9 ms·

How would you define abandonware?

SCHiM 6y ago
I don't think I have the full definition. But if you think about online games, it becomes abandonware if you can no longer log into the game servers? Or if your product is dependent on DRM, then is becomes abandonware when the DRM servers shut down. I think different classes of media will require different definitions of when they become abandonware, but I think we'll mostly know it when we see it.
- dataflow 6y ago
  Your definitions are better than what I was imagining, but I think they might still have rather significant edge cases & loopholes in reality. To give some examples off the top of my head: What if (say) access ends up varying across jurisdictions? What if they keep the servers running, but start charging for them? What if the company wants to sell to someone in another jurisdiction? etc.
iso1631 6y ago
I would require copyright holders to renew their copyright. 5 years for free, then $1 for the 6th year, $2 for the 7th, $4 for the 8th, $8 for the 9th, $1m for the 25th, etc.
- ziml77 6y ago
  Not every copyright holder is a massive corporation. Artists produce many pieces per year. That would cost them a lot to keep copyrights.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    It's mostly representatives of individual creators who oppose orphan works legislation. Disney probably isn't going to forget (or worry about the expense) to renew the copyright on Frozen. But an individual author/photographer/etc. may well forget. And in the photographer case, does that mean they're going to have to spend money every year to renew the copyright on each individual photograph that want to continue to protect?
  - ryukafalz 6y ago
    It doesn't necessarily benefit massive corporations more than individual artists, because those massive corporations probably also hold copyright over a lot of works; it'd cost them huge amounts of money to renew them all. I think GP's scheme isn't awful honestly; it would have the effect of drastically lowering the practical length of copyright for most works while providing artists with a way to maintain copyright over works that are actually highly successful. (A per-year doubling might be a bit much but I think it's on the right track.) If the practical effect was that we mostly got back to the original copyright term we had in the US (14 years with the possibility to extend that once), I'd be pretty happy. Maybe start the fees after the 14th year.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Not for the duration that matters. 5 years for free is plenty of time to make reasonable income on your creations; after that, you're just seeking rent from society. Sure, boost that to 10 or even 20 years if needed[0]. But from then on extension costs should grow exponential - otherwise we risk locking down work for duration longer than a human lifetime. Like it already happens with Disney. -- [0] - 20 years may have been appropriate in mid-20th century, but I'd argue it isn't now. Cultural creation accelerates exponentially, but long copyrights prevent the ability to improve on prior art to accelerate in lock step.
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      5 years for free is plenty of time to make reasonable income on your creations; after that, you're just seeking rent from society. I strongly dispute this statement, unless your definition of reasonable income does not include at least making back the money you spent on producing the content in the first place. You're ignoring all the small creators who produce new material for niche markets, possibly as a side income rather than their main jobs, and rely on the long tail of sales of that original work to make it financially worthwhile. Not every copyright holder is a Hollywood movie studio, big name record label or international book publisher you've heard of. Your longer periods might be more realistic in those cases, and even 10 years might not be enough to break even.
      - danbolt 6y ago
        Do you think there'd be a good time to draw a line? I can't really see the need for 25+ without a fee.
        Silhouette 6y ago
