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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.
Copyrights should expire much sooner, a few years at most. I can't imagine any serious drawback.
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).
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.
Then why did they pay Lucas $4 billion?
I don't deny that this has happened but the examples - e.g. 50 Shades of Grey which was transformed even if the core point of "dark triad alpha loves me" was kept, that Anne Hathaway movie - say something and the fact that studios still pay or overpay for IP does too.
I think Lucas prefers the billions he made before Disney could just copy him + the billions he made selling it to them to the honor of being the John Carter to whatever successful series Disney made off his ideas.
Certainly, one could argue that Lucas introduced people to Flash Gordon and Japanese cinema but how many? I was a pretty big SW fan and I don't think I ever watched anything because I was told it inspired SW.
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