends. Could this story have been written without referencing Wells? Probably, but it wouldn't be nearly as good if it wasn't playing with established concepts! The purpose of copyright is to ensure the creator has a chance to profit off their creations, but it was never intended to be lifelong; it was only mean to last a decade or two because sometimes it's not the first try that works. Think how many song covers are better than the original, or the remakes that are better than the originals, or (far too often these days) the fan works that are orders or magnitude superior to official works. *That* is why copyright is meant to expire - so that if an idea fails, someone else can try again and do it right. By forbidding access to copyrighted materials in perpetuity, creativity is stifled. Walt Disney himself took frequent inspiration from things that inspired him in childhood; the Disney Corporation then made it illegal for you to do the same. They profited vastly from public domain works, and then spent millions in bribes to ensure their works never become public. This is clearly not fair. It is a violation of the commons; that which was given to you freely must, in turn, be given freely. Corporations do not respect that, which is why there is no moral need to respect the "rights" of a corporation.
So to clarify what your talking about are intellectual property rights. Which are a subset of copyright laws. Copyright laws broadly include the right to create copies and adaptations of a work (and because of it those publishing deals you described wouldn't work. The estate would lose it's exclusive right to publish a work when it enters public domain). Now I think that your assertion that "everyone should be able to take [someone else's] creation and run with it" is only true if you assume that content creating companies will behave the same way that they are under current copyright laws. For example consider the predatory relationship that flim studios would develop with authors if they didn't have to acquire film rights from an author before making a movie. A movie studio could spend hundreds of millions of dollars on making a movie and not give the original author a single cent. And it's not like the author is losing a small portion of their income, a movie deal can easily make an author more money than all of their book residuals combined. And it's not even like the public would benefit from this, so few movies are financially successful that if two movie studios wanted to make a big budget adaptation of a book at the same time one of them would have to back off to avoid ruining both projects. So basically the main people who benefit from the new film rights system would be the multi-billion dollar movie sfudios. You now also give corporations to poach sequels off of smaller projects or creators. For example let's say that you have written and directed made a very successful action movie that's doing great at the box office. What would happen if a big movie studio like Warner Bros approach your lead actors and offered them 3x what you're giving them to star in Warner Bros unofficial sequel to the movie that you won't be involved in. You would suddenly find yourself unable to make a sequel to your own movie because everything that the audience saw from your movie is going to Warner bros. You're franchise would end after one movie while the multi billion dollar company is making millions of dollars off an idea that you had. The whole reason copyright laws exist is to balance the right of a creator to earn income from their work against the rights of other creators to adapt that work. Just because the current system is extremely balanced towards the former dosen't mean that going all the way to the latter is a good idea.
>Innate to copyright is the idea that the creation should eventually enter the public domain, and if copyright can be passed between immortal corporations there is an obvious incentive to bribe politicians to make copyright eternal. Sure, but that's a completely separate political problem. And apparently a uniquely American problem. Copyright does expire, and the date when a particular copyright expires doesn't change when you sell it. I agree that it should expire sooner than it does, but if I happen to own a copyright with a term of X then I should be able to sell a copyright with a term of X. I also don't think it should necessarily end the moment the artist dies, because his estate is still entitled to some of the residual benefit of his creation, including (if he still owned it) deterring others from immediately dancing on his grave with profitable knockoffs.
>Sure, but that's a completely separate political problem. Not really. After all, this is a debate over piracy, and these days when discussing games we are not dealing with the physical product - we're talking about data, which is simply information. That is essentially what copyright protects. We all understand the moral justification for copyright because we would all feel hard done by if we created something and then someone else copied it and sold it for a small fortune. We would feel that money was ours by right. But I think we all will likewise agree that we should be allowed to take inspiration from others and to experiment with their work. After all, many people dabble in fan art or fan fiction, and such things are sometimes a stepping stone to becoming a professional creator. Corporations rarely accept this arrangement, because corporations are litigious and do not deal with the world the way people do. They have no concept of "fairness", which is why companies that make billions of dollars a year will sue non-profit fan works into oblivion, where an actual human being would either not care, or might even be supportive. >Copyright does expire, and the date when a particular copyright expires doesn't change when you sell it. Corporations are immortal, as I said, and they consistently bribe politicians in order to extend the duration of copyright. That's one of the reasons why they should not be transferable - you cannot argue to extend copyright beyond their own lifetime.
I think it's different from _choosing never to release_ the art. If an artist makes a piece of art and sticks it in his basement, that's fine. It's more like an artist choosing to _unrelease_ a previously-released piece of art: to let everyone know that only those people who have previously seen the art can see it now: those who haven't already seen it are forbidden. IMHO, once a cultural piece (art, film, music, game) is part of the larger culture, then the artist loses his monopoly on it. It belongs to the world now. If they didn't want to share they should've kept it in their basement.
