Comment by Buttons840
1 day ago
Even better would be broad copyright reforms. Fair Use needs to be expanded and clarified. History has shown players are able to keep games alive themselves by emulators, reverse engineering, custom servers, etc. Expand Fair Use to say that these things are protected if needed to keep the game functional.
Fair use is already pretty good, but we shouldn't need to rely on it to preserve older games. The reform we need is a dramatically shorter term for copyrights. All older games should be completely out of copyright.
I'd add better handling of copy-protected titles as well. If a game wants the benefit of copyright, they need to make a version of it without DRM available in escrow (held by some entity like the Library of Congress) for when the copyright expires.
One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock even if the work is in the public domain, so that needs to be accounted for as well.
>One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock
My understanding is that the Library of Congress has the authority to designate situations in which it is legal to remove DRM on electronic copies of books you have purchased, such as to run it through a TTS program for those that are visually impaired. Does this not apply to other art mediums?
People can just break the law though
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I wish, but shortening existing copyright terms would be legally very thorny. It would run into Takings Clause challenges and violate treaties the US has signed.
If the government banned fracking it wouldn't need to compensate owners of oil rich land when it becomes worthless. Devaluing property is not the same as taking it.
And the legal basis is completely different, copyrights are created as an artificial right in the Copyright Clause, given for a limited time and purpose. They are not property in the traditional sense and Congress has absolute power over them.
> violate treaties the US has signed.
not that has stopped the US doing something.
The fact is, copyright extensions have served corporate interests well and is likely to continue to get extended even more, and more draconian, given how many decompilation and recomps have been done recently.
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All the relevant treaty clauses were strong-armed into those treaties by the US - no other country gives a shit about DMCA 1201 except insofar as the US forced them to.
Oh don’t worry. If the US can bail on the treaty signed with Ukraine and repeatedly threaten to not honor NATO commitments, then this is small-fry stuff.
> It would run into Takings Clause challenges
The incumbents would probably file lawsuits, but would they win?
If Congress can set copyright terms retroactively, why can't they set copyright terms retroactively?
What happens if they do the thing where you have to file for a renewal every year and the first 14 years are free and automatic, but then the renewal fee starts at $1000 and doubles for every year over 14?
> violate treaties the US has signed.
This is just an excuse the industry uses after bribing their way into some documents that can be renegotiated at any time. The US has been the ones pushing for this nonsense to begin with, so if they stopped, most other countries would be happy to enter into a different treaty. And the remaining ones would be the ones with the most to lose if they were the only ones to not sign onto the new agreement at the point when the US and most others pull out of the corrupt one.
Then get rid of the treaty.
This administration would just say that it is in the national security interest of the US to do the thing. Judges are wary to restrict the POTUS prerogatives relating to national defense, so they won't challenge it.
It's the dumbest and most obvious weakness of our system of government and it will never be fixed.
Publication of the source code should be required for software to be copyrightable and copyright should expire much sooner. It makes no sense for a binary to fall into the public domain 70 years later.
"Local copy of Qwen-3.8, you have your own machine. I'm putting a windows game binary in your home directory. Decompile the game and rewrite in Rust. Appropriately document source code and make full testing framework. Make sure any plugins are compatible with the original game. If there are any protections or preventions like DRM, exclude those features."
You seem to be approaching this from the perspective of “I want to play this game” when there is more value to the original source code than simply being able to run something similar.
This is how every commercial software being a DRM + remote attestation cloud only package begins, one day there will be a perfect ratio trap!
I am not sure how long this stays a joke
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Something like a 20 year cap on copywright would be fair.
We already have reverse engineering tools, and the vast majority of 20 year old media isn't producing new revenue.
Will never ever happen. Disney alone would spend billions to stop any meaningful copyright reforms
20 years is short enough for someone to wait for it to expire rather than pay a licensing fee. You ideally want it long enough that someone can benefit from their work, without being so long that society is unduly prohibited from creating derivative works.
If you look back at what was created in the past, 30 years seems like an absolute minimum, 50 years seems about right -- perhaps with a registration requirement for the full term so that works with an unclear publication date and ownership can be easily traced. That would mean the film Logan's Run would just be leaving copyright protection now.
