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Notes -
Let's talk about software revocation: when a seller limits or disables their software after release, like an online game shuts down, particularly when customers aren't refunded.
Examples
Egregious example: Microsoft plans to remotely disable Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac. To be clear, this software was a one-time purchase and works completely offline, Microsoft even explicitly stated at one point it would continue to function. I can't even play devil's advocate.
Another example that I personally believe is stupid: when music from games is removed because the songs are licensed for a fixed duration (e.g. GTA4). Because, why include songs with these licensing requirements, when there are plenty of great songs without them? (And I don't think the removed songs from the GTA4 list are especially popular, I don't recognize any of them and only a couple artists.) Many games are simply delisted when the licenses expire; alternatively the licensed songs could be gated only for new users. At least these gamers weren't explicitly told the music would last forever (I assume), they just assumed.
Less egregious cases: when online-only games shut down. It's expensive to keep servers running; if the seller is an individual or small company they may obviously not have the funds. Providing users self-hostable servers can also be expensive: the server code should be changed for consumer hardware and documented, and the client code should be changed with UX and functionality for custom servers, or gamers will have trouble running it. Sometimes, the seller legally can't release server binaries, for IP reasons I don't really understand (the client code has third-party libraries, why is the server code different?). The most justified cases (albeit rare): the game is free-to-play with only temporary (e.g. seasonal) micro transactions, so there's nothing to refund.
The archtypal example: The Crew. A paid game released (by Ubisoft) in 2014 and permanently shut down in 2024 (without refunds). Online was a big part of the core gameplay, but the game had an offline mode which included a single-player campaign. Regardless, when Ubisoft shut down the game, they disabled the online mode and stopped players from re-downloading it. This shutdown spawned Stop Killing Games and lots of discussion about software revocation. Fortunately, the community has created a mod that re-enables the game and emulates its server (The Crew Unlimited).
Reactions
Stop Killing games campaign/NGO (mentioned above). Most known for collecting 1 million EU signatures so the EU Commission must eventually discuss their initiative, they also collected enough UK signatures for a UK parliament debate, and lobby in the US. Their voice has reached mainstream audiences (more or less: the world is so complicated there's not really one mainstream, but besides millions of signatures, they also got endorsed by celebrities including PewDiePie and Notch), but they haven't (physically) accomplished much, yet...
California's Protect our Games act. Passed the state assembly (not yet law). It requires publishers to post a notice 60 days before shutting down their game, and provide some offline functionality or refunds, although it doesn't apply to subscription games (and may have other exceptions). Backed by Stop Killing Games.
French consumer group sues Ubisoft over shutdown of online game 'The Crew': "UFC-Que Choisir alleges that Ubisoft misled consumers about the permanence of their purchase and imposed abusive contractual clauses stripping players of ownership rights". An earlier lawsuit in the US was dismissed. Backed by Stop Killing Games.
Cory Doctorow has (of course) written about this. I still support his crusade against enshittification, centralization, and unreasonable DRM (regardless of underlying goals), but I admit my general opinion of him has lowered, as this recent article has subtle xenophobia.
A road paved with good intentions
Of course consumers shouldn't lose access to things they've bought. You wouldn't remotely shutdown a car, or remotely disable its heating, or make previously-free heating a paid upgrade...(In fairness, the first two were mandated by governments, and the third was walked back.) Back on topic, surely at least egregious cases like Microsoft's are unjustified, so why shouldn't we prevent them via regulation?
It's not so simple:
Generally speaking: regulation doesn't intrinsically prevent anything, it's just a strongly-worded suggestion to the government and population. Moreover, all regulations have drawbacks: they cost money to enforce, discourage businesses, and hurt good-intentioned violators. Selective enforcement leads to the worse of both, where good-intentioned individuals and small businesses are targeted (sometimes frivolously but it still hurts them) while big businesses are ignored; an example I think is copyright, with false DMCA claims hurting individuals while big AI companies train on everything.
Consider the regulation "a software seller cannot disable any offline feature in their client without refunding buyers". Sounds reasonable, right? But what if an indie game developer pushes a balance chance that nerfs an OP character by removing their special ability? What if they remove a poorly-implemented game mode almost nobody was playing? Both of these also sound reasonable, but both can be considered disabling offline features. Even if no indie is successfully sued for such a frivolous reason, a failed lawsuit (motivated by the law) would harm them; even if there's no real lawsuit, the potential may discourage them.
My proposal
For now, media pushback and patches seem to be working for the most egregious cases. The Crew is playable via mod, more games are explicitly stating they won't remove licensed songs, I predict Microsoft will walk back revoking Office and am confident otherwise there will be a widely-available patch.
For the future, I support removing regulations on buyers circumventing end-of-life software, rather than adding regulations on sellers. At least after software becomes "end-of-life" (but preferably in general), there should be no restrictions on hacking the local version, only trying to hack the server. This won't stop determined sellers who put the entire game on the server and don't stream important gameplay logic (effectively recreating Stadia for only their game); but it's an improvement, and that streaming would make their game accessible to gamers with low-end PCs.
Copyrights on software should be about 6 or 7 years, and obtaining one should require sending the source to the USPTO who will publish it after the period ends.
The answer to that will be an even fuller embrace of cloud computing by every software manufacturer. It will be the end of running commercial software locally where you could possibly decompile, crack or copy it. Every software publisher will only allow you to interact with their software through cloud computing, that way they can avoid needing to copyright their software. This includes games (the infrastructure is slowing coming into place to allow this).
We can step back too, if you sell software or sell a service made available to Americans it's got to have it's source with the USPTO and be released after X years.
And someone there had better be able to compile and run your software with exact functionality of your commerical product. No free base layer with all the secret sauce on top.
It's never going to happen but software wants to be free.
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I like this in theory. In practice I think the massive disparity in legal resources will make this no different from the current situation.
If the game company with lawyers on call says their game doesn't count as end-of-life because of some transparent bullshit and threatens to sue a buyer sharing how to circumvent their restrictions then the likely result is that the buyer gives in or goes bankrupt fighting an expensive legal case (and then gives in).
The government might be inconsistent and heavy-handed but they do actually have the resources to threaten a company like Activision if enough people demand it.
I think that generally, it’s harder for game companies to successfully even threaten a frivolous lawsuit, than to defend a legitimate one.
The game company’s lawyers can defend the government’s lawsuit, or the hobbyist sued for bypassing EOL-not-EOL software can get enough people and attention on their side to recover any financial damage and Streisand the game company.
The problem with adding regulations is that they may be applied to smaller devs. Removing regulations, so that some smaller devs’ software may be deemed EOL too early, is less of an issue; because smaller devs already have weaker DRM and lawyers, and thus rely on good faith to defend against piracy (which seems to work well enough).
We have examples now that show this isn't how it will work in practice. I think the recent case around Bambu Labs' software is illustrative.
I won't go into all the details but what I find notable about that case is that, when served with a legal threat, the developer who made a workaround to now-removed functionality immediately took it down without any attempt to fight a legal case. This happened despite a significant number of people interested in his success and despite the developer appearing to believe the threat was legally unsupported.
It shows very clearly that legality is not sufficient to protect game preservation efforts. Under the current legal system threats of legal action often work even if the target believes the case is meritless.
I'm not convinced the requirements from Stop Killing Games will be much of a concern for small developers. They're far less likely to use DRM and turning off Steam's DRM would put basically all of them in the clear of even your more stringent requirements. They're also far more likely to stop supporting a game because their company has gone bankrupt, at which point fines for non-compliance are irrelevant.