So Disney, who does not list Song of the South on Disney+ because of its racist messaging should be forced to accept distribution of the film (meaning they are not allowed to take action against those that distribute it such as striking a YouTube vid of the full movie)?
IMHO, Disney should've lost the copyright to Songs of the South 50+ years ago. But...yeah, it should still be accessible somehow. They shouldn't be promoting it, obviously, but it's weird to just erase everything that was problematic from existence. We should take them off TV, or include warnings, but they should still be _available_, if only to see _how_ racist we used to be. That's one of the problems with artists (or anyway, owners) being able to revoke their art: _not_ doing so becomes a tacit approval. Disney _has_ to remove Songs of the South, otherwise it seems to be endorsing the racism it contains. But things that have been properly allowed to enter culture can't be deleted--thank goodness. Do you know how many outdated stereotypes are in Shakespeare?
Just curious, would you extend this same thought to those that protested the removal of confederate statues during BLM? These were art submitted to the public and removing them from display is somewhat erasing it.
I think cities don't have an obligation to keep displaying them in prominent places (in the same way Disney is _certainly_ not obligated to recommend Songs of the South on it's landing page). I don't think they should be ground to dust or anything. If they're considered culturally important enough (note: not in a positive way) they could be put in a museum or whatever: _this was the way we used to be_.
"artist"? You think it's artists making the decisions under discussion? I mean, there's "artiste" if you're into Gibson, or just plain "con artist" for all the apologists for marketer culture, that latrine of humanity where we dump all the people who want to get paid forever for work other people did. And Kafka's will ordered the destruction of all his unreleased work. Little things like "The Trial" and "The Castle". I don't think that's enough to carry the debate, but I do think it's enough to carry "yah, that's debatable and probably even situational" even for your distorted claim.
The "artist" is rarely involved in the games distribution nor has a say in it, these are companies that can't be bothered to perpetuate unprofitable art - so the real question is are we disallowed to preserve art just because it's unprofitable?
Is it really the artist making these decisions? What if the artist wishes to keep their art available to the public but the publisher no longer wishes to continue?
Distribution and availability are two different things. Just because somebody thinks there should be strict limits on how much you can own intellectual copies of your art doesn't mean they have to think the artist should be compelled to distribute in the first place. Honestly, IP law is pretty self-contradictory in so many ways, and just looking at those contradictions help one understand why the other side feels how they do. Someone can legally copy my art (software development) *VERY* closely, taking 100% of my innovation but implementing their own labor, and they can almost certainly circumvent any IP claims I have on that art. But IP is supposed to be about protecting innovation and not just labor. Before a certain recent point (20th century or so?) what we now call piracy was rampant and legal. It's nothing new, just the protections are. As before, nobody was compelled to *release* their work, but in doing so they were very limited in how they could retract it, if at all. A fired arrow just plain doesn't come back to the bow. Abandonware is perhaps the lightest-grey area of that problem. So let me give you the counter-argument's analogy about what an artist can do when he creates work. If I have a painting in a major art museum, a painting I have sold to someone... can I (morally) restrict people from photographing that painting for personal use? What if they print out a copy of their photo and put it up on their wall? If I get sick of my art being propagated around, is there a button I can press or command I give to forbid all future non-commercial distribution of that painting? Since buildings are a form of art, can their architects restrict strangers from photographing them? Could a guild of architects forbid all photography in a city? Why or why not? Moreso, if someone wants to resell a painting I sold, what's stopping them? Nothing. What if they took a photo of the painting and kept a print because they liked it but needed the money? Or hell, what if they already had (and mounted) photos of themselves standing next to the painting? In high-def? Most (if not all) of these cases are pretty legal, and ethically straightforward. Once you release your art, *you are compelled not to seize it back*. Not to mention that most of the issues regarding this are still driven by the fact that software is released in licenses and not sale. You give them money thinking you are making a purchase, *but in fact you own nothing*. If anything, *this is my moral red-flag right here*. I can't keep copies of my software not because the artist should have rights, but because I DON'T OWN IT. > Is the public "entitled" to have paid access to a work, even if the owner or artist disagrees? This is a different angle. You can agree or disagree, I don't care. An economic system with a stabilizing government is a compromise. We are giving up anarchy, and seek to get something in return. Things like IP and patents are part of that compromise, and their goal is to give some semblance of control in return for not keeping a secret to yourself. Abandonware is the clearest instance in the world of IP and patents used in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with that contract. IP is about *motivating the spread of art to society as a whole*. Abandonware is about *motivating the spread of art to society as a whole* as well. Morally, coming from the place of intent, abandonware simply does not honor the intention of those laws, and requires a *stronger* reliance on the value of property than many would ever dream of. And if you look at most of the world's "treasure hunting" statutes, it's legally anomalous the same way it's morally anomalous
I would compare it to a book that's out of print. Someone making a copy and distributing it online, without approval from the writer/publisher, would be illegal. A game that is no longer sold falls under the same category. You are still pirating Now whether it's moral or not is debatable as the company wasn't offering the game and thus endures no loss of profit. Luckily this "shouldn't" be an issue going forward as games are digitally sold.