        Do you think there'd be a good time to draw a line? I suppose that's the $LARGE_AMOUNT question, isn't it? As a personal opinion, I think copyright is OK as an economic incentive unless and until we find something that works better, but the protection should be determined by what makes it economically reasonable for people to create and share useful works, taking into account all the circumstances and over the long term. There is clearly no single duration of protection that is even close to that benchmark for all situations, because something like a blockbuster movie or smash hit video game might make several times its production costs back within months of initial distribution and that might be a large majority of the revenue it will ever make, while those small, niche-content creators I talked about before might not break even for a decade or two. As ever with debates about alternatives to current copyright, things start to get sticky when you try to figure out a reasonable way to estimate the effects of any proposed change without actually making it and then waiting a decade or three to see what happens. I like the idea of shortening copyright protection but at the same time considering other rights to protect things of value that are, sometimes incidentally, protected by copyright today. For example, I have no problem with the requirements that exist in some places to credit the creators of a work, as an entirely separate matter from copyright. I think there is also a lot of room to explore safeguards against intruding on a larger creative effort too soon, such as where an author has put considerable effort into world-building and is continuing to produce successful new works set in that world, in which case allowing poor-quality fan fiction to flood the market as soon as the copyright on the first work in that world expires could sharply devalue the overall creative effort for the author and so result in fewer or lower quality works subsequently being produced and shared by that author, which is a harm to society as well. In short, I don't think you can reasonably draw a single line with anything resembling our current copyright system. I think there should probably be several lines, in each of several colours, and some of them should be circles and triangles. But then given how difficult enforcement often is already and how widespread misunderstandings about the existing law are, that might not be practical either. Economics and intangible goods are a tough combination.
  - ticviking 6y ago
    We could allow natural persons to hold copyright for their natural life. Their heirs, if natural persons could get a 18 year free extension (allowing any minor child of a creator to benefit from their parents IP to pay for their upbringing) Corporations can start paying that escalating price right away. (Edit: misread GP and removed a paragraph)
  - finnthehuman 6y ago
    I think that's the point, to send works nobody is making money with to the public domain faster. Rather than the politically untenable idea of shortening the ever-expanding length of copyright.
  - mLuby 6y ago
    Right, this is the problem: how to protect normal people without giving large companies more power? And how to do it when the companies are the ones in the room with lawmakers? Non-transferable copyright/patents?
- Qwertious 6y ago
  I don't think that's the right set of incentives: 1. Different industries have different paces; it might take 25 years for any NASA software to be fully developed in the first place, whereas if you haven't made back your money on your singleplayer videogame after 10 years, you probably won't ever make it back. Point is, there is no flat duration that is fair to every work out there. 2. almost by definition, the stuff we care about is more profitable and will therefore be kept under copyright longer. 3. I wonder whether copyright expiration is actually helpful for software, when it doesn't provide you with source code. I'd like to see some mechanism that incentivizes the IP owner to publish source code after their copyright expires - perhaps by offering a conditional extension to the copyright duration in exchange for putting the source code in escrow? Really, I don't think software's IP type should be "copyright" in the first place. It doesn't make sense to cut and paste a binary like you would with a book's text.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    > it might take 25 years for any NASA software to be fully developed in the first place NASA is a government agency, the work should be in the public domain
    - Qwertious 6y ago
      s/NASA/aerospace/
- passivate 6y ago
  Does the clock reset if you update the original work? With rolling releases, who determines when the clock officially starts? Also you'd have to account for industries where copyright/trademark/patents could overlap on products. While a nice idea, I imagine it would become a bureaucratic nightmare to implement as a law. But nevertheless, we need to think about new ways to fix the current broken system.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    Sure, the new version (where Greedo shoots at Han) would reset the clock, but the original work (Where only Han shoots) still remains the same, and to be renewed would cost Disney $500b to renew it this year.
jerry1979 6y ago
It looks like abandonware has an evolving legal status and relates to "orphaned" works in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works_in_the_United_Sta...