I'm far more concerned that SKG and similar laws will be added to the pile of laws that are effectively unenforced than I am about seeing them enforced strictly on small publishers.
Of course he did, because others already forked it. And if Bambu still tries to sue him, Louis Rossman has pledged to pay his legal fees.
The FULU repository went up May 12. The developer took his repository down on April 23rd.
Apparently he received the threats from Bambu in late April. Unless some very fast-paced discussions happened behind the scenes, he could have had no idea a replacement would go up when he took his repository down.
Furthermore, is FULU maintaining the code or just re-hosting the original? Now the developer is out of the way all Bambu needs to do is make a small change to obsolete the backed-up version.
He pledged $10,000. This is good of him but probably insufficient for even a simple legal case, and doesn't cover the personal cost of dealing with this either. Fundraising might cover the rest if the developer actually gets sued. I wouldn't want to take that bet. Would you?
Others went up earlier: https://github.com/dafik/OrcaSlicer-bambulab
Nowadays, when a popular repository goes down, one can be confident someone will upload a backup, even with a weak legal threat
(Although it's not the only possibility and maybe they're wrong) that Bambu didn't make this small change is evidence they expect someone would fix the repository.
Not personally, but the multiple people re-uploading the repository are.
Apologies for the late response.
That one does seem to have been created before the original went down, fair enough.
I think it's more likely that two things are true
If I was a soulless corporate bastard in charge of killing this open-source product off I'd get the teams working on this product to rework the APIs in a way that just happens to break this method and look to deliver that in 6-12 months. This gives plenty of time to work on it, plausible deniability as to why the workaround broke, and hopefully everyone has forgotten by then.
But are they, actually? FULU isn't a person so while the organization could be sued it seems much less likely for any of the people behind it to be vulnerable. It's hard to tell in a foreign language but that "dafik" fellow seems to be fairly anonymous, with a common name, few projects, and little information.
I'm also not sure if just hosting the repository is legally problematic. Most of the claims Bambu made sound related to development of the repository and it's not clear to me that any of the people rehosting intend to continue development.
In practice, I’ve noticed pirates tend to do this: a big software or repository will be taken down (drawing attention), they’ll wait a bit (well past mainstream attention span), then a fork will start accumulating software updates or re-uploaded media.
I’m sure they don’t want to be arrested. Usually they’re in a country like Russia or Brazil where they’re safer from legal action. But the result is the same, the data is re-uploaded.
Maybe. It might also be the case that some new 3D printer is announced that is open and has enough features/price, so developers and consumers focus less on Bambu.
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Surely that can (and imho should) be easily solved by just keeping the old version available for download? If you enjoy playing the OP character or the unpopular game mode, you can still play it in single player that way. Only if you try to connect to the servers, it tells you "please update your game to the latest version [Update] [Continue offline]".
Even permanently requiring the game to be downloadable may be too much for an individual or small company that has gone bankrupt.
But I support, if it works (or should work) offline, not having legal avenues to stop people keeping and playing the old version (including bypassing DRM for their offline copy).
That's not what I was talking about. I was proposing making older versions available alongside the newest, which adresses the specific issue of an update removing content.
If you go bankrupt, your customers get to keep (the offline part of) what they bought, but need to manage it themselves, including getting copies of games they lost when their hard drive broke or older versions they didn't save back then from third parties.
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Putting aside Stop Killing Games (which I support), there is a bigger question about how dependent we are on these tech companies and how it gives them basically unlimited leverage over... well, everything.
In the West, virtually every government agency, every small and big business, every school, college and university, half-assed book club, is dependent on infomation services provided by one of Google/Alphabet, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft (or in some cases, all three. My understanding is Apple is a distant fourth).
Any one of these companies could basically crash the global economy single-handedly just by revoking their services to even a small segment of the population or economy.
I can't imagine how a government plans to regulate these tech companies while they're using the very services provided by those companies to plan said regulation. It seems like there's always a loaded gun on the table, even if these companies superduper pinkie swear never to abuse their power, even putting aside the natural price gouging that occurs.
It might have always been the case that other companies, such as major banks (looking at you GFC) have at similar, if not the same leverage in the past, but I think the difference is that even the banks are now dependent on these tech companies!
This is a consequence of the government procurement process. Essentially the government would rather buy software services at a billable hourly rate with forward engineer support than do their own development. This is in large part because a billable rate is a line item in the budget that they can pass to congress. Actually doing their own software development, so as to not be beholden to third party vendors would require not existing in a "use it or lose it" budgetary culture. Obviously the vendors also like this approach and lobby the politicians for it, who consequently control the purse.
I'm not sure their is a solution other than nationalizing the companies at this point (which is bad) because the system works for the people at the levers of power. The fact that it is corrupt and inefficient is a feature not a bug to some. A competent government also has the problem of being competent at wielding its power tyrannically leading to other people to oppose competent software development practices.
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I do really fear for this on some games I love and still play. Diablo 2, Starcraft Brood War. Eventually I dont think servers will exist for them. WOW seems to have some sort of equilibrium (although I haven't played that in years, but I do sometimes get tempted to pay the $15 or whatever to reactivate).
Diablo 2 supports private servers.
That's a good point.
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Supreme Commander Forged Alliance had the community take over and continue development/multiplayer servers after the company collapsed. Starcraft and Diablo are presumably more popular than Forged Alliance ever was. I think the biggest threat is Blizzard legal department.
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I can understand the idea when it comes to disabling content in a game that the player owns outright and has the ability to either be played completely offline or to be played on player owned servers. In both cases, you’re taking something away even though it would still function perfectly fine even without outside support. I don’t think it’s reasonable to try to force people to keep their servers running in perpetuity. That forces a cost on a company that might make them think twice before starting an online service simply because they can’t get rid of it later.
The idea is the company would release the code so the community could run the servers.
Or at a minimum compiled binaries for the servers.
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Well this is an important point because there isn't really as big of an issue as people make it seem and what problems do exist are often because of government.
If something is widely unpopular enough in a competitive industry then a company will generally walk it back. As the comment pointed out before me about league of legends, Riot could nerf any of my favorite champions into the ground and there's nothing I could do about it. But they wouldn't, there's no financial sense in it. Popular characters like Yasuo or Lux will never be unplayable for an extended period of time. Even the less popular ones like Reksai or old asol/morde/aatrox before reworks weren't compete gutter trash, in fact Asol at least was crazy overpowered if anything for most of his pre rework existence. And the only reason they got changed is because they just weren't liked by the community. It sucks for the niche fans like me, who used to main old Mordekaiser, but I was probably like one of ten people who did or something.
Markets have internal feedback systems to prevent them from upsetting you too much, you can just walk away and go somewhere else. Heck even the worst offenders like someone brought up overwatch 2 self correct pretty hard if it's hurting them, because Overwatch 2 has pretty much just reverted back already! They even have a 6v6 mode again.
When games shut down, it's typically because there's just not enough demand left anymore to justify the ongoing costs. Passionate fanbases who are willing to eat the cost themselves will often make their own privately hosted servers to play on and many companies don't really care that much about it. It's very rare for companies to step in unless you're directly threatening their current profits (like why Yuzu got shut down after they fucked about with Tears of the Kingdom piracy) or trying to make money off it like the original YouTube Vanced project only got shut down once they tried profiting. If no one is willing to eat the cost then clearly not enough people really want it so what's the problem?
What issues do exist is generally in the legal aspect of hosting. Or rephrased, because of the government making rules on what you can and can't do. The government creates problems that only more and more government can solve!
Exactly where are you going to go instead of Office 2019?