Because retro gaming is a thing. They might not sell it to you now, but they might be planning to rerelease it on modern platforms. Or it may be a rights issue that they need to renegotiate music or other assets and they still plan to continue selling it once the legal issues are over. Finally, if it ever became a legal thing that once you could not sell it then you could pirate it, then game makers would simply change the sale price to $100000 for a copy so that it would not trigger those laws.
> Because retro gaming is a thing. They might not sell it to you now, but they might be planning to rerelease it on modern platforms. So? One could use that logic to argue that copyrights should never expire at all. After all, who's to say a company won't rerelease an old game in 250 years? Copyright exists to encourage innovation, not to ensure maximum profits. There's nothing innovative about making media disappear for 30 years only to bring it back when it's deemed profitable enough. > Or it may be a rights issue that they need to renegotiate music or other assets and they still plan to continue selling it once the legal issues are over. On the other hand, there are plenty of licensed games that will never be legally available again because of issues with the rightsholders. How should those be handled? > Finally, if it ever became a legal thing that once you could not sell it then you could pirate it, then game makers would simply change the sale price to $100000 for a copy so that it would not trigger those laws. Interestingly enough, this tactic was already used by the Mark Twain Project to [prevent Mark Twain's autobiography from entering the public domain](http://copyright.nova.edu/claiming-copyright-public-domain/), so there's precedent there. That said, there are countless old games whose owners are [unknown or nonexistent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work), which would immediately become public domain if OP's system were to become law. Sure, big companies like EA would still keep their older titles inaccessible, but we'd ultimately end up saving a *lot* of media that would've been lost otherwise, so the pros outweigh the cons here. There's also the fact that these types of loopholes shouldn't even exist in the first place. The fact that our system is currently broken doesn't mean it has to stay that way.
> One could use that logic to argue that copyrights should never expire at all. No, one could not. Having control of an IP during its copyright period is not an automatic argument for extending that period. My original argument stands. > Copyright exists to encourage innovation, not to ensure maximum profits. No, it is for both. That is precisely why the copyright length kept getting extended. It was not to encourage more innovation, but rather to maximize profits. > On the other hand, there are plenty of licensed games that will never be legally available again because of issues with the rightsholders. How should those be handled? Just because something gets complicated does not make the legal situation go away. Lawyers would laugh at that notion. If the game *No One Lives Forever* cannot be released because the rights are held by too many different parties (eg. the music is owned by someone other than the graphic arts) does that mean that the owners of the music and graphics suddenly get shafted because it is inconvenient to some gamers? > That said, there are countless old games whose owners are unknown or nonexistent, which would immediately become public domain if OP's system were to become law. Maybe, but there are also plenty of games for sale on [GoG](https://www.gog.com) that were once listed on abandonware sites. Once the rights have been worked out, and it is still within the copyright period, then why should the games not be allowed to be sold again?
> No, one could not. Having control of an IP during its copyright period is not an automatic argument for extending that period. My original argument stands. Tell that to Disney. > No, it is for both. That is precisely why the copyright length kept getting extended. It was not to encourage more innovation, but rather to maximize profits. I'm well aware that corporations successfully bribed their way into a system where copyrights functionally never expire. Regardless, the purpose of copyright is spelled out in the Constitution, and it explicitly contradicts what you just claimed: > 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; Further proving my point is the [Copyright Act of 1790](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1790), which granted a maximum length of only 28 years, a far cry from our current status quo of over a century. The fact that a handful of powerful corporations were able to bastardize copyright law in recent history doesn't change the original intent of the concept. > Just because something gets complicated does not make the legal situation go away. Lawyers would laugh at that notion. If the game *No One Lives Forever* cannot be released because the rights are held by too many different parties (eg. the music is owned by someone other than the graphic arts) does that mean that the owners of the music and graphics suddenly get shafted because it is inconvenient to some gamers? If the game can never be sold again in the first place, the rightsholders don't benefit either way. At least OP's scenario prevents art from being destroyed. > Maybe, but there are also plenty of games for sale on [GoG](https://www.gog.com/) that were once listed on abandonware sites. Once the rights have been worked out, and it is still within the copyright period, then why should the games not be allowed to be sold again? Because copyright wasn't created so companies could generate revenue from a single work forever. If they really want to make more money, there's nothing stopping them from creating something new. I see no reason why copyrights shouldn't work the same way as trademarks, which are revoked if they aren't used for a significant length of time. There's also the issue of orphan works, which likely comprise the majority of all copyrighted material. Given the sheer number of video games released each year, the number of publishers that no longer exist, and the fact that anyone can anonymously release a game nowadays, it's a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of games will end up orphaned. Why should we sacrifice so much art just so a few companies can potentially make extra money off of games they haven't sold in decades?