For context, I believe in the UK, there is a 50-year term for broadcasts, computer-generated works, Crown Copyright (125 years or 50 from first commercial publication if within 75 years of creation), and certain classes of films. There's a schedule here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-...
50 years is insane for software. There may be 1 or 2 versions of 1976 software that people still buy today, although I’m skeptical. 30 years is also far too long; same deal for 1996 versions of software. Who’s buying new copies of Windows 95 today? 20 years seems about right.
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You only would license something that’s already successful.
How much money does George Lucas need, I guess he’d only have a networth of a few hundred million vs a few billion.
I make music and buy tons of it. I’ve never been like, yo Nas is coming out with a new project, I’ll just wait 20 years to buy it on sale.
Right now if I want to sample a song made 50 years ago I still have to pay thousands to license it even if everyone involved has long since left.
Most of the money goes to some massive label.
Likewise, I don’t think Nas would struggle if his older albums were made public domain.
He’s still the only one who can perform the tracks live. He can still make new music, like the 6 projects he made in the last few years.
Sony/Columbia would only stop profiting off the deal they had an 18 year old sign decades ago.
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> 20 years is short enough for someone to wait for it to expire rather than pay a licensing fee.
“Someone” might, but most people won’t. Do you think studios are going to announce the next blockbuster and most people will be like “eh, I’ll just wait 20 years, maybe I’ll have a kid and raise them until adulthood to pass the time”?
Portal is going to be 20 next year. I bought Portal 1 and 2 for a couple of bucks like a decade ago already.
I’d even say 20 years default is two long. Especially because there are things which are just abandoned. Make it shorter and add limited options to renew for limited time.
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Disney would still benefit from trademark law, even if copyright was shortened. I'm okay with trademarks.
They let Mickey Mouse expire.
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How do you define functional?
Maintaining the same functionality advertised or realised at the time it was purchased.
This seems tough-to-unworkable for some games. I'll use World of Warcraft^1 as an example.
WoW launched in an essentially unfinished state. Molten Core, the first 40-man raid, didn't have a loot table. I'm not sure it was even accessible on launch day. And when it did get a loot table, it had placeholder graphics for the tier 1 set.
This was fine: it would take months for players to be able to tackle end-game content, so the game didn't need to launch with it all ready to go. But a law requiring Blizzard to keep a launch-day WoW available wouldn't be especially satisfying.
Even if you changed it to be "its full functional state" or something similar, that gets weird. After Molten Core was BWL, which you couldn't reach on launch. And so on and so forth. WoW changes a ton over an expansion, and each expansion brings even bigger changes (do you play pre-Cata or post?). Do we require Blizzard to keep available each and every patch version? Hotfix version? How do players decide which they want to play? I really enjoyed the Argent Tournament, but I bet most preferred actually reaching ICC (which itself had a bunch of time locks before you could reach Arthas, himself).
[1]: Even beyond everything outlined, WoW gets weird when you consider Classic and now Forever.
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Usable similarly to how it was at the time of first sale?
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What you want is to repeal DMCA 1201. It is specifically 1201 that is responsible for the most anti-preservation rulings. Custom servers are legally imperiled because Blizzard, the patient zero of the technofeudalist takeover of the US, sued a developer for releasing a Battle.net custom server and won because he didn't implement the CD Key check. It is fairly trivial to make a central server have DRM checks that a third-party replacement can't replicate, even though they legally have to, which makes them effectively illegal.
Expanding exceptions to copyright law would be nice for different reasons, but custom servers and emulation were already legal before companies figured out they could put arbitrarily difficult roadblocks in the way of them.
Also while we're here, DMCA 512 was also a piece of horseshit, albeit less because it curtailed online freedom and more because it isn't a good way to adjudicate low-stakes copyright claims.
You'd think custom server developers would find it easy to operate in closed networks and Tor. This isn't valuable enough for the US to break Tor for. Server hosts might have a harder time but a lot of them are closed communities like Minecraft servers are, so they don't get attention.
> Tor
This sounds like fairy dust for this use case. You’re playing a real time game where latency matters, and you’re running all that latency sensitive traffic through a network of relays running on altruism - each hop would introduce latency and you’d deal with contention in the network.
The play experience would be awful.
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