Are you suggesting that people opposing this should demand that the government repeal DMCA and copyright laws, and that you won't accept a solution where the government does something other than repealing laws?
You should know very well that getting the government to repeal copyright and DMCA is infeasible. If you can't accept less optimal solutions, you are telling people that because the solution doesn't involve maximal restrictions on government, they shouldn't have a solution at all.
Furthermore, even libertarians are supposed to permit the government to enforce laws against fraud. Microsoft claiming it's perpetual and then walking that back should be considered fraud, and even with your anti-government stance, you have no grounds to oppose forcing Microsoft to actually provide what they said they would.
People have listed alternatives even in this very thread! So they aren't hard to find. Seems like there's open office, WSOffice, onlyoffice, libre office, and of course Google docs that will fulfills most things you'd need.
Copyright laws can have some value but "I can't legally host this server" is inherently an issue from government because the problem is about what is legal.
Because there's not enough political demand for reform. Lots of unpopular ideas that will never happen are objectively the right ones while unpopular ideas of rent seeking regulations consistently win. See basically everything in the housing market space for proof of that.
If they claimed it would be available forever and they're actively making it not available and it's not one of those lifetime guarantee type things where the specific details clarified it to something more reasonable then yeah that does seem like an issue that should be solved.
But can it not be solved through already existing fraud statutes?
If they were useful alternatives, people would be using them instead already.
I repeat: If the only solution you will accept is the government getting rid of (or even reducing) copyright and DMCA, you are saying "I will accept no solution that's practical, and if you do come up with a practical solution, tough."
Microsoft has a binding arbitration clause. I'm not going to win in Microsoft-approved arbitration.
I suppose you are going to say "well, you shouldn't have agreed to the arbitration clause when you bought and used the product".
Cool, so people are using the best option available to them already. Be mad at the worst options if you have a complaint.
I understand it's more practical to layer on more and more government, that doesn't make it right. That is the bullshit that causes our insane bureaucracy to turn even more insane.
Well yeah duh, you picked the best available product to you and agreed to the terms. Even then binding arbitration laws don't necessarily hold up and you can in fact win them.
I'm talking about the best option that we could practically have.
The government requiring companies to not disable products isn't available, but it is one that we could practically have. The government getting rid of copyright to the extent necessary to solve this problem isn't available, and also is not one that we could practically have.
All large companies use binding arbitration in their products. There is no product that is equally useful and doesn't have such clauses.
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And which of those Just Work, aren't horribly slow and don't have garbage UI (the reason I absolutely refuse to use Google Docs)?
If you're really all-in on UI (and don't hate post-2007-Microsoft), OnlyOffice. It's pretty explicitly trying to emulate Microsoft Office and to minimize on-boarding issues. Performance is comparable to MSOffice, one of the better PowerPoint equivalents.
LibreOffice is the most powerful and performant, but the UI looks like it came straight from 2003. That can be a plus, and is for me, but most won't like it. It does have the strongest Excel competitor if you're doing a lot of spreadsheet work.
I will generally discourage OpenOffice (effectively dead since Sun abandoned it, minimal updates) and Google Docs (usable for basic collaboration, but Google will bite you and it struggles badly as use cases get complicated). WPS Office had some trouble (Chinese ownership, censorship scandal), but I haven't used it so I can't comment deeper.
Another option, albeit commercial, is SoftMaker Office, and they do make a free beer version of an older version of their office suite. I myself use the free beer version of the 2006 release of the office suite for document writing; it’s lighting fast in a modern computer and works really nicely.
If I need a newer feature, e.g. ODF (or DOCX) support, Color fonts, etc. I reach to Libre Office. But SoftMaker’s 2006 free suite works really well for my needs 99% of the time I need to edit a document.
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Suppose I have legacy VBA macros in Excel. Are there any that let me just directly use them? Last I had looked at LibreOffice, I think, and I was going to have to do some significant rewriting.
LibreOffice has the best direct VBA support, but it is still limited and partial and unlikely to get drastically better. OnlyOffice has an LLM-assisted translation, but I wouldn't recommend it for production services.
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I think a lot of the problem comes down to whether the consumer can trust the seller to provide what they purchased. If I play league of legends, it is very clear that the company can do whatever they want. And so, even if my favorite champion is nerfed into the ground, I know it is unreasonable to want my money back.
On the other hand, if I purchase a perpetual license from Microsoft, I expect to be able to use that product perpetually. This is false marketing on their behalf. When I purchase a game, I expect to be able to play it whenever I want. This assumption goes back to when games were physical things that lasted as long as their disk did. If I buy a game only for the servers to close a few months later, I am justifiably going to feel scammed.
This goes further than end of service too. Can I trust that the subscription I purchased will stay cheap? Can I trust Anthropic not to enshittify once they have a dominant position in the market? Can I trust Unity to not suddenly change their ToS right as I am getting ready to publish? The rational answer is no. Currently, there seems to be very little protection against the terms of whatever I purchased changing at a moment's notice, and companies are taking advantage of this. Naturally, this state of affairs leads to growing dissatisfaction and distrust from consumers. The longer this stays unresolved, the more radical the suggestions to fix it are going to become too. The future iteration of stop killing games might be much less reasonable.
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If a software license wants to say "you cannot hack the client, ever" then who is the law to prevent that? In general, we allow all sorts of things in software licenses.
To my knowledge, courts only enforce IP law against "hacking the client" projects whenever the companies can prove they're being financially harmed. Most of the time it means they have some version of the service up already. I suppose there might be cases where a very edgy fan fiction tarnishes the brand's IP, but presumably the company does believe there is financial damage in this case.
Well there is one other case, which maybe is the real discussion: if the fan-made project is making money, companies will go after it to get a piece of the pie. I think that's fair. If a company wants to stop service for their online game, I don't think it means the IP should become public domain. For example, the service might be unprofitable after merely 1 year. The company should still be able to expect royalties, for example. Or, be able to veto a fan-made service, even if it is profitable in the market.
I say this as someone who has played MMOs, as someone who is sad many have changed or shut down, and as someone who follows various emulator projects (And am sympathetic to the community).
You’re right about breaking the client. I don’t know why people have a hard time with this. You realize “the cloud,” is someone else’s computer, right? Whether that’s social media or online banking or an MMORPG, it doesn’t make any difference to the point. Client side apps often run in containers like Docker or Kubernetes, which adds a layer of abstraction between the user and the actual application, so you’re not directly in control of the binary to examine. If you’re messing with it you’re often doing things like looking for and intercepting API calls to look for keys, OAuth tokens, looking for misconfigured servers, fuzzing endpoints to look for IDOR and SSRF.
Whether you're messing around to cheat on their systems, playing a joke or have criminal ambitions from their standpoint, they don’t know what your intent is, not to mention your activity is actively damaging the integrity of their infrastructure and impacting them financially. If I was in their shoes, I’d be ‘somewhat’ sympathetic to that viewpoint too. It’s not like dissecting assembly on a Super Mario cartridge. If the product is EOL and being retired that’s a bit of a different issue.
I didn't have in mind any kind of service exploits when I said "hacking the client." Of course companies can ban you from their services, for essentially any reason.
I only had in mind white-hat "preserving a retired product," but I think its kind of silly to think the community or the market is entitled to that. Of course, the relevant punishment here is getting sued, not getting banned.