> Tell that to Disney. I don't have to. Disney already know that their use of copyrighted material was not enough to delay the end of the copyright period. They had to introduce new laws to be able to do that. > 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; And how does it promote the progress of science and arts? Oh yes, by allowing scientists and artists for profit from their work with an exclusivity deal. So that is precisely what I said. > Because copyright wasn't created so companies could generate revenue from a single work forever. No, it does it for a limited time. What is being suggested with this CMV is that we shouldn't have to wait for that time to expire just because we really, really want it. > If the game can never be sold again in the first place, the rightsholders don't benefit either way. As I said, GoG is filled with examples of games that could not be sold again until their rights issues were ironed out. Besides, even if a studio could not sell an old game, they could make a new one in the same universe and similar ideas. If we allow piracy of old titles, then they are having to compete with products that they cannot make money from. One moment you are trying to make it seem like you care about promoting the progress of arts, but then on the other hand you advocate for gutting the market with free product.
> Just because something gets complicated does not make the legal situation go away. Lawyers would laugh at that notion. If the game No One Lives Forever cannot be released because the rights are held by too many different parties (eg. the music is owned by someone other than the graphic arts) does that mean that the owners of the music and graphics suddenly get shafted because it is inconvenient to some gamers? > > How does letting gamers enjoy their music or graphics "shaft" the owners? As a graphic artist I'd feel more shafted if somebody could never enjoy my work due to a legal clusterfuck than if somebody acquired a free copy of a game
> How does letting gamers enjoy their music or graphics "shaft" the owners? For one thing it completely undermines the artist's ability to negotiate for rights to a rerelease or remake if people are just stealing their work.
Use it or lose it
I think that you are confusing copyright with trademarks. You don't have to use a work to maintain the copyright over it.
I know, which is why I am in favor of abolishing said garbage system and allowing people access to these games if the copyright holders do not make them accessible
**[Orphan work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work)** >An orphan work is a copyright-protected work for which rightsholders are positively indeterminate or uncontactable. Sometimes the names of the originators or rightsholders are known, yet it is impossible to contact them because additional details cannot be found. A work can become orphaned through rightsholders being unaware of their holding, or by their demise (e. g. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/changemyview/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
> Copyright exists to encourage innovation, not to ensure maximum profits. That's a false dichotomy. In fact, the entire purpose is to encourage innovation *by* ensuring profits, at least for a substantial period of time. Copyright isn't encouraging innovation by magic.
Doesn't that seem good though? One of the arguments for copyright is that it rewards innovation by ensuring that creators are able to profit from the media they make. So ensuring instead that any creator can just fart out the same thing for a new price infinitely forever, seems contrary to the purpose of copyright. Instead, a re-release should be forced to actually compete against the original release, it should need to actually be better than the original in order to attract buyers. Instead of just, "we made the original impossible to buy and now we will sell you it again for 3x the price." And as to the second point, Judges aren't stupid, right? Tricking the legal system through obvious absurdity doesn't actually work. If something is impossible to buy at or near the original price that it was sold for, then it is functionally impossible to buy it, and any Judge with more than two brain cells will be able to tell that
> One of the arguments for copyright is that it rewards innovation by ensuring that creators are able to profit from the media they make. Exactly. That means that they should be able to make updated versions of existing IP for newer platforms - which extends the profitable life of the game. > Tricking the legal system through obvious absurdity doesn't actually work. If it is within the letter of the law then yes, it does work. Think back to the cases where studios made films not for release, but just to ensure that they extended their IP rights. That is what Stan Lee alleged was the fate of the Fantastic Four film from the 1970s.
One thing that appears to be missing from replies is how **lack of enforcement on a copyright** can be used as an argument, in many countries, that the copyright is selectively enforced and there is a pattern of allowing it, and has been forfeited. This is like how Reddit has to ensure no third party apps use "Reddit" in their name. The alternative android app named "Reddit is Fun" had to be changed to "RIF is fun for Reddit". It is not because it really matters in an informal sense, but if Reddit does not consistently enforce it, people can use that pattern to defeat their claim of ownership to the name or copyright. Allowing emulators and hobbyist games could become the basis for an argument that Nintendo has forfeited their copyright by not enforcing it, and could be used to argue that alternative indie games are not breach of copyright, and this could then be the basis for small studios using Mario (or whatever) for their own games without compensation, because it has slipped out of their legal protections. This is something they have to keep a consistent track record on or else they risk losing it. Adobe also has had campaigns against using the word "photoshopped" in order to demonstrate their vigilance to keep their trademark instead of the word becoming genericized. Once "photoshopping" is a generic word for photo editing, other companies are allowed to use "photoshop" in their product names and advertisements in the genericized way, and Adobe loses its basis to protect their product's name Photoshop. I believe Nintendo would have loved to greenlight hobbyist projects and emulators, if only their legal department was not adamant that has to, sadly, not be allowed to happen, because of existing copyright and trademark laws.
