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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.
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!
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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?
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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.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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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.
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.
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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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I scratch my head at people that don’t understand the difference. Sometimes I think they just want to pound the point into legislation because it favors their desires over the way people’s work gets abused. If I only could’ve gotten away in English class recklessly chopping up someone else’s work as my own and calling it “fan fiction,” it would’ve made things so much easier for me. Per the chain above as well, 10 years is way too short a copyright on someone’s work.
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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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