I know, but it was sort of implied when you referenced MMO’s at the bottom of the comment. The problem with a lot of video games today is that they often depend heavily on a backend infrastructure or continued service updates to the product in a way that video games pre-millennium didn’t have to. EOL’s on the other hand are more of a case where a large company is “hoarding” a dead IP but still wants to prevent interested parties from keeping it alive or taking it in a different direction. If it wanted to collect fees and license it to private “player communities” or indie developers, I don’t think it would be as hotly debated, but the company shouldn’t be obligated to provide the tools or infrastructure to keep it active.
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I will admit that I did not read all of it, but I failed to detect anything I would call xenophobia in the parts which I did read. If there is a sentence about low-IQ foreign barbarians ruining the UK, I must have missed it.
Presumably, your claim is that Cory Doctorow (born in Canada and naturalized as a UK citizen) is xenophobic towards the US.
If so, this seems a bit disingenuous to me. I mean, he is closely aligned to the EFF, which is a US-based organization critical of surveillance states. The EFF does not seem especially anti-American to me. Sure, they spend more time fighting against US surveillance efforts than Chinese surveillance efforts, but I don't think that this is because they love China or hate the US, but rather because their members are based in the US and the political system allows them trying to influence laws in the US but not in the PRC.
A central example of a xenophobe would be someone who dislikes another culture he knows very little about. "I don't understand their language, their food smells strange, their customs are weird, they are probably up to no good and I want them gone."
By contrast, Cory Doctorow could very much pass as a US citizen without too much effort on his part. I am sure that he has more knowledge of the US political system than the median citizen, and a big chunk of the culture he engages with is likely US-origin.
People are very much allowed to have opinions on countries they are not citizens of. There is no part during the naturalization process where the officials tell you "you may now have an opinion about our government". I am a German, and yet I have opinions about governments and policies of pretty much any country I know anything about, from the US to North Korea.
As people “used” to say about Canada before the cost of housing crisis and infinity immigrants policy, “Canada is America-lite. All of the awesomeness, none of the bullshit.” Or as some US citizens call it, “Diet America.” (There’s also USA expansion pack or Murica DLC.)
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It's the wording.
The proposals are fine. "The Internet is dominated by the US government and Big Tech" and "Europe can't rely on a service largely controlled by a foreign country" would be fine. I'd even accept a fig leaf, if he mentioned "not all Americans" somewhere (keeping the "American internet" and other borderline phrases).
The problem is he says things like "the American internet" and "We’ve known the Americans couldn’t be trusted to run our internet for decades", not distinguishing between the US government-technology complex and lowly American citizens. It's subtle; while he never explicitly criticizes lowly citizens, "Americans" implicitly includes them, and he doesn't address this inclusion (e.g. with a fig leaf). And many of these citizens aren't to blame for any action he criticizes: they're actively opposing the US government and Big Tech. Doctorow is throwing these allies under the bus, to appease a rising Canadian xenophobia towards Americans, which is a poor response to manufactured American xenophobia towards Canadians.
I think that his phrasing is still okay. We use phrases like "Russian aggression" without bothering to add a fig leaf about some Russians not supporting the war in Ukraine, and perhaps even being in prison for protesting it.
If someone says "The Iranians can not be trusted to stick to the terms of the nuclear deal", it is obviously a shorthand for the Iranian leadership, because the average Iranian citizen will not be in the position to enrich uranium in her basement, so there is no claim about her trustworthiness being made.
Likewise, the average US citizen does not run the internet. And I think it is very true to say "In the current political system, the median US voter can not be trusted to elect a wise government which is (among other things) a good steward of the internet." Note that this leaves a lot of possibilities open, from "the US is run by the deep state, which cancels any anti-snooping candidate" to "most US citizens are genetically inclined towards the military-technological complex, so of course they vote for spying and bombing" and all the more likely explanations in between.
If Cory had written about the US 'stealing' (i.e. annexing) Alberta in the Obama era, the median response would have been to recommend that he finds a more reputable crack dealer. The framing back then was very much activists vs surveillance state. Today, the US is openly neo-colonialist (like Trump bragging about securing Venezuelan oil), and the EFF seems completely sidelined in the culture war, the MAGA idea of privacy is Palantir, and the opposition will want to spy on you in case you do a racism. Realistically, the chances of the US electing a government which cuts down on spying seem as good as that of the Mensheviks overthrowing Stalin in 1950.
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To be honest, I don't think he's wrong on this. Lowly American citizens are as apt to demand their government Do Things about the objects of their consternation as citizens are anywhere else. In the spirit of goodwill between nations, I'll concede maybe they're a bit less likely than some, but it's such a high bar it makes no odds.
Even here, where many are supposedly libertarians, @Amadan and other mods complain that lots of users hammer the Report button in response to posts they disagree with. I also note that many American citizens seem to quite like their government getting its way by muscular means, so long as it works and they aren't inconvenienced.
I don't write this to dunk on Americans specifically, only to say that having the citizens of a foreign power in charge of the internet is very likely to cause issues no matter which power that is, because people are people. It's certainly true that much of what the American government does is pretty unpopular with American citizens, much more so when it affects those citizens, but even if the American government suddenly turned into a direct democracy I still wouldn't particularly want to be beholden to the American public.
I figured that was the reason I got downvoted so much on certain comments here. I suppose I should be proud to be one of TM’s most controversial posters.
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Many, but not all.
Moreover, his main issues (enshittification, mass surveillance, and control) are affecting Americans to the extent many are starting to notice, so Doctorow could probably get a majority on his side.
Yes, but Doctorow doesn’t make the general argument that Canada and Europe can’t rely on a foreign internet, only an American internet.
Even Cory for all his brilliance vastly underestimates just how deeply entrenched the problem is. I’m a huge fan of the work he does and I love the guy but I can’t share his broader optimism on things.
To take one of your points as an example, not many people know there’s a company out there called Axon Fleet Systems that sells tons of equipment to law enforcement, military and government agencies all across the country. Well, they developed a new ‘kind’ of emerging technology called C-V2X which stands for “cellular to vehicle to everything” that massively leverages the cellular network infrastructure to conduct surveillance. What that means is new commercial cars will be equipped with the same tech, which means police responses, manhunts and dragnets can fully exploit the telemetry of cars to have pretty close to real-time intelligence of people “suspected” of criminal activity (as the signals bounce around from car to car before being relayed to the cell tower and then gets interpreted by a response center; meaning new cars are a relay for surveillance).
Add to the mix the fact that search warrants are largely rubber stamped and happen in secret with limited recourse to challenge things, it extends the scope and lowers the bar on probable cause for them to collect further evidence against you. It’s a very worrying trend. I used to be such a techie but I’ve been increasingly letting out a sigh and just want to go back to simpler times.
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I don't know that I'd consider an Israeli or Turkish imperialist who hated and feared his neighbors but wasn't ignorant about them a fringe example of a xenophobe.
For Turkish people their sense of superiority is more culturally and historically chauvinistic, probably similar to the way Parisians view themselves in contrast with the rest of France. In the Israeli case it’s rooted in theology (and outright racial ideology for some).
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I have no love for the United States' copyright and IP regime but, as a developer of enterprise software myself, I have a lot of sympathy for the developers I suppose. Unless you have planned from the beginning for the idea that your game should be runnable without access to a server or that your server must be runnable on random consumer hardware I can see why it would be pretty difficult to backport that capability. Thinking in terms of my own product, you would need to replicate an extremely specific network and storage topology to get my software running and releasing a version of our software where you didn't have to do this might as well be asking us to rewrite the software from scratch. I don't know what the internals of various gaming company servers look like, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were similar. Especially in our modern era of cloud computing.