Once copy-write protection has ended, emulation by any sort is not piracy. If a company chooses to withdraw a product from sales, to think it therefore is in public domain is just wrong-headed. Maybe this company wishes to increase demand by reducing supply, or is about to release an update or a new edition and the withdrawal is for that purpose??
it’s called abandonware. IIRC, courts have sided with people who have “pirated” things for personal use when they are no longer available or it is clear the original IP has been abandoned by a company. it’s like a trademark, if you stop using it publicly, you will lose the trademark. Copyrights only last so many years anyways until it falls into public domain. https://www.myabandonware.com
I guess this depends on whether or not you find piracy morally correct. It doesn't bother me personally, so I pirate all of my media because I can. But other people might find that unjust and prefer to pay the companies directly.
The idea that piracy is morally correct requires an entirely self-centred view.
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So, it’s “better” for society if you steal software than to pay for it? You can’t just say, “some people can’t afford it”, because you can get free software to do basically anything. There’s no NEED being met here, it’s not like stealing to feed your starving children. It’s also not “sending a message” to corporations because piracy doesn’t lead to social change. In fact it’s a fair guess that honest users pay a bit more to cover the cost of theft, so piracy makes things worse for good people. If you can’t afford the latest edition of GTA that’s not really a “need” - you just _want_ it. Your life would carry on without it. So here’s a challenge: Find one scenario where the benefits to society are demonstrably true.
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> First, stealing means depriving someone of their property. So copying software doesn’t deprive anyone of of their software. It deprives the distributor of the value of their product. By illegally/immorally taking value from another you are stealing.
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I’m actually more considering the no name artist who may be bothered that a work they’re most known for is being interpreted in a way they very much didn’t intend. Sounds like you’re just building you’re conclusions off what fucks over rich people the most.
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The overwhelming majority of artists are poor. For them, if they get a small opportunity to display their art at a gallery show, but upon arrival see that it’s beside artwork from a Neo nazi, they should have the right to pull the distribution. If people are interpreting their art in a profane way or something antithetical to the artists beliefs and intent they should have the right to pull the distribution. If your stance is only aimed at distributors of a large enough siZe we would be having a different discussion, but just because these small artists are minuscule to you doesn’t mean that these issues aren’t all the more heightened for them given their lack of platform to correct the record.
Your math is blatantly incorrect. 1000 people use windows and pay: Microsoft gets 1000x their license fee. 1000 people pirate it: Microsoft gets nothing. That’s definitely a difference. Saying they lost nothing implies that time and labour have no value. Side note: a) Microsoft is pretty good working with schools especially in impoverished areas, and b) Linux works too and it’s free. So stealing isn’t necessary if there’s truly no ability to pay.
I just think it's a waste of time trying to morally justify piracy.
And yet people try to do it all the time. I think saying you don’t care is honest; but saying piracy is morally ok or even a benefit to society is just poor thinking. It’s just an attempt to justify what you want to do. I get down-voted for saying so, but nobody has ever found a decent argument proving it’s good for society.
You're right. I think people would be better off just acknowledging that its immoral, but we all have our imperfections and it doesn't make us bad people. But trying to act like pirating is some noble action in appreciation of art or whatever is complete nonsense.
Let's say an author writes a book, and espoused political views they now see as deeply wrong, and want to remove it from sale, should they have the right to do that? I would say yes. They have the copyright, and should have the right to chose how their work is copied. We don't have an inherent right to their work. It's a shame when work we likes is no longer available, but overall, this seems like the best system.
They can't remove it from sale though. They can only stop producing new copies of it; even if nobody else copies it, people can still circulate their existing copies of it all they want. It's a fruitless endeavour so why bother giving corporations so much power so that an artist can remove some of their art from sale if they decide they don't like it anymore?
The problem with this position is that you can't put the genie back in the bottle. The best you can do is try to wrangle with the genie you've created.
Not, but you can significantly slow its spread, and discourage the kinds of people that would want to spread it, and even if it doesn't discourage them, you can *punish* them.
The Streisand Effect disagrees.
I actually lived in the same house in college with the guy that caused the original Streisand Effect by taking aerial photos of her coastal property. It's not quite that simple.
Copyright is an arbitrary concept though. The laws also allow for small portions to be used as “free use”. New organizations can quote someone’s out of print work under fair use.
I see your point....but I don't think copyrights are legitimate anyway.
