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I disagree wholeheartedly. The purpose of copyright is to shift money made from selling copies back into the production of new works; and anything else is just
by kmeisthax 5y ago
I disagree wholeheartedly. The purpose of copyright is to shift money made from selling copies back into the production of new works; and anything else is just blatant rent-seeking at the expense of the larger economy.
High-budget songs, movies, and video games will either make back their budgets immediately, or they will be written off as a loss. There are very few cases where a work's financial success is predicated on money made five or ten years out. Hell, for video games, ten years out and you need to port your game to a new platform, which costs money, since the industry's investment into emulation technology[0] is piss-poor.
Furthermore, the production values of a work don't have much to do with it's longevity; you can't spend twice as much to get a work with twice the relevance decades down the line. In fact, most of the works from the past that still are relevant today were made on budgets that would be considered shoe-string today. If anything, I'd argue that longer terms make cheap cash-ins a safer bet than riskier experimental projects, even though the latter is more likely to be relevant. Do you really think that, say, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is going to last longer than the original Ghostbusters?
[0] Counterexamples: PC gaming, Steam Proton, and Xbox Series/PS5 backwards compatibility. All of these rely upon having built their games on technologies with long-term compatibility support built-in (Windows, x86), or upon community re-implementation efforts (WINE). The game industry cannot ever seem to afford to write their own one-off emulators.
- foolfoolz 5y agothis is totally false. world of warcraft was released 15 years ago and is still generating real profit. because video games receive updates and have continued micro transactions they do not necessarily make the most of their revenue immediately upon release production value has a huge impact. why would rockstar spend billions developing gta 5 if it was public domain after 10 years? it’s still the cash machine that runs the business today and it’s 8 years old
- kmeisthax 5y agoWoW and GTA5 both made back their costs shortly after launch. The fact that there is more profit to be made afterwards isn't an argument for or against longer copyright terms. The point of copyright is not to enable the author or publisher to capture 100% of the profit - otherwise, we'd just issue perpetual copyright title and call it a day. The point is to encourage the production of new works by giving people who create them a "bite at the apple", so to speak. So the length of copyright title needs to be calibrated to allow creators the chance to make a profit, but to not gate further creativity or re-use behind a paywall. This is, of course, very poorly bargained-for in present law.
- Dylan16807 5y agoIf world of warcraft hadn't added any content in 15 years it wouldn't be making much money. > why would rockstar spend billions developing gta 5 if it was public domain after 10 years? Because that's still a ton of money. Also every time they update the game with more content, that's something you can only get if you buy or wait even longer. And it's easy for them to require payment to use GTA Online. > it’s still the cash machine that runs the business today and it’s 8 years old I don't think it would be a tragedy if they had to put out a new game at some point in the next few years to keep making as much money. Also the game was already completely free for a week in 2020.