I am not sure this framing is quite correct. It sounds like Office 2019 for Mac shipped with a local certificate that does the verification of license keys. Microsoft has renewed that certificate but distributing the renewed certificate still requires an update to the software containing the certificate. Microsoft isn't releasing an update for Office 2019 since it has been out of support for 3 years. If they no longer have the source code this may be very difficult to do. They should not have made representations that it would work in perpetuity knowing this limitation.
I find it funny that this law seems like it could easily be more punitive to companies I think are much more pro-consumer than those that are anti-consumer, due to the subscription carve-out. Expect to see a bunch of companies add a $1/year subscription to their games to exempt themselves from California's law!
Hence I don't think they should be obligated to backport it, just that users shouldn't be prevented from reverse-engineering the software and backporting it themselves.
Similarly, someone will definitely figure out how to patch the certificate if they haven't already done so.
But here, Microsoft is a trillion-dollar company and explicitly promised the software would continue to function, so I think they should be obligated.
Another reason why I prefer removing regulations over adding them.
No, I think that's greatly overstating the promise they made. It was a perpetual license, i.e., not a subscription. There were never any guarantees about the software continuing to function past its published support lifecycle. I'd agree with you if they had pushed an update to disable it, but bitrot is an utterly foreseeable consequence of using unsupported software.
“Continue to function” was the exact phrase on their website. And “perpetual license” maybe not technically, but literally implies it works perpetually.
Moreover, it’s not an online service that would cost Microsoft to continue hosting it. All that’s needed to keep it running is to push a small update that disables the DRM. I’m confident that’s more than doable for Microsoft: even if they lost the original code, they have ChatGPT and Claude to reverse-engineer the software, or when (inevitably) a crack releases, instead of DMCAing they can adopt it themselves.
I'm sure it's doable, and they may end up doing it as a courtesy, but I don't think they're under any ethical obligation to do so. They announced the lifespan of the product when they sold it, everyone was clear there would be no promise of updates after that. It's not like they broke the certificate, the expiration was set long ago.
Apple could push a security patch that caused some undocumented functionality used by Office 2019 to crash. Apple says the code used by Office 2019 was insecure and they won't be modifying their security update to accommodate it. Is Microsoft still under any obligation to push out a patch to make sure it continues to function, in your view?
I totally get customer frustration with bitrot and the (seemingly unnecessarily) short lifecycle of software. One of Microsoft's great strengths for a long time was that they put a lot of effort into making sure your old unsupported software would run on new and improved Windows platforms. But this also became a major liability to them, and I also understand the need to draw a line at spending precious engineering effort fighting bitrot for products that have been superseded several times over. I would guess they will not legally pursue someone who makes, e.g., an unofficial certificate patch.
They promised the software would “continue to function”, yet they’re the ones who set the certificate to expire and now refuse to update it.
It’s not their responsibility to update the software further, including not their responsibility to fix if Apple breaks the software via OS update (although they should let someone else fix it).
It’s selling someone a product with a built-in unadvertised kill switch (planned obsolescence without plausible deniability). The seller isn’t responsible for reasonable defects outside the warranty, nor if the buyer breaks the product. But if they put in an unreasonable kill switch (from malice or incompetence) they’re responsible, even outside the warranty. DRM that expires and bricks the software (which no other DRM I’m aware of does) is an unreasonable kill switch.
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Another variant of the "paved with good intentions" problem is what happens when the underlying technology just changes. Minecraft's server infrastructure has been undergoing a pretty wide variety of modifications, sometimes for good reasons (proper user IDs), sometimes for more mixed ones (chat reporting as an anti-grooming... and anti-privacy matter), and sometimes for bad reasons (pushing toward the Bedrock model). Do the old versions count as meaningful different products? There's enough of a 1.7 following (and even a Zontargs beta 1.2 following) that it's happening, but that's unique to Minecraft's scale, and I'm not sure it's meaningful as a legal scope to care about. In turn, though, it's not hard to imagine bigger differences that would undebatably matter.
Server infrastructure licensing tends to be a nightmare. I've had specific database implementations that were licensed per-core, per-developer, and prohibited redistribution of executable code. I even had one case where the license didn't transfer with a disk drive replacement, though I think that company's gone under or been bought out since. It's become less common, thankfully, but it's a far cry from the typical library file where you're typically only charged per-developer or a single fixed cost.
That's not insurmountable, and City of Heroes was very infamously leaked multiple times, and ended up getting a weird level of permission to operate, but it's a big hurdle. Even if the source code for Tabula Rasa fell out of the sky -- and NCSoft has very strong reasons to not want that to happen -- I wouldn't expect it to have enough of a following to become active again.
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Use OnlyOffice people. It's open source and not vulnerable to any of this BS!
I still use TOPS legal pads and pin that shit to my cork board, 😤. But seriously. I haven’t tried OnlyOffice but I have used LibreOffice and found it wanting.
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Not really, one of the most egregious cases gets surprisingly little attention: Overwatch 1. I never played it myself because I prefer to get headshotted by the sweats in CounterStrike, but Overwatch 1 had a massive playerbase that was forced onto (the in many ways inferior) Overwatch 2. And that's a game from a massive company that absolutely has the resources to keep Overwatch 1 playable (or to release some sort of offline patch or a private server binary).
Didn't they shut down CSGO when they launched CS2 (which was actually CS5)?
Sort of, they actually brought CS:GO back for some reason (though it's not listed normally on Steam).
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Valve shut down their official servers and matchmaking after CS2’s release, but CSGO was and is still playable via community servers.
Nice! I didn't realize that. I haven't played CounterStrike since the original Half Life mod, so I only knew what I'd read.
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Yeah Blizzard is notorious for this sort of anti-consumer stuff. It's frustrating that the crappy gaming companies that pull stuff like this continue to rake in billions.
It really only took off after they were acquired by Activision. It was all downhill after that.
Valve is the single guardrail keeping the entire industry from tumbling head over heels down the slippery slope.
Their ability to sort of 'impose' pro-consumer rules for those who want to use their marketplace is like the one and only place where the incentives are finally aligned towards gamer's preferences.
GOG? Itch .io?
Both good companies most of the time, but neither has enough marketshare to have any real pull with game publishers.
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They’re the only ones who can even remotely make the appeal to both sides in a way that’s somewhat satisfying, but I still hesitate going all in on them. You let me download a fully open executable with no licensing requirements, I’ll save developers all the overhead costs of physically distributing their media. Only way I’d do it.
Of course that won’t prevent piracy, but it keeps honest people honest and stops legitimate buyers from defecting. “The suits” don’t understand that actual buyers have a direct incentive to reward developers and because if you like their work you want to continue to consume their content and keep turning it out. In all the times I’ve pirated games or movies I almost never did it was a way to give the parent studio a finger, I did it because it was easier to use and less punitive.
I'm just saying. If Gabe ever sells, we're seeing $100-$120 games being standard, DRM out the wazoo, and a complete lockdown on the user review system. Just to start.
Hence why I would like Steam to add a little button at checkout to let you donate to Gaben's immortality fund.
Except there are like five other companies champing at the bit to run what is basically a free money printer that Gabe has set up. Valve basically does nothing as a company and gets paid for it because of steam. The only reason it has no real competition is because they know they have to keep their customers happy. This isn't something "Valve is a particularly moral upstanding company" thing, it's a plain market incentives thing. If anything, it might be better if they had some real competition.
All of those are publicly traded and subject to different incentives/pressures.
Namely, the incentive to gobble up 100% of any consumer surplus that might exist in a product.
Gabe could maybe double his own net worth if he was willing to be less consumer-friendly. There's certainly ways he could exploit the access the Steam platform gives him to various valuable demographics.
