10 ms·

I don't understand why the ESA cares at all about this. None of the games in question are making any money, and the publishers don't expect to make any money in

I don't understand why the ESA cares at all about this. None of the games in question are making any money, and the publishers don't expect to make any money in the future on them. What is their incentive? Maybe they want to preserve the opportunity of reviving an old IP? If that's the case, then doesn't allowing players to keep playing the abandoned games improve the visibility of those IPs, improving the value of a future revival? It's really dumbfounding. I'd like to understand the motivation here, so that it at least makes sense to me.

chongli 12y ago
Their incentive is to keep players buying new games rather than playing old ones.
- rosser 12y ago
  Exactly. If you're happily playing Abandoned Title III, why would you need to buy New Hotness XXVII? It's pretty much the same kind of thinking that counts each viewing of a pirated movie as lost revenue — nevermind that you can watch a DVD or BD over and over and over, and not get charged each time...
  - aetch 12y ago
    Nevermind that going to a theatre to watch a movie over and over would GET charged each time...
DanAndersen 12y ago
It seems more often than not that the incentive is just to sit on the rights to IP, even if you don't plan to do anything with it ever, just because there's no incentive to let things go, and there's some microscopic but non-zero benefit to holding onto IP just in case. I wonder if, instead of having the near-endless wait until public domain, it would be good to have a system of intellectual property that made copyright increasingly expensive to hold year after year, as some function of the total assets of the IP holder. Make it some exponential function, so that after a certain number of years, holding onto the rights to some IP is just too expensive to maintain unless the holders feel they can actually do something good and profitable with the IP (rather than a system that would need to show regular "use", which would incentivize publishing crap to satisfy a regulation).
- Shendare 12y ago
  That is brilliant. It would solve the Mickey Mouse Protection Act problem as well. If megacorps like Disney want to spend millions keeping Mickey Mouse and friends out of the public domain after 100 years, they're free to do so, without keeping things like The Great Gatsby or the Dewey Decimal System locked up for no good reason.
- derekp7 12y ago
  The only problem I see is for software that gets new versions periodically. Often times an old version is "good enough", but if it became public domain then it would compete against the newer version. Of course depending on your viewpoint that may not actually be a problem.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    That's how it's supposed to work - if you don't make a better type then people will stick with the old type. It seems in many areas technology has plateaued and so companies have moved to planned obsolescence, which this is just a version of. This just highlights to me that the current economic systems are failing and a paradigm shift is required to allow mankind to make better use of resource. We can make a bucket that will last multiple lifetimes but if you go to the shop you'll find ones that break after a short period of use. Companies are seeking laws to allow them to engineer in obsolescence of copyright works and prevent those who purchased copies of those works from working around that obsolescence. Rather like making cars with closed engine bays and legislating against owners using tools to access the engines for repairs ... no doubt that will come, auto-mobile computers are starting to make car repairs rather like this already.
    - mxfh 12y ago
      There are way to little responsibilities for the copyright holders compared to the rights are able to enforce. Copyrighted works could be treated comparable to undeveloped land if not used. Meaning works currently not being commercially available in a supported medium under reasonable conditions from the rights holder. If available the rights holder may either pay an annual tax (much like land value tax) or release the work into public domain.
malkia 12y ago
Every time there is a new device/platform released, an opportunity arises for old games to make comeback and money to be gained. Whether it's right or wrong to make money off it... I don't know. But I can feel both sides. For example my favourite all time PC game is Heroes of Might and Magic (2 and 3). There is a wonderful "inspired-by" version called PalmHeroes, and then some open source projects (freeheroes and others). And then I won't mind paying for the latest version UbiSoft released for iPad's - and it seems that version was just the DOS version emulated on the iPad (okay, maybe not, but felt that way). But I was satisfied nonetheless. Playing heroes on the iPad is great. Ah well, I don't really have saying in such matters - maybe movies/books can help a bit in this direction. ..... Now one thing that is possibly worrying - is how current games are going to be emulated in the future. It used to be that next-gen games were able to play previous games (PC, console) or emulate them, but PS3/Xbox360 are already hard to emulate on PC (especially PS3) - wondering with even newer consoles... And then that's even minor, what's more worrying if the game relies on external assets/services (fully online games) - then nothing could be done really....
- darkmighty 12y ago
  You make a very interesting point about emulation. For older consoles emulation was essentially guaranteed by Moore's law (and specifically the frequency scaling that went for a while). For a slowing down Moore's law, may we reach a point where real time emulation of a different architecture is just impossible? (and instead some kind of translation will need to be done, à la wine?) An advantage is that architectures are converging anyway to PC-like instead of exotic stuff like Cell.
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_emulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_emulation A lot of emulators work that way, and have for a long time. N64 on a Pentium II with only twice its clock rate, etc. Real time emulation of specialized hardware with 100% coverage has never been straightforward. Massive amounts of extra computing power won't save you from having to do specific calculations with low latencies. I'd say it's been impossible to completely capture arbitrary machines for quite a while now. But in practice you can fudge the differences and emulate with similar amounts of power.