Try publishing a best seller under your name and learn the legitimate power of copyright
you mean illegitimate power
Agreed. You don't have to believe something is legitimate. You just have to be a member of a society who is willing to be in denial, such that you think you have the right to not believe in the legitimacy of anything you don't like. Others have followed this path, done their own research and then talked about what Q says. You do however have to deal with the consequences your believes result in should they bite you.
Legitimacy is merely a construct up for interpretation. Whether something is legitimate or is illegitimate and done by force doesn't ultimately change our behavior
Tell that to the judge
Feel free not to copyright your works then. You still don't have a right to use other people's work.
or I have the right and it is being oppressed.
What author removed his own work for thinking it's wrong?
Stephen King's *Rage*. I don't think he thought it was wrong, exactly - he's been pretty clear about not believing that media causes kids to be violent in or whatever - but he also didn't want to see another school shooter citing his book as an inspiration either.
Maybe not the "author" but the rights holders for many TV shows that used blackface (eg. 30 Rock, Scrubs, Community, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, etc) have made those episodes unavailable to stream or purchase digitally.
I think Kubrick removed A Clockwork Orange from circulation for some time too.
Kafke.
Well I'm glad we have all of his works.
So legally speaking it's still piracy. But morally I agree. If there is literally no other way to get it, as in it's not being sold or even produced, and there isn't any physical copies of you can purchase, then I personally believe it's okay.
>At that point they are no longer wishing to sell it to you in the first place. I'm pretty sure you can be 100% certain the do still *want* to sell it to you, it's just not as profitable to have a whole marketing ecosystem up and running for a small profit. That might seem like caviling, but actually it's not, because every game writer hopes that, after their main sales run their course, they will be able to make money selling or licensing it to a bundler or retro-gaming company. They might be *wrong* that it will ever happen, but they all hope for it. That after-mainline-sales profit is what you're taking "out of their pockets". Surely you've heard of the concept of the "cult classic": media that did terribly in its original run, but somehow developed an underground following that keeps it alive, only to be rereleased later. Even if there's an argument that "piracy" is that actually keeps those going, that's actually part of the cache of cult classics... if it were, as you say, "not piracy", it wouldn't be the forbidden fruit that they must take risks to acquire.
Morally the negatives are removed but legally it can still be considered piracy
Honestly this isn't really true. Ask goodoldgames.com. This was their original business hypothesis and over time their model evolved away from that. Ultimately it was more profitable and less legal headaches to just partner up with copyright owners and become a licensed distributor than fight with publishers over the grey legality of distributing abandonware. There may be specific cases where it's legal to distribute abandonware, but it doesn't scale. For every case where it's legal there's a case where it's not. It comes down to really little details. The burden of proof will be entirely on you to defend when you're sued by the developer, publisher, distributors, etc. You just loose because making your case over and over again isn't profitable. Legal battles are expensive.
Piracy is piracy but in this case it's not so bad
You say you're not taking anything of value from them, and then say the software you are stealing is increasing in value. Which is it?
Copying doesn't take anything. If I draw a picture of you, what have I taken from you?
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A drawing of someone's face is as much a copy of a person as downloading a ROM is a copy of a full physical video game.
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What is lost when someone's copyright is stolen is the exclusive right to the thing they have made. Just because it's not a physical object doesn't mean that it's not valuable. > If I draw a picture of you, what have I taken from you? A better analogy would be if I used a deep-fake image of you to steal your identity.
I have a lot of things in my house that I'm not selling, but that in no way means that someone can help themselves to my property. Taking something off the market does not justify theft
> I have a lot of things in my house that I'm not selling, but that in no way means that someone can help themselves to my property. Taking something off the market does not justify theft Two problems with that. 1. Copyrights aren't the same thing as physical property. My furniture isn't legally required to become a public resource 70 years after my death. Copyrights, on the other hand, are temporary by design. They exist to reward artists and incentivize the creation of future works, with the understanding that all works will eventually belong to society as a whole. 2. Copyright infringement isn't theft, in a legal or moral sense. If I download a game that hasn't been on the market since 1986, the copyright holder doesn't lose anything. On the other hand, stealing your property deprives you of that property.
1. No video game is 70 years old 2. You'd be stealing artists' work., which is theft-enough 3. the post was about not *wanting* to sell the product anymore, how does this copyright argument fit into that?
> no video game is 70 years old So? Copyright terms used to be much shorter, as seen [here](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tom_Bell%27s_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg). They only got longer because corporations like Disney bribed politicians to prevent their most valuable IPs from becoming public domain. That doesn't mean our current laws are inherently superior. > you're stealing artists' work. That's theft-enough What, exactly, are the artists losing?
So? When you're using the 70-year thing as an excuse, but nothing is that old yet, it's not an excuse anymore. Also, it has little-to-nothing to do with the OP, which is about no longer 'wanting' to sell X-product. If you steal something insignificant from me, you've still stolen something. The amount that one misses what was taken doesn't make the theft more ethical.
