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Because taxes are how we typically set incentives and the government is well-configured to use them. This is common in other contexts: for example, in many citi

by acdha 3y ago

Because taxes are how we typically set incentives and the government is well-configured to use them. This is common in other contexts: for example, in many cities leaving your property vacant will trigger additional taxes because they don’t want empty buildings impacting the surrounding neighborhoods. > If I can’t purchase and enjoy a copyrighted work legally, the copyright is unenforceable. That’s not true in the United States, and if it were you’d still have the problem this thread is discussing where you need the servers (or DRM systems, etc.), which is why I’d like to change the incentives so it’s cheaper to release things you no longer intend to use even if they weren’t directly distributed to users. The indie carve out reflects that there is some real cost here (packaging things up, vetting the rights for a release, etc.) If you have an old game which never went big, you don’t want a solo developer getting hit with a bill they can’t afford because they didn’t back up everything well or life happened and some planned work took longer than they thought it would. Again, remember this proposal is for a legal mechanism to compel action and you want to think about how it could impact people with the least resources.

int_19h 3y ago
OP is saying that this is how things should be, not how things are. The government is well-configured to use copyright as a stick, too. Literally the only reason why copyright - an artificially imposed monopoly - works at all is because the government enforces it, and so it gets to set the terms for eligibility. The legal mechanism here would be a new law, same as your tax proposal, so I fail to see the difference. As far as needing servers to continue running - the community is generally quite capable of doing that so long as there are no legal roadblocks to it like DMCA and CFAA. It is likely to provide a better experience too, compared to what would essentially be compelled support from the original developer, which is virtually guaranteed to be the least they can get away with to legally dodge the tax - e.g. spinning up one underpowered server that can only serve very few users at a time. It is also unclear how such compelled services would interact with game updates. Is the server required to support all past versions of the game going all the way back to the original release? For competitive multiplayer games especially this may not feasible for good reasons. OTOH if you only require that they support the most recent update, this opens the possibility of the developer simply shipping an "update" that disables as many features as they can get away with once the game is on life support - e.g. removing multiplayer entirely if possible, or at least making it as crippled as they can get away with; and then providing support only for that crippled version.

by acdha 3y ago

int_19h 3y ago

OP is saying that this is how things should be, not how things are. The government is well-configured to use copyright as a stick, too. Literally the only reason why copyright - an artificially imposed monopoly - works at all is because the government enforces it, and so it gets to set the terms for eligibility. The legal mechanism here would be a new law, same as your tax proposal, so I fail to see the difference. As far as needing servers to continue running - the community is generally quite capable of doing that so long as there are no legal roadblocks to it like DMCA and CFAA. It is likely to provide a better experience too, compared to what would essentially be compelled support from the original developer, which is virtually guaranteed to be the least they can get away with to legally dodge the tax - e.g. spinning up one underpowered server that can only serve very few users at a time. It is also unclear how such compelled services would interact with game updates. Is the server required to support all past versions of the game going all the way back to the original release? For competitive multiplayer games especially this may not feasible for good reasons. OTOH if you only require that they support the most recent update, this opens the possibility of the developer simply shipping an "update" that disables as many features as they can get away with once the game is on life support - e.g. removing multiplayer entirely if possible, or at least making it as crippled as they can get away with; and then providing support only for that crippled version.