anigbrowl 12y ago
And there's no chance you will from reading this article, since there's no link to the ESA's statement, so the whole article is based on 4 excerpted words. I would find this article much more persuasive if there were a better attempt to establish the content. This is the ESA's position: http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/class%2023/Entertainment_Software_Association_Class23_1201_2014.pdf http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/class%2023/En... I am broadly sympathetic to the EFF's position, but the ESA's argument is a lot more thoughtful and nuanced than the way the EFF is portraying it. I see this happening more and more with the EFF, and I trust their advocacy less and less because of it. It's one thing to be for a particular position, it's another to misrepresent that of your opponent in order to garner support. If you're confident of your position, you shouldn't feel the need to obscure access to primary sources so people can make up their own minds. Oddly, while the EFF has multiple submissions to the copyright office as part of the open rulemaking process, and they're available on the EFF website, I've seen little acknowledgement of the fact the the Copyright Office is conducting a 3 year open rulemaking exercise on this topic, or about the Congressional committee that's re-examining copyright issues. I strongly urge interested parties to draft and submit their own arguments directly to the copyright office, where they will carry much greater weight. http://copyright.gov/rulemaking/ http://copyright.gov/rulemaking/ PS if you're only interested in proposals to add exceptions to the DMCA, they're here: http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/ http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/ and here: http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-020615/ http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-020615/
- revelation 12y ago
  Is it, really? Consequently, contrary to EFF’s assertions, multiplayer gameplay over the Internet is not a “core” functionality of the video game, and permitting circumvention to access such functionality would provide the user greater benefits than those bargained and paid for.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Yes, I think it is. It's a 30 page document with another 3~40 pages of supporting materials, which consider things like the difference between single and multiplayer modes and so forth. Also, the EFF article doesn't even touch on the question of what users are actually buying, but boils the entire position paper down to 'hackers are practically pirates!!' Reading the comments here, I see it's been quite successful as a piece of emotional manipulation :-/
quadrangle 12y ago
Planned obsolescence. If people have old games to play, they can play them instead of new games. All sorts of creative industries have an interest in destroying the public domain because it provides value to the world which thus means less demand for new creations. Nobody wants to admit this, and it is usually not consciously the focus of their copyright arguments (even to themselves), but it's the real source.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  As someone who works in the arts, I disagree. You're assuming a 'lump of attention', in which if attention is paid to public domain work (eg a classic silent movie) some other modern work will have to go unwatched. That's true in the very short term, insofar as most people like to watch one movie at once (or play one game at once, or...adjust as appropriate), but a great deal of cultural work depends for its aesthetic effect on consumers' familiarity with prior work, notwithstanding the fact that one is 'competing' with it. The project I'm developing right now includes a bunch of references to other work, some of which is due to fall into the public domain in a few years, and other work which may or may not be in the public domain (I'm actively following a piece of litigation to find out whether I need to cough up thousands of dollars in licensing fees to have someone sing 'Happy Birthday', for example).
cwyers 12y ago
> None of the games in question are making any money, and the publishers don't expect to make any money in the future on them. I don't know if that's true. Steam, GOG, Nintendo's Virtual Console... there's money being made on publisher back-catalogs these days, and even if the publisher has no current plan to release or support these games, the value of that back catalog is part of the total value of the company at sale or liquidation.
Florin_Andrei 12y ago
It's almost as if intellectual property is becoming something sacred, a moral category, a goal unto itself.
JustSomeNobody 12y ago
My guess is this is just the lazy way to deal with the situation. Instead of working out who can do what with old stuff, the just say no.
shmerl 12y ago
> I don't understand why the ESA cares at all about this. Simple. They are control freaks and have paranoid fear of DRM dying out. That's because DRM + anticircumvention were never about copyright. It's for controlling markets and stifling technological progress.
stonemetal 12y ago
Have you never seen or heard of the Wii virtual console or any of the Sega\Actvision\whoever classics collections? Just because they don't sell them right now or expect to make money on them in the next 20 mins doesn't mean there is no money expected from them in the future. With the current copyright law the future is for fucking ever, and who knows when the next round of nostalgic resurgence is? Just like the Disney vault BS, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
davidgerard 12y ago
Because past products compete with present products. This is why the movie and record industries have been aggressively antihistorical: you can't sell the kids your new crap if they know it's crap.
emodendroket 12y ago
It's absolutely about preserving their ability to resell the games later. Maybe slightly upscaling them so they can charge full-price, but, even if not, think about how many times Nintendo's sold, say, Super Mario Brothers. No coincidence that they've been one of the most aggressive pursuers of people distributing ROMs.
chrismcb 12y ago
It isn't about old games, it is about new ones. They think by giving exceptions to old games it will make it more likely, easier, to give them to new games. Or that people will find it more acceptable.