At a bare minimum, they could serve targeted ads (for things other than Vidya) on the platform.
But he has no legal obligation to do so since 'shareholder value' is not his primary concern.
Just take a quick assessment of ANY other comparable industry and see if there's any exceptions to the general rule that publicly-traded companies enshittify their product once they've achieved market dominance.
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This is a peeve of mine. I fully understand the legal and practical idea that a 'license', in terms of IP, is revocable pursuant to its own terms, and thus enforcing that revocation is... fine.
But in the era of physical media, if you bought a CD, there was no mechanism for deleting the songs off of it once you had it. In theory they could send a cop to your house to confiscate it, but that was never worth it. They just priced everything into the purchase.
Same with Vidya. I can boot up any of my old gamecube games and the licensed music will still play, since the GC isn't natively online.
Silly, silly me, I figured that the addition of always-on internet connectivity would mean you could have infinite musical variety on in-game radios thanks to seamless integration of streaming services.
But once again we manage to land in this weird place where the licensed music built into the game goes away after a while, and its all but impossible to import your own music or just hook a streaming account in and have an unlimited supply of music directly in the game. Unless you're capable enough with mods, that is.
Not that anyone can currently stop you from playing music yourself while gaming, but what really is the point of using the medium of Vidya if you're gimping the advantages it has over more static forms of entertainment. And of course, I'm also old fashioned enough to think that I should be able to boot up the game and have a functionally identical experience to the one I had the first time around, and I'll get cranky if things were changed arbitrarily.
I'm admittedly an Intellectual property skeptic, in that I think the current legal setup is far enough from optimal because of stuff like this, where it always gets leveraged to a clearly anti-consumer end and doesn't generate any noticeable benefit, other than upholding the current IP regime. I'm sure 99% of the time nobody really notices because a game that is 10+ years old has to be TRUE classic for people to keep playing it that long.
The last factor here is that it also prevents much cross-collaboration of game assets. The issue with music can apply to literally ANY OTHER artistic element of the game. In game models, textures, hell even textual elements could be licensed in such a way that they have to get pulled out down the line, leaving you with an entirely nonfunctional game.
So the larger regime probably makes it less feasible for certain games to get made due to the need to produce all the assets in-house if they want to maintain IP control over the longer term. Vidya are one of the only media this would apply to because of its integration of so many different types of assets into a singular product.
“I had a dream once the RIAA kicked my door down and arrested me for singing too loudly in the shower.”
Does anyone else here remember EA’s “Spore” DRM controversy at launch, that only authorized a licensed user something like 3 installations per purchase? It was an attempt they made trying to kill the secondary market for video games and went about as well as one would expect. I don’t think they’ve tried to make that move sense.
It’s also why I’ve always preferred physical media. I don’t use Audible, I don’t have Spotify and TBF I don’t even like Steam all that much, but it’s the closest I’ll come to walking over to that side of the aisle. I wonder what kind of territory we’re going to wade into when synthetic biology and widespread nanotech really take off and you’ve got corporations scrambling to patent peoples genes. Plenty of room for dystopian futures to take root.
Its why I continue to maintain a physical, offline music collection even though it feels increasingly pointless. I've still got a bunch of my old CDs in a box in my closet as a last resort.
I pay 8 bucks and I can stream 95% of the music I want anywhere I am, which is a fair deal. The problem is they've trained me to expect betrayal and removal of songs I enjoy for reasons beyond their control, so archives/backups feel like a necessary step. Music files are small, storage is cheap.
I AM certainly willing to pay to see live performances, the value add there is clear, but digitization of everything has made me very unwilling to hand over money for an ephemeral digital file that I'm technically not allowed to copy.
There was a similar controversy years ago, around the time when cloud storage first took off. People were very skeptical of putting all their files onto someone else’s servers, hoping that it would still be there, hoping it would still be secure. A handful of people thought it was idiotic and said you’d never get them onboard with it and that you should stick to local storage. The counter-response was, “What if there’s a fire in your house? What if you get robbed?” These are all risk factors, and I’m not against cloud storage at all, but I prefer the vectors I have direct access and control over rather than the ones I don’t. It’s also why I don’t use ebook readers for general purpose consumption. If I’m at work and I have some downtime, sure. But generally I don’t like the thought of losing my place because my alarm clock drained the battery which caused my book to die.
Amazingly, Dropbox has never betrayed me over the course of 15 years. But the only reason I tolerated it in the first place is because it syncs with a local folder on my own computer so it was added convenience with no additional risk.
Then Microsoft tries to force that same crap on me and I get mad because they're trying to dictate what I keep on my computer.
Depends on what you consider a betrayal, I guess. A year or two ago, they added a new setting that (if memory serves) allowed them to train models on your data, and turned it on by default. I considered that a massive betrayal and moved to a self-hosted Nextcloud instance after that. I might move to Proton Drive once they have a Linux client.
I do recall that but... I'm not TOO mad about letting my data get hoovered up to help summon the Silicon demon.
I actually WANT the machine God to have a piece of my personal data in there. I tailor my behavior online to make it easy for the thing to figure out my preferences.
For me, it was the underhanded way they did it. If they introduced a setting and it's off by default, fine whatever. If they turned it on by default but gave copious notice, that's not great but I might have been ok with it. It was the fact that the setting was both on by default and they snuck it in (I found out from a hacker news comment thread) which I found so unacceptable.
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I used to have Dropbox but dropped them after the change in their privacy policy. I’ve used MEGA for over a decade now and never looked back. I still prefer things locally and disk duplicators have never made the task easier than they have today, but the cost of physical storage is actually more expensive than cloud subscriptions, ironically. The increase in content quality has matched the rate of storage expansion such that it’s less economical than it used to be. I don’t like the trend in that direction but realistically what can you do? Either bite the bullet and accept the out of pocket cost or take it to the cloud. I’ve tried the synchronization thing too, MEGA also has the same thing but I can never optimize it for how I want things to synchronize and just forego it entirely.
Its me, the bullet muncher.
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Yeah it's an interesting problem. Modern copyright law seems pretty obviously problematic for software and needs an update, but IP is always tricky and the system we have works well enough, I guess.
In general I think it would be great for game companies to have to release the code open source if they're going to stop supporting something, even an old version of a game. WoW Classic is a great example, how there was obviously a huge amount of players that still wanted to play it but weren't able to due to Blizzard's decisions. And now it's mostly dying with the Turtle WoW lawsuit. Tragic.
In the long run, this might just be technologically obviated. If we live in a world where we can just tell Claude Opus 420.69 to reverse-engineer the server software and also the client software to be identical to the actual client software except with whatever encryption and security checks stripped out, and it actually generates that software successfully and cheaply, then all we really need is to prevent government interference. Of course, this could create a DRM cat-and-mouse game where the game devs program their games such that the security checks are so fundamentally built into the game that it's impossible to make a version of the client software that's meaningfully the same but with the security checks stripped out.
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The system we have works terrible. Even if we assume that removing/restricting the power of copyright will reduce the content created - we are producing too much anyway.
I agree. 10 years of IP would be perfectly fine imo.
Dean Baker was the guy to read on this some years back. He had some good proposals.
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Yep.
I think the regular threat of release to the 'public domain' or open-sourcing, as you say, would be a positive incentive for companies to maintain games and eventually 'allow' the community to gain some ownership of them if the community wishes to maintain their game past its intended lifespan.
They should be able to figure out a price point which balances out all these concerns if there's some hard limits in the law.
