5 ms·

It may well be that either the third parties who created the game are no longer around (making their intellectual property difficult/impossible to license), or

It may well be that either the third parties who created the game are no longer around (making their intellectual property difficult/impossible to license), or that they in turn had licenses for various assets (images/sounds. etc...) or other technologies to parties that are not longer around, and under licensing restrictions that never envisioned this sort of use. Sometimes tracking all of this down to even know what the pieces legal provence is would be more trouble than it would be worth.

chimeracoder 4y ago
This is a great argument in favor of shorter copyright terms. Instead of a situation in which everyone loses (the status quo), after some point, the games would become public domain because the maximum possible copyright period has run out, enabling people to play them again.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  Or at least require active registration and renewal, which fixes the "orphan works" problem to a certain extent.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  This seems like an argument for copyright terms which are short by default but can be extended if the holder cares about them and pays some fee; so any abandoned content would actually become available to the public instead of being locked away for whole generations.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    I don't see any benefit to the public in allowing a company to pay a fee to extend their copyright. Once the copyright has lapsed the company will still be free to do whatever they want with the property, it's just that so will everyone else.
jimmaswell 4y ago
If there is no copyright holder anymore, then who will sue you if you just start selling the thing?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 10000truths 4y ago
  Then whoever can make a non-frivolous claim to the copyright will crawl out of the woodwork to sue you for damages because they suddenly have a financial incentive to do so.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    Honestly even the largest companies don't seem to care too much about suing people for copyrights they don't actually own. In the cox cable lawsuit, with billions in damages at stake, the major record labels under the RIAA had a ton of infringement claims thrown out on appeal because they didn't actually have the rights or hadn't registered them at the time of the alleged activity. It shaved a fair amount of cash off the damages cox was on the hook for, but it must have taken them an immense amount of time and effort to check the rights on all those works to find them and as far as I can tell, the labels who falsely claimed to the courts that they had the rights didn't see any consequences for their part. If there's no accountability for failing to keep their own records in order even in such a massive high profile copyright lawsuit why would they ever bother?
- stormbrew 4y ago
  It's genuinely very difficult to have things completely lose any kind of copyright ownership is the thing. If they're individual works, ownership follows the estate wherever it goes for decades. If it's a corporate work/work for hire, the assets were probably bought by someone in a firesale, and then they might have gone out of business and all their assets were bought too and so on ad nausium. Proving that no one owns the copyright to the satisfaction of any company or person who's even a little risk averse then becomes essentially an archeological or genealogical task that's rarely worth it. This is why we get an endless stream of movies and books built on ideas from before 1920 and everything made since then that isn't a blockbuster of some sort languishes into obscurity. Eternal copyright is where ideas go to die.

chimeracoder 4y ago

This is a great argument in favor of shorter copyright terms. Instead of a situation in which everyone loses (the status quo), after some point, the games would become public domain because the maximum possible copyright period has run out, enabling people to play them again.

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
Or at least require active registration and renewal, which fixes the "orphan works" problem to a certain extent.
PeterisP 4y ago
This seems like an argument for copyright terms which are short by default but can be extended if the holder cares about them and pays some fee; so any abandoned content would actually become available to the public instead of being locked away for whole generations.
- autoexec 4y ago
  I don't see any benefit to the public in allowing a company to pay a fee to extend their copyright. Once the copyright has lapsed the company will still be free to do whatever they want with the property, it's just that so will everyone else.

jimmaswell 4y ago

If there is no copyright holder anymore, then who will sue you if you just start selling the thing?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
10000truths 4y ago
Then whoever can make a non-frivolous claim to the copyright will crawl out of the woodwork to sue you for damages because they suddenly have a financial incentive to do so.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Honestly even the largest companies don't seem to care too much about suing people for copyrights they don't actually own. In the cox cable lawsuit, with billions in damages at stake, the major record labels under the RIAA had a ton of infringement claims thrown out on appeal because they didn't actually have the rights or hadn't registered them at the time of the alleged activity. It shaved a fair amount of cash off the damages cox was on the hook for, but it must have taken them an immense amount of time and effort to check the rights on all those works to find them and as far as I can tell, the labels who falsely claimed to the courts that they had the rights didn't see any consequences for their part. If there's no accountability for failing to keep their own records in order even in such a massive high profile copyright lawsuit why would they ever bother?
stormbrew 4y ago
It's genuinely very difficult to have things completely lose any kind of copyright ownership is the thing. If they're individual works, ownership follows the estate wherever it goes for decades. If it's a corporate work/work for hire, the assets were probably bought by someone in a firesale, and then they might have gone out of business and all their assets were bought too and so on ad nausium. Proving that no one owns the copyright to the satisfaction of any company or person who's even a little risk averse then becomes essentially an archeological or genealogical task that's rarely worth it. This is why we get an endless stream of movies and books built on ideas from before 1920 and everything made since then that isn't a blockbuster of some sort languishes into obscurity. Eternal copyright is where ideas go to die.