4 ms·

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" n

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law is not always strictly applied and the iron boot is more like a fluffy slipper when it comes to availability of historical content.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.

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.