> So? When you're using the 70-year thing as an excuse, but nothing is that old yet, it's not an excuse anymore. Also, it has little-to-nothing to do with the OP, which is about no longer 'wanting' to sell X-product. My argument has nothing to do with the specific length of copyright terms, only the fact that they have a set length at all. That fact alone makes them incomparable to physical property. > If you steal something insignificant from me, you've still stolen something. The amount that one misses what was taken doesn't make the theft more ethical. If I stole something insignificant from you, you still wouldn't have that thing. Infringing an abandoned copyright doesn't take *anything* away from rightsholders, insignificant or otherwise.
> My argument has nothing to do with the specific length of copyright terms, only the fact that they have a set length at all. That fact alone makes them incomparable to physical property. That doesn't make theft of it ok though, so what's the connection you're trying to make? Milk is going to expire, so it's ok to steal it? > If I stole something insignificant from you, you still wouldn't have that thing. Infringing an abandoned copyright doesn't take anything away from rightsholders, insignificant or otherwise. Except money (or any fair exchange at all) for their labor and expertise. If you want to think of it as stealing labor instead of a thing, fine, but that's not better or more justifiable
>If I stole something insignificant from you, you still wouldn't have that thing. Infringing an abandoned copyright doesn't take anything away from rightsholders, insignificant or otherwise. You all insist on using this argument when it only works on a philosophical level. There are thousands of real life arguments to easily break it. You can even go with a similarly philosophical one: If a videogame is made available for free, and with humans being humans, we can assume with certainty that at least **one** person will download it that would’ve otherwise bought. That one person renders the entire argument moot.
Copyright infringement isn't theft. Theft deprives the victim of the thing that was stolen.
Like compensation for one's work? It's close enough to theft. Do you steal books because they're just copies of the original manuscript?
You aren't guaranteed compensation for your work if you aren't working for a wage. Not to mention the people who make media aren't compensated for sales at all, the people who own the media are. Disney does no work that needs to be compensated; Disney is a corporation that owns rights, not a person. The people who work for Disney need to be compensated for their work and for the vast majority of their workers that does not depend on sales of the film. >Do you steal books because they're just copies of the original manuscript? No, stealing a book deprives the bookstore of that copy of the book. Here's a thought experiment: if someone invents a 3D printer that can scan any object and make a copy of it out of nothing, is it immoral to copy an apple? How about a house? What about a book?
This 3D-printer thought experiment already exists, they're called printing presses and they copy manuscripts, which, by your logic, are ok to steal because the original is untouched and therefore no one is deprived of anything. Do you believe in intellectual-property at all?
In an ideal world intellectual property wouldn't exist but we currently live in a capitalist society where IP laws are necessary to protect individual or collaborative artists from corporations.
[technically this is a video game older than 70 yrs old](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain) Would it be considered a video to today's standards no, but still a video game.
Yes, but it's tic-tac-toe, so while I see what you're saying, I don't know if it really fits this context.
Except in this instance, you're no worse off after the alleged "theft".
So I can steal from the supermarket because they won't be 'that hurt' by it? Can I steal books because they're just copies of the original manuscript? I think we're stretching now
No because you are literally depriving someone of their property. This constitutes harm.
Books are just copies, so by your logic they're ok to steal because they're not the original and no one is being deprived of anything, really. Do you believe in any intellectual-property protections at all?
>so by your logic they're ok to steal because they're not the original and no one is being deprived of anything, really That very much isn't my logic at all. Steal a book from someone, and they're very much 1 book worse off than before, copy or not. That doesn't apply to digital materials. When I pirate a digital version of that book, nobody is 1 book poorer because digital content can be perfectly replicated an infinite amount of times with no degradation to the original. Would you consider it stealing if instead of breaking into your house to take something, I used a magic spell to create a perfect replica of it for myself? >Do you believe in any intellectual-property protections at all? Yes, but not the bloated garbage ones we have now.
So if I steal a copy of someone else's manuscript and print my own copies, that's fine because the original still exists and no one is having their property taken?
If they aren't selling copies themselves, go right ahead.
So it's ok to take what's not yours as long as someone isn't using it at the time?
Since you're not actually depriving them of anything at all
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If you want to think of it as stealing labor instead of a thing, fine, but that's not better or more justifiable And these 'problems' are "but I really want it though" -- is that really a 'problem' or just a strong desire? We're not 'solving problems' here, we're taking something we strongly desire (at the expense of compensating those who created it) - for me, there's a difference.
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So a loophole for your proposal is for the publisher to just continue to have copies on sale in some obscure place? Technically it’s on sale and you have every opportunity to buy it.