I don't think I have the full definition. But if you think about online games, it becomes abandonware if you can no longer log into the game servers? Or if your product is dependent on DRM, then is becomes abandonware when the DRM servers shut down. I think different classes of media will require different definitions of when they become abandonware, but I think we'll mostly know it when we see it.

dataflow 6y ago
Your definitions are better than what I was imagining, but I think they might still have rather significant edge cases & loopholes in reality. To give some examples off the top of my head: What if (say) access ends up varying across jurisdictions? What if they keep the servers running, but start charging for them? What if the company wants to sell to someone in another jurisdiction? etc.

iso1631 6y ago

I would require copyright holders to renew their copyright. 5 years for free, then $1 for the 6th year, $2 for the 7th, $4 for the 8th, $8 for the 9th, $1m for the 25th, etc.

ziml77 6y ago
Not every copyright holder is a massive corporation. Artists produce many pieces per year. That would cost them a lot to keep copyrights.
- ghaff 6y ago
  It's mostly representatives of individual creators who oppose orphan works legislation. Disney probably isn't going to forget (or worry about the expense) to renew the copyright on Frozen. But an individual author/photographer/etc. may well forget. And in the photographer case, does that mean they're going to have to spend money every year to renew the copyright on each individual photograph that want to continue to protect?
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  It doesn't necessarily benefit massive corporations more than individual artists, because those massive corporations probably also hold copyright over a lot of works; it'd cost them huge amounts of money to renew them all. I think GP's scheme isn't awful honestly; it would have the effect of drastically lowering the practical length of copyright for most works while providing artists with a way to maintain copyright over works that are actually highly successful. (A per-year doubling might be a bit much but I think it's on the right track.) If the practical effect was that we mostly got back to the original copyright term we had in the US (14 years with the possibility to extend that once), I'd be pretty happy. Maybe start the fees after the 14th year.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Not for the duration that matters. 5 years for free is plenty of time to make reasonable income on your creations; after that, you're just seeking rent from society. Sure, boost that to 10 or even 20 years if needed[0]. But from then on extension costs should grow exponential - otherwise we risk locking down work for duration longer than a human lifetime. Like it already happens with Disney. -- [0] - 20 years may have been appropriate in mid-20th century, but I'd argue it isn't now. Cultural creation accelerates exponentially, but long copyrights prevent the ability to improve on prior art to accelerate in lock step.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    5 years for free is plenty of time to make reasonable income on your creations; after that, you're just seeking rent from society. I strongly dispute this statement, unless your definition of reasonable income does not include at least making back the money you spent on producing the content in the first place. You're ignoring all the small creators who produce new material for niche markets, possibly as a side income rather than their main jobs, and rely on the long tail of sales of that original work to make it financially worthwhile. Not every copyright holder is a Hollywood movie studio, big name record label or international book publisher you've heard of. Your longer periods might be more realistic in those cases, and even 10 years might not be enough to break even.
    - danbolt 6y ago
      Do you think there'd be a good time to draw a line? I can't really see the need for 25+ without a fee.
      - Silhouette 6y ago
        Do you think there'd be a good time to draw a line? I suppose that's the $LARGE_AMOUNT question, isn't it? As a personal opinion, I think copyright is OK as an economic incentive unless and until we find something that works better, but the protection should be determined by what makes it economically reasonable for people to create and share useful works, taking into account all the circumstances and over the long term. There is clearly no single duration of protection that is even close to that benchmark for all situations, because something like a blockbuster movie or smash hit video game might make several times its production costs back within months of initial distribution and that might be a large majority of the revenue it will ever make, while those small, niche-content creators I talked about before might not break even for a decade or two. As ever with debates about alternatives to current copyright, things start to get sticky when you try to figure out a reasonable way to estimate the effects of any proposed change without actually making it and then waiting a decade or three to see what happens. I like the idea of shortening copyright protection but at the same time considering other rights to protect things of value that are, sometimes incidentally, protected by copyright today. For example, I have no problem with the requirements that exist in some places to credit the creators of a work, as an entirely separate matter from copyright. I think there is also a lot of room to explore safeguards against intruding on a larger creative effort too soon, such as where an author has put considerable effort into world-building and is continuing to produce successful new works set in that world, in which case allowing poor-quality fan fiction to flood the market as soon as the copyright on the first work in that world expires could sharply devalue the overall creative effort for the author and so result in fewer or lower quality works subsequently being produced and shared by that author, which is a harm to society as well. In short, I don't think you can reasonably draw a single line with anything resembling our current copyright system. I think there should probably be several lines, in each of several colours, and some of them should be circles and triangles. But then given how difficult enforcement often is already and how widespread misunderstandings about the existing law are, that might not be practical either. Economics and intangible goods are a tough combination.
- ticviking 6y ago
  We could allow natural persons to hold copyright for their natural life. Their heirs, if natural persons could get a 18 year free extension (allowing any minor child of a creator to benefit from their parents IP to pay for their upbringing) Corporations can start paying that escalating price right away. (Edit: misread GP and removed a paragraph)
- finnthehuman 6y ago
  I think that's the point, to send works nobody is making money with to the public domain faster. Rather than the politically untenable idea of shortening the ever-expanding length of copyright.
- mLuby 6y ago
  Right, this is the problem: how to protect normal people without giving large companies more power? And how to do it when the companies are the ones in the room with lawmakers? Non-transferable copyright/patents?
Qwertious 6y ago
I don't think that's the right set of incentives: 1. Different industries have different paces; it might take 25 years for any NASA software to be fully developed in the first place, whereas if you haven't made back your money on your singleplayer videogame after 10 years, you probably won't ever make it back. Point is, there is no flat duration that is fair to every work out there. 2. almost by definition, the stuff we care about is more profitable and will therefore be kept under copyright longer. 3. I wonder whether copyright expiration is actually helpful for software, when it doesn't provide you with source code. I'd like to see some mechanism that incentivizes the IP owner to publish source code after their copyright expires - perhaps by offering a conditional extension to the copyright duration in exchange for putting the source code in escrow? Really, I don't think software's IP type should be "copyright" in the first place. It doesn't make sense to cut and paste a binary like you would with a book's text.
- iso1631 6y ago
  > it might take 25 years for any NASA software to be fully developed in the first place NASA is a government agency, the work should be in the public domain
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    s/NASA/aerospace/
passivate 6y ago
Does the clock reset if you update the original work? With rolling releases, who determines when the clock officially starts? Also you'd have to account for industries where copyright/trademark/patents could overlap on products. While a nice idea, I imagine it would become a bureaucratic nightmare to implement as a law. But nevertheless, we need to think about new ways to fix the current broken system.
- iso1631 6y ago
  Sure, the new version (where Greedo shoots at Han) would reset the clock, but the original work (Where only Han shoots) still remains the same, and to be renewed would cost Disney $500b to renew it this year.

jerry1979 6y ago

It looks like abandonware has an evolving legal status and relates to "orphaned" works in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works_in_the_United_Sta...