Personally, I think that if you are going to withhold access to a given product entirely, making it unavailable for purchase or even rental to the 'general public,' that's akin to waiving the protections against others copying and distributing said IP. But I might even go a step further and say some information is 'inherently' of value to the public and thus should be kept accessible on general principle, so I generally support the Sci-hub mission.
Off the top of my head: make the released version of code so complicated and obscured that people can't effectively use it.
"Security through complexity" was definitely an option.
Seems untenable now that AI coding is a thing.
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In general I think our IP laws dramatically stifle competition in the creative realms, which as a consumer absolutely sucks! We could have so many awesome spinoffs of LOTR or Star Wars by now if our laws were sane.
'Fan fiction' could just become the norm a decade after a story gets told. Which would be a great change.
I agree. Up until the modern era this was how stories worked. The characters and plots belonged to the people in the culture. Robin Hood or King Arthur, fairy tales, and so on were stories with lots of different versions and regional variations depending on where the stories were being retold.
And I wish this was how things worked now. I’d absolutely love to see what Mickey would be like if you had stories written by contemporary artists.
But on the other hand Harry Potter fanfiction is godawful: nothing but Master of Death power fantasies and Hot (Gay) Slytherins as far as the eye can see. The crowd is not always better.
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I want to point out, this is a flaw and reason why IP actually does encourage creativity: it's already bad that people keep reusing tropes because they're reliable, encouraging experimentation (even by coercion) leads to better works in the long run.
But IP has so many other downsides, sometimes it even discourages and blocks original works (for example, LLMs being broadly censored against anything resembling IP, because otherwise it's too easy to trick them into generating it). And it turns out, fan-fiction writers are often more creative than original fiction writers, by applying creativity to less common aspects (besides the core characters/settings/etc. which they reused).
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I dream of an era where the "canon" for a given series isn't dictated by the primary IP holder, but instead can be forked off by people where-ever they want, and fans can just form organic consensuses as to what particular canon is 'best,' and pick and choose precisely which parts of it they want to incorporate into their particular experience.
I would absolutely prefer the version of Star Wars where the Darth Jar-Jar theory was true and he turned out to be the evil behind Snoke in the new trilogy. Let me have my canon, and you can have... whatever The Rise of Skywalker was.
Force these massive companies to compete on something resembling quality, rather than Neener neener I own the IP, you have to go through me if you want more content.
There's something nice about having one canon, like how it can be more fun to play Minecraft in Survival Mode than Creative Mode.
But not everyone feels this way (like how some people only play Creative Mode), mainstream canons (especially today) are generally mediocre at best (even according to the mainstream audience), and IP has so many other downsides. People who want this can resort to subscribing to some curation group who picks one canon for every popular media.
I agree one canon is better. I’ve got no idea if JarJar should be reworked but I do think it would be nice if Disney realized some of the stuff they created was stupid with Star Wars and just remake some of the episodes. Episodes 7,8,9 need to be completely redone. The IP for Star Wars has lost a lot of value because they were so bad. They should just remake those films maybe borrowing from fanfiction. Perhaps even admit you messed up and run some crazy promotion like the new episode 7 is free in theatres. How much would it really costs to remake them like 1.5-2.5 b which is significantly less than the initially paid for the IP.
GOT probably needs a reboot either just the last seasons or the final 2. Paramount paid $110 B for GOT. A reboot is tops 3% to do it again but correctly and GOT is likely still WBD highest value IP. Probably more like 1% of purchase price. Some of the issues with GOT was just being a rushed finish, but the WhiteWalkers and John as the Prince who was promised was just poor storytelling. It was the dumb hivemind trope that Independence Day used to beat a super powerful enemy. The real WhiteWalker story has never been told. Not even sure of Martin figured out that story.
The thing with great IP and the stories people really love is it’s not about fantastic graphics and special effects. It’s the storytelling where you need very real talent figuring it out.
I think the real cost, the real problem, is the reputational hit from admitting they fucked up, alongside the shame, blame, and perhaps even legal responsability, it puts on the creators (producers, directors and writers, mostly) of the publically disgraced movies and the chilling effect it would have on future works.
Imagine how it would go! It's hardly a new phenomenon, bad movies get made all the time at all budget levels, but admitting it means throwing people under the bus. It means telling, quite directly, to the dozens of fans of episodes 7-9 as they are that they have objectively bad taste, talk about spitting on someone's soul. For any producer, director or writer who is about to work on a Disney movie, they'll have seen how Disney failed to stand behind their works. Are they going to imply the movie I worked years on is shit if it doesn't make them enough money? For the public, they'll have seen how Disney swore, for years, to the tune of billions of dollars that episode 7, 8 and 9 were the sequels we always wanted to the Star Wars saga.
No, I don't think we're gonna get a redo. If that bad all women Ghostbusters movie was never officially disgraced by Sony, Disney's not going to do it with Star Wars. At least that Ghostbusters movie could be pushed into a corner never to be talked about again, while SW killed off or bastardized beloved characters. It's best for them to maintain the fiction that they were perfectly good movies that simply for whatever reason, didn't resonate enough with audiences. The best they could do to correct it is a split timeline, JJ Abrams' Star Trek-style, that they then splice over the bad one, and I have a hard time imagining them pulling it off in a way that doesn't feel like a massive ass pull; at least Star Trek had a history of time travel and diverging timelines.
That’s not how movie financing works. If you’ve ever read about the politics and mechanics of the industry, it goes something like this (I’m oversimplifying a bit and some details may be a little inaccurate from what I remember):
A lot of rich people (and even ordinary people without their knowledge) finance movies.
In IB, there exists a specialty financing department called something like “TMT-DCM” which stands for “Telecom, Media & Technology,” Debt Capital Markets (DCM). A common goal of IB is to raise money for companies projects (this is a fairly standard function called “capital sourcing”).
Some movies are absolutely financed by rich people. The story of the dude that defrauded Malaysia and then used the money to party and fund 'The Wolf of Wall St' is pretty well known. But the reality is that this isn't that common. Rich people don’t have cash just sitting around. They’re rich because they own companies that are worth a lot of money.
Anyway, IB’s are commonly tasked with raising money for movies. I don't know who’s active today (and TBF it’s been about 15 years since I read about this), but Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan were very active back in the middle of the 2000’s. The thing is IB’s don't really have money themselves, so they reach out to rich people and institutions (e.g. pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, foundations, also sometimes hedge funds, etc.) to invest. More normal people unknowingly have exposure to this than you might think.
This is where people go wrong in their thinking. Individual movies are very risky. So then why would people invest in a single movie? Well they actually don't, and this is where the magic happens. What happens is you go in and create a portfolio (which is substantially less risky than an individual film). The way these deals are setup is that, say, 10 future movies were coming out for a studio in the next 18 months, and their total budget was estimated to be $600 million, with a mix consisting of few $100 million movies and several $30 million movies. The producers and the studio will then reach out to an IB. The bank will then say, "If the studio sources $100 million, we can get the other $500 million.” Alright. Deal.
The IB then creates an ABS (which is essentially a financial package that will contain all the money that these movies make over the course of their entire lives. That includes everything, box office, DVD’s, cable broadcasts, TV broadcasts, foreign broadcasts, airplane broadcast, you name it, they do it, or 'other' licensing like when a clip of a movie is featured in a commercial for a toothpaste advertisement. The ABS will have a lifespan of, say 10 years for instance, and will have a minimum return of 8% a year and a maximum of, 15% a year, which is all based on several inside and outside estimates of how the movies should perform. The IB then turns around and markets this security to rich people and institution's to invest. They give $X (up to $500 million) and get a percentage of the total return pool.