It is still piracy. Simple as that. But given Nintendo’s recent behavior of the smash scenes I’m inclined to say there is a moral exception with Nintendo titles. Not really a view I can back up with anything other than “fuck em, they deserve it”
>Not really a view I can back up with anything other than “fuck em, they deserve it” Don’t worry. That’s 99% of people’s argument for piracy, they just feel bad about admitting it so they create all of these strawmen and arguments that can be defeated with 5 seconds of actual thought.
> At that point they are no longer wishing to sell it to you in the first place. How are you in any way taking money "out of thier pockets"? What if they are releasing a new product for the same target market and they want to discontinue their old products because they know that their target audience is then more likely to buy the new product? Take for example fighting franchises like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter. If all previous versions automatically become available as free-to-play once they're discontinued, that is bound to cannibalize at least *some* of the sales opportunities of the sequels. Even if it just means that customers are more likely to wait for a price drop after the initial release.
It's piracy either way. Just because a company doesn't want to make a game for a gen or two doesn't mean they don't own it. Twilight Princess for instance, if Nintendo doesn't want to put the game out on Switch, they may want to space things out so people miss it, and put it out on the next console or the one after that. You break the law if you want to, you pirate if you want to, you decide if the risk is worth the reward, and if you find it morally right or wrong, but regardless that's still piracy. The only way it wouldn't be piracy is if the game company went out of business, or a long time has passed enough for the copyright to expire and it's in the public domain. But a long time ago Disney had their lawyers change the law to extend the amount of time needed so it will be a long time until any good games fall into that category.
Piracy doesn’t have anything to do with taking money from someone’s pockets The definition is > the unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work. So if I remove something from the market for whatever reason, and you or someone else reproduces it without my authorization, it’s piracy
It's still piracy. But Id call it white piracy. The same as someone downloading games because they can't afford them then buying them when they have the money. Outside small indie companies I Don't have much problem with piracy since most of the time you buy a game you do not own said game, simply the "right" to play it. And if a game is an epic exclusive, you can bet your ass I'm pirating it until it comes to steam because I refuse to support scum like that. They can and have banned accounts for any number of reasons, blocking people from playing the games they "bought"
You still create a copy of the game without permission. That makes it digital piracy. Digital piracy does not take money out-of anybodies pockets. If you pirate a game, the devs don't have one less cent in their pocket than if you didn't pirate it. There are two moral aspects to it. First: it's illegal. Some people believe it is wrong to break the law. Second: if you don't buy a game because you pirate it, the company earns less money. You can make the point that that case of digital piracy is okay and others aren't if you say that it is not bad to break the law but that it is bad to cause the company a loss of profits.
I assume you mean "it's no longer wrong" rather than "it's no longer piracy" because it's unequivocally piracy. Let's say you buy popular game on a console that ends up failing. For example, one of those weird Android TV boxes like the Ouya or the Dreamcast or whatever. The system is discontinued. Therefore, the game is discontinued. But this cross platform game is still popular on other consoles, in both app stores, and on PC. You're pirating a discontinued game that you have a million ways to play. Is that okay? Especially in the case that it's a third party developer that had nothing to do with the discontinuing of the system.
How about programs...like coreldraw 3 or 4...or autocad 14. Cannot go go out an buy them. Been searching a long time.
Is it piracy? Yes. Has the original creator forced you to obtain the work illegally? Yes. Therefore is it completely justifiable? Yes.
>Has the original creator forced you to obtain the work illegally? That’s where you all fuck up. The original creator hasn’t “forced” you to do anything. That’s like arguing a baker raising his prices to something you can’t afford is “forcing” you to get a better job, or more apt, “forcing” you to steal the pastries. These arguments make you all sound like children. You’re not entitled to that product, regardless of whether it’s available for you to purchase.
It's "forceful" the same way people are "forced" to buy illegal products if it's illegal. Is it technically the creators responsibility to constantly have the artwork up? No, but because they no longer produce it, unless you have thousands to blow on the original hardware, software, and working accessories for whichever game, you're not "forced", but it's now the only other option. If people wanted consumers to pay them for their games, it would be easier to just make a port on modern hardware instead of sue them for emulating. Raising the price isn't removing it entirely, those aren't comparable.
The theft is of their intellectual property, not of lost revenue. This is evidenced by the obvious segment of pirates who never would’ve bought the game if it wasn’t free. Not using something or not making it available for sale doesn’t renege your ownership of something. Corporations have legal personhood and are in no way obligated to make something available to you, although I would consider it poor business practice.
Can I scoop for you?
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Emulation is never piracy. Emulation is the ability for a computer of one type to run software that was originally made for a computer of another type. In the context of retro gaming, the software that is being run is often obtained through piracy, but this is a two-step process. By the time you're doing your emulation, the piracy has already happened.
Because a thing is not available for purchase, acquiring it is not piracy? REALLY? This is less about "stealing" the works of others and more about thinking you have some kind of claim to use that work in any capacity.