3 ms·

Right now we are seeing video games disappear after only a few decades. When the business model is for the copyright owner to issue restrictive licenses, most i

Right now we are seeing video games disappear after only a few decades. When the business model is for the copyright owner to issue restrictive licenses, most information will eventually disappear. DRM further exacerbates the situation. Moreover this is inherent in the nature of a capitalist system itself - it's Schumpeter's creative destruction at work. It is normal, regular, and otherwise healthy for all businesses to eventually end. But if that business was the only entity with the right and ability to copy, distribute etc. - then the creative work they produced is highly likely to disappear, lost to us forever. It's tragic enough that the early history of video games may simply disappear. That future generations will have no idea how it all got started. With copying and distribution cheaper and easier than ever before, we're somehow still at risk of losing this era of history. It's far, far, FAR scarier to think of this happening to the repository of human knowledge contained in BOOKS. The future which is now unfolding is a sort of permanent, rolling version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, where the collective wisdom of the human race just sort of fades away over time. Where we lose the ability to learn from our past, because we've lost the ability to make an enduring recording of it. Ironically, with technology, we have unlocked infinite, practically free distribution of copying and information. It can be done with a keystroke. The problem lies in our legal, political and economic systems - the iron boot has become so heavy it's crushing the larynx of the past and future alike, in a way never before seen in human history.

hilbert42 3y ago
"-the iron boot has become so heavy it's crushing the larynx of the past and future alike, in a way never before seen in human history." Exactly, as I said in my post we need a new political movement to fight the problem.
jmiskovic 3y ago
DRM is bad, most of us agree on this. Also, copyright laws were written for bygone era where things didn't move so fast. I think it's the case of the "lawful" not being aligned with "ethical". But the tragedy of games disappearing? There's more than 30 games released on Steam _each day_, let that sink in. Writing and publishing books has never in history been so easy. A vast majority of these are archived and easily available to anyone, in many more magnitudes of scale than our capacity to consume them. In fact, I'm seeing the opposite of your claims, with Meta and OpenAI publicly admitting of breaking copyright laws while training their LLMs, and also the widespread movement for self-proclaimed librarians hoarding books, ROMs and other software in terabyte scales. I'm not passing judgements about any of this, just saying that copyright law is not always strictly applied and the iron boot is more like a fluffy slipper when it comes to availability of historical content. There was a recent article about 87% of "classic" games no longer being commercially available - well that's still above the Sturgeon's law ("ninety percent of everything is crap"). Why would anyone expect publishers to offer content that is only interesting for historical reasons? For games that are still relevant, there is an added effort to run them on modern systems and to offer customer support.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Actually copyright laws from bygone eras were downright progressive compared to what Sonny Bono, Disney and other corporate lobbies have forced upon us in the last few decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#/media/File:Tom_Bell's_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#/media/Fi... No one is saying publishers have to offer content which is not commercially interesting. My contention is that if we want to preserve knowledge we need to put it in the public domain after a while, maybe several decades, or at least be very generous with exceptions for archival. This is consistent with copyright law until it was subverted in the modern era. At this point it looks like Disney has successfully lobbied for permanent and perpetual copyright.

hilbert42 3y ago

"-the iron boot has become so heavy it's crushing the larynx of the past and future alike, in a way never before seen in human history." Exactly, as I said in my post we need a new political movement to fight the problem.

jmiskovic 3y ago

DRM is bad, most of us agree on this. Also, copyright laws were written for bygone era where things didn't move so fast. I think it's the case of the "lawful" not being aligned with "ethical". But the tragedy of games disappearing? There's more than 30 games released on Steam _each day_, let that sink in. Writing and publishing books has never in history been so easy. A vast majority of these are archived and easily available to anyone, in many more magnitudes of scale than our capacity to consume them. In fact, I'm seeing the opposite of your claims, with Meta and OpenAI publicly admitting of breaking copyright laws while training their LLMs, and also the widespread movement for self-proclaimed librarians hoarding books, ROMs and other software in terabyte scales. I'm not passing judgements about any of this, just saying that copyright law is not always strictly applied and the iron boot is more like a fluffy slipper when it comes to availability of historical content. There was a recent article about 87% of "classic" games no longer being commercially available - well that's still above the Sturgeon's law ("ninety percent of everything is crap"). Why would anyone expect publishers to offer content that is only interesting for historical reasons? For games that are still relevant, there is an added effort to run them on modern systems and to offer customer support.

safety1st 3y ago
Actually copyright laws from bygone eras were downright progressive compared to what Sonny Bono, Disney and other corporate lobbies have forced upon us in the last few decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#/media/File:Tom_Bell's_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#/media/Fi... No one is saying publishers have to offer content which is not commercially interesting. My contention is that if we want to preserve knowledge we need to put it in the public domain after a while, maybe several decades, or at least be very generous with exceptions for archival. This is consistent with copyright law until it was subverted in the modern era. At this point it looks like Disney has successfully lobbied for permanent and perpetual copyright.