So then your movies start coming out. The ABS starts getting a chunk of the profits, and the terms for 'revenue' and 'profit' are very strictly defined. The debt agreements for these ABS’s can run like 300 pages long, with everything laid out in excruciating detail. The split will be something like 20% of the profit which goes to the studio / producer and 80% going back to the ABS. When the ABS hits its maximum return for a given year, the excess profit then goes back to the studio which is to incentivize them to keep distributing the films.
So the idea is that out of 10 movies, maybe 3 bomb, 5 do ‘alright’' (e.g. are profitable but not exactly raking in dough), and 2 are huge blockbusters. But the point here is that the 7 that do 'alright' or great more than pay for the ones that bombed with money left over.
Then after a while, say 5 years or so, all the movies come out and now we have a better picture of how all 10 did, and we can figure out how the investment did. But, there’s still 5 years left on the ABS. Usually there are call or put clauses in the contracts that allow either the investors to be made whole by forcing the studio to buy back the ABS at a predetermined return (that’s the “put” and it’s used if the movies failed to perform) or the studio may have a “call” (which allows the studio to buy back the ABS at a predetermined price if the movies way overperform). But it’s also common that people just ride the ABS and collect the checks up to maturity and at the point of maturity, normally the residuals are auctioned and everyone gets a cut of the final distribution.
Incidentally, this scenario is how Netflix funds all of its content. The debt that Netflix issues is “backed” by the streaming rights and liquidation value of all its IP (movies / TV/ etc.). The only real difference is that instead of having a bunch of little boxes containing let’s just say 10 movies each, Netflix itself is just one giant box that holds everything. But the structure is more or less the same.
I don’t know how much any of this has changed in the years up to today, but this is how it used to work in the early 2000’s.
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I think the Star Wars brand might actually be toast. I do get your point but 7-9 did very real damage that a full cancellation of those might work.
GOT would be harder because the end wasn’t terrible it was just bad relative to the earlier work.
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Agreed, but then we end up having to watch said canon crash and burn when someone without any love for the IP grabs hold of it and inserts their own vision, and then mocks the people who are suddenly alienated because har har I peed all over your stuff now I own it. A fandom should, in such cases, be able to organize and just pay some other person to continue from where things left off and go on their merry way. This could happen in the current era, but in practice, coordination problems mean you can't outbid Corporations for the rights.
I think books in particular are amenable to a 'flexible' canon. Most long-running series have entries that fans would rather forget/ignore. Oh, and many where the endings rather suck. So if another author wants to come in and rewrite, say book 6 of a series, or just change a single character arc or 'fix' an ending, well, let them publish it, stick it on the shelf next to the originals, and let people choose.
I ALSO support the idea of authors going back over their own works and adjusting things based on their increased experience and feedback... so long as they're very transparent about doing so and keep the previous versions available.
This doesn't always play out well (Kirkman is making some changes from the Invincible comic to the TV show that I find baffling) but I think it is healthy.
This also opens them up to being bullied into making changes that are genuinely horrible, but hey.
Yes there's absolutely an 'artistic integrity' argument to be made.
I think the apotheosis of this would be a wikipedia-like site that tracks all versions of a given canon and charts the different paths readers/viewers can take and lets people provide feedback on individual tracks so future readers/viewers can pick the one they expect to like.
Hey, at least fans can fight over whether Sony's version of the canon is better than Microsoft's. We lost something when the console wars died down.
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That does sound good, except as the other user noted, the IP laws also protect the small quality authors from the massive slop companies to an extent. Right now, if you have Legends of Gemlands and a generic mass-marketed Slop Wars, you can google the former and it will come up. Gonna be a lot tougher if the massive company can fork Legends of Gemlands and have their version come up in the first 10 pages of search.
That's trademark (identity), not copyright (content). Nobody is suggesting that trademark be abolished.
Wouldn't forked content necessarily have identity similar enough that it is easily confused?
The trademark is the name of the work, not the plot and the characters. Just call your fork Legends of Crystalia, and mention on the same page that it's a fork of Legends of Gemlands not endorsed by the original creator, in order to avoid any confusion. (Though if the characters are trademarked separately—e. g., using a specific gemstone character that figures prominently in the plot as the logo for Legends of Gemlands—then you will have problems.)
For a real-world example, see the recent controversy between Notepad++ (trademarked) and a fork that dared to call itself Notepad++ for Mac without authorization.
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I never understood how people bought into this willingly.
I assume natural crowd-following instincts (you want to be part of what everyone else is doing, not go off on some random tangent where nobody else cares), backed by the aforementioned IP regime that makes it very sketchy to put too much effort into a product you can't distribute.
But yeah, its like the one Tyler the Creator tweet about cyberbullying. "How the hell is corporate canon real? Just read the fanfiction, don't watch the theatrical releases, and believe whatever you want."
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Copyrights should expire much sooner, a few years at most. I can't imagine any serious drawback.
It used to be the case in early American history that you had only process patents; not the end product. But if you want to keep to IP law, they were highly protectionist tools designed to protect monopolies rather than foster innovation. The World Trade Organization is the 21st century poster boy for this, by trying to guarantee monopoly pricing power for big corporations. That prevents development and competition, it doesn’t encourage it.
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Yeah I agree with Count, I think 10 years would be a completely fair time for IP to last. It's pretty wild that they can get extended to the 100 year mark, and you have companies like Disney still milking IP a century old.
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Copyrights should be limited to life of author plus like 10-15 years at most, patents normally require significantly more inventiveness and cost and legal procedure to even turn into an enforcable legal right (you can write any old BS on a piece of paper and if you intented to be creative in any way whatsoever it's automatically covered by copyright) and they don't last more than a few decades.
Life+N for low numbers of N creates a perverse incentive to assassinate good authors in order to get their works into the public domain faster. I've got several authors who I'd love for to die soon, but the current Life+70 rule cross-referenced against actuarial odds disincentives direct action.
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Why extend to life of the author?
As I understand, the main benefit of copyright is to get authors paid for works that are physically free to copy. They should be paid, or many people won’t be incentivized or able to afford creating such works.
But why should they continue to be paid after a few years, when they haven’t done anything else productive (if they did, for example created another work, they’ll be paid from that).
Some things do take a long time to be monetized. Movies that become cult classics etc. Game of Thrones isn’t a cult classic but the first book was published 15+ years before the show which made the story available to a wider audience. He actually needed to write more source material before you could make a show. For him to monetize his story it took decades.
The show seems to have been dependent on his continued input to maintain quality, given, for instance, that it took a nosedive once it outpaced his published novels, so he could quite plausibly have continued to monetize his story and creative abilities just through his unique ability to continue putting out quality installments.
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Without copyright you have things like people bastardizing Tolkien's creations while he is still alive and writing more about his world he created. It would seriously have pissed him off, and justifiably. At least now the bastardising happens when he's dead and doesn't care any more.
We still have that, it's called fanfiction. About the only difference is you can't earn money on it (usually).
Pretty important difference: it prevents Disney from putting $100 million into marketing their own version of Tolkien while he was still writing his.
This is already a known phenomenon with existing IP constraints.
If they have $100 million, they can create their own brand with slightly different details, so it steals ideas from the existing brand without violating its copyright, and succeed off marketing even if their brand is worse.
In both cases, the original creator probably ends up with more sales and attention than they would've otherwise, by being credited with inspiring the heavily-marketed release.
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"Someone writes new novels set in your world" vs "someone writes new novels set in your world that take over your brand by sheer volume of marketing" is an important difference, yes.
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