chongli 12y ago

Their incentive is to keep players buying new games rather than playing old ones.

rosser 12y ago
Exactly. If you're happily playing Abandoned Title III, why would you need to buy New Hotness XXVII? It's pretty much the same kind of thinking that counts each viewing of a pirated movie as lost revenue — nevermind that you can watch a DVD or BD over and over and over, and not get charged each time...
- aetch 12y ago
  Nevermind that going to a theatre to watch a movie over and over would GET charged each time...

DanAndersen 12y ago

It seems more often than not that the incentive is just to sit on the rights to IP, even if you don't plan to do anything with it ever, just because there's no incentive to let things go, and there's some microscopic but non-zero benefit to holding onto IP just in case. I wonder if, instead of having the near-endless wait until public domain, it would be good to have a system of intellectual property that made copyright increasingly expensive to hold year after year, as some function of the total assets of the IP holder. Make it some exponential function, so that after a certain number of years, holding onto the rights to some IP is just too expensive to maintain unless the holders feel they can actually do something good and profitable with the IP (rather than a system that would need to show regular "use", which would incentivize publishing crap to satisfy a regulation).

Shendare 12y ago
That is brilliant. It would solve the Mickey Mouse Protection Act problem as well. If megacorps like Disney want to spend millions keeping Mickey Mouse and friends out of the public domain after 100 years, they're free to do so, without keeping things like The Great Gatsby or the Dewey Decimal System locked up for no good reason.
derekp7 12y ago
The only problem I see is for software that gets new versions periodically. Often times an old version is "good enough", but if it became public domain then it would compete against the newer version. Of course depending on your viewpoint that may not actually be a problem.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  That's how it's supposed to work - if you don't make a better type then people will stick with the old type. It seems in many areas technology has plateaued and so companies have moved to planned obsolescence, which this is just a version of. This just highlights to me that the current economic systems are failing and a paradigm shift is required to allow mankind to make better use of resource. We can make a bucket that will last multiple lifetimes but if you go to the shop you'll find ones that break after a short period of use. Companies are seeking laws to allow them to engineer in obsolescence of copyright works and prevent those who purchased copies of those works from working around that obsolescence. Rather like making cars with closed engine bays and legislating against owners using tools to access the engines for repairs ... no doubt that will come, auto-mobile computers are starting to make car repairs rather like this already.
  - mxfh 12y ago
    There are way to little responsibilities for the copyright holders compared to the rights are able to enforce. Copyrighted works could be treated comparable to undeveloped land if not used. Meaning works currently not being commercially available in a supported medium under reasonable conditions from the rights holder. If available the rights holder may either pay an annual tax (much like land value tax) or release the work into public domain.

malkia 12y ago

Every time there is a new device/platform released, an opportunity arises for old games to make comeback and money to be gained. Whether it's right or wrong to make money off it... I don't know. But I can feel both sides. For example my favourite all time PC game is Heroes of Might and Magic (2 and 3). There is a wonderful "inspired-by" version called PalmHeroes, and then some open source projects (freeheroes and others). And then I won't mind paying for the latest version UbiSoft released for iPad's - and it seems that version was just the DOS version emulated on the iPad (okay, maybe not, but felt that way). But I was satisfied nonetheless. Playing heroes on the iPad is great. Ah well, I don't really have saying in such matters - maybe movies/books can help a bit in this direction. ..... Now one thing that is possibly worrying - is how current games are going to be emulated in the future. It used to be that next-gen games were able to play previous games (PC, console) or emulate them, but PS3/Xbox360 are already hard to emulate on PC (especially PS3) - wondering with even newer consoles... And then that's even minor, what's more worrying if the game relies on external assets/services (fully online games) - then nothing could be done really....

darkmighty 12y ago
You make a very interesting point about emulation. For older consoles emulation was essentially guaranteed by Moore's law (and specifically the frequency scaling that went for a while). For a slowing down Moore's law, may we reach a point where real time emulation of a different architecture is just impossible? (and instead some kind of translation will need to be done, à la wine?) An advantage is that architectures are converging anyway to PC-like instead of exotic stuff like Cell.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_emulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_emulation A lot of emulators work that way, and have for a long time. N64 on a Pentium II with only twice its clock rate, etc. Real time emulation of specialized hardware with 100% coverage has never been straightforward. Massive amounts of extra computing power won't save you from having to do specific calculations with low latencies. I'd say it's been impossible to completely capture arbitrary machines for quite a while now. But in practice you can fudge the differences and emulate with similar amounts of power.

anigbrowl 12y ago

And there's no chance you will from reading this article, since there's no link to the ESA's statement, so the whole article is based on 4 excerpted words. I would find this article much more persuasive if there were a better attempt to establish the content. This is the ESA's position: http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/class%2023/Entertainment_Software_Association_Class23_1201_2014.pdf http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/class%2023/En... I am broadly sympathetic to the EFF's position, but the ESA's argument is a lot more thoughtful and nuanced than the way the EFF is portraying it. I see this happening more and more with the EFF, and I trust their advocacy less and less because of it. It's one thing to be for a particular position, it's another to misrepresent that of your opponent in order to garner support. If you're confident of your position, you shouldn't feel the need to obscure access to primary sources so people can make up their own minds. Oddly, while the EFF has multiple submissions to the copyright office as part of the open rulemaking process, and they're available on the EFF website, I've seen little acknowledgement of the fact the the Copyright Office is conducting a 3 year open rulemaking exercise on this topic, or about the Congressional committee that's re-examining copyright issues. I strongly urge interested parties to draft and submit their own arguments directly to the copyright office, where they will carry much greater weight. http://copyright.gov/rulemaking/ http://copyright.gov/rulemaking/ PS if you're only interested in proposals to add exceptions to the DMCA, they're here: http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/ http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/ and here: http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-020615/ http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-020615/

revelation 12y ago
Is it, really? Consequently, contrary to EFF’s assertions, multiplayer gameplay over the Internet is not a “core” functionality of the video game, and permitting circumvention to access such functionality would provide the user greater benefits than those bargained and paid for.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Yes, I think it is. It's a 30 page document with another 3~40 pages of supporting materials, which consider things like the difference between single and multiplayer modes and so forth. Also, the EFF article doesn't even touch on the question of what users are actually buying, but boils the entire position paper down to 'hackers are practically pirates!!' Reading the comments here, I see it's been quite successful as a piece of emotional manipulation :-/

quadrangle 12y ago

Planned obsolescence. If people have old games to play, they can play them instead of new games. All sorts of creative industries have an interest in destroying the public domain because it provides value to the world which thus means less demand for new creations. Nobody wants to admit this, and it is usually not consciously the focus of their copyright arguments (even to themselves), but it's the real source.

anigbrowl 12y ago
As someone who works in the arts, I disagree. You're assuming a 'lump of attention', in which if attention is paid to public domain work (eg a classic silent movie) some other modern work will have to go unwatched. That's true in the very short term, insofar as most people like to watch one movie at once (or play one game at once, or...adjust as appropriate), but a great deal of cultural work depends for its aesthetic effect on consumers' familiarity with prior work, notwithstanding the fact that one is 'competing' with it. The project I'm developing right now includes a bunch of references to other work, some of which is due to fall into the public domain in a few years, and other work which may or may not be in the public domain (I'm actively following a piece of litigation to find out whether I need to cough up thousands of dollars in licensing fees to have someone sing 'Happy Birthday', for example).

cwyers 12y ago

> None of the games in question are making any money, and the publishers don't expect to make any money in the future on them. I don't know if that's true. Steam, GOG, Nintendo's Virtual Console... there's money being made on publisher back-catalogs these days, and even if the publisher has no current plan to release or support these games, the value of that back catalog is part of the total value of the company at sale or liquidation.

Florin_Andrei 12y ago

It's almost as if intellectual property is becoming something sacred, a moral category, a goal unto itself.

JustSomeNobody 12y ago

My guess is this is just the lazy way to deal with the situation. Instead of working out who can do what with old stuff, the just say no.

shmerl 12y ago

> I don't understand why the ESA cares at all about this. Simple. They are control freaks and have paranoid fear of DRM dying out. That's because DRM + anticircumvention were never about copyright. It's for controlling markets and stifling technological progress.

stonemetal 12y ago

Have you never seen or heard of the Wii virtual console or any of the Sega\Actvision\whoever classics collections? Just because they don't sell them right now or expect to make money on them in the next 20 mins doesn't mean there is no money expected from them in the future. With the current copyright law the future is for fucking ever, and who knows when the next round of nostalgic resurgence is? Just like the Disney vault BS, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

davidgerard 12y ago

Because past products compete with present products. This is why the movie and record industries have been aggressively antihistorical: you can't sell the kids your new crap if they know it's crap.

emodendroket 12y ago

It's absolutely about preserving their ability to resell the games later. Maybe slightly upscaling them so they can charge full-price, but, even if not, think about how many times Nintendo's sold, say, Super Mario Brothers. No coincidence that they've been one of the most aggressive pursuers of people distributing ROMs.

chrismcb 12y ago

It isn't about old games, it is about new ones. They think by giving exceptions to old games it will make it more likely, easier, to give them to new games. Or that people will find it more acceptable.