While in the past doing a reprint of a book, movie or game was expensive and wasn’t worth if something wasn’t popular, now selling something on a digital store has only a small initial cost (writing descriptions and graphics) and after that there’s nothing more. So why publishers are giving up on free money?
I thought to those delisting reasons:
-
Artificial scarcity. The publisher wants to artificially drive more sales by saying that’s a limited time sale. For example that collection that included sm64. super Mario Galaxy and super Mario sunshine on switch. The greedy publisher essentially said “you only have 6 months to get this game, act now” and people immediately acted like "wow, better pay $60 for this collection of 3 old games, otherwise they’ll be gone forever!” otherwise they would have been like “uhm, i liked super Mario sunshine but $60 for a 20 years old game? I’ll think about that”
-
Rights issues. For books the translation rights are often granted for a limited time; same for music in games; or if it’s using a certain third party intellectual property. Publisher might decide that the cost for renewing the license is too high compared to projected sales, while the copyright owner instead still wants an unrealistic amount of money in a lump sum instead of just royalties. Example is Capcom DuckTales remastered, delisted because Disney is Disney.
-
Not worth their time. Those sales need to be reported to governments to pay taxes and for a few sales, small publishers might prefer to close business rather to pay all the accounting overhead. Who’s going to buy Microsoft Encarta 99?
-
Controversial content: there are many instances of something that was funny decades ago but now is unacceptable. Publisher doesn’t want to be associated with that anymore
-
Compatibility issues. That game relied on a specific Windows XP quirk, assumed to always run as admin, writing their saves on system32, and doesn’t work on anything newer. The code has been lost and they fired all the devs two weeks after the launch, so they’re unable to patch it.
In all those cases (maybe except 5), the publisher and the copyright owners decided together to give up their product, so it should be legally allowed to pirate those products.
If I want to read a book that has been pulled from digital stores and is out of print, the only way to do is:
- Piracy (publisher gets $0 from me)
- Library (publisher gets $0 from me)
- Buying it from an ebay scalper that has a “near mint” edition for $100 (publisher gets $0 from me)
And say that I really want to play super Mario sunshine. Now the only way is to buy it used, even if they ported it to their latest game console and it would literally cost them nothing to continue selling it. But if I buy it used, Nintendo gets the exact same amount of money that they would if I downloaded it with an “illegal” torrent.
In short: they don’t want the money for their IP? Then people that want to enjoy that IP should be legally allowed to get it for free
How about:
If a item isn’t available for sale, the copyright is abandoned and now public domain.
The items would just be kept on sale at hugely inflated prices
Would still be better than today in my opinion
I’m sure we could legislate in such a way that says if it’s purposely priced artificially high to prevent sales, then the same IP abandonment applies.
No you couldn’t, unless you enact government controlled prices for all media.
Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.
we do this for standards and patents: for a patent to form part of a standard, it must be granted on fair and reasonable, non-discriminatory grounds
it’s different in that the party is entering into that agreement voluntarily, however we use language like “fair and reasonable” already
And you can, in fact, regulate market prices.
But that doesn’t make it feasible or convenient. Is a 250 USD collector’s edition from Limited Run on a game that originally cost 15 bucks “fair and reasonable”? I mean, they sell. People buy them. People buy them even when the cheaper option is still available.
Digital goods have wildly diverging prices. Laws take intent into account all the time, but how do you take intent into account on something that is agreed upon via supply and demand if your goal is to guarantee supply?
People are being too simplistic here and assuming that things are either copyrighted or on the public domain, which is already not how this works. You don’t need to set a killswitch for public domain transition based on whether something is being monetized, just a fair scenario for unmonetized redistribution. If you make it so people sharing and privately copying things at their own cost is fine but selling is reserved for the copyright holder it doesn’t matter how the holder prices things. Plus that’s in practice already how we all operate anyway.
It seems to me that any legislation could easily carve out an exemption for any special editions, only applying to the “regular” version.
No it couldn’t “easily” do that because legislation can’t predict every single time a product is going to be brought to market and make exceptions for every time a sales person comes up with a way to license or sell a thing.
Laws work best when they are general principles that can be applied to a wide swath of scenarios via interpretation. People just look at a thing they don’t like and want laws to… you know, stop that kinda thing. But that’s not how it really works, at least when it’s working well. Even the current copyright is guilty of this to some extent, having been designed to effectively ensure that only the original author can profit from selling printed copies of their books and then being beaten into a bloody pulp by the realization that the content of a creative work and its medium are different things.
But at least the core principle behind it was workable initially, the idea of tying copyright to something being available for sale is fundamentally a nonstarter. I mean, I sure hope if I write a story and don’t make it widely available until I sell it to an editor it doesn’t mean that anybody with a copy of it could just share it or sell it themselves just because I’m not making it available. That doesn’t seem like a great idea, fundamentally.
Is a 250 USD collector’s edition from Limited Run on a game that originally cost 15 bucks “fair and reasonable”? I mean, they sell. People buy them. People buy them even when the cheaper option is still available.
well that’s an easy one - you can have whatever price you like for a collectors edition, as long as some edition of the game continues to be offered at or around the original price (or perhaps average unit sale price) that the game was sold at
again, we sometimes do this for housing in australia in some areas - you can build a luxury apartment block as long as you have a certain amount of affordable housing mixed with it
People are being too simplistic here and assuming that things are either copyrighted or on the public domain
i think perhaps you’re misreading what people are saying. copyright is an important tool to ensure people get paid for their creative works, and that investment gets put into such projects however the point of copyright is not to make people money - money is itself a tool to maximise the goods and services available. the point is to maximise the availability of goods and services.
i think it’s pretty easy to have a law that days if the work is not available for consumption, it loses at least some of the protections of the copyright system to ensure others can make it available for consumption in some way
based on whether something is being monetized, just a fair scenario for unmonetized redistribution. If you make it so people sharing and privately copying things at their own cost is fine but selling is reserved for the copyright holder it doesn’t matter how the holder prices things
i think now we’re kind of agreeing - im not sure that anyone is arguing that monetisation itself is the trigger - the availability of the product to the average (or perhaps original target) group on fair terms is the trigger
It is, very much, not “an easy one”. You’re describing a regulated market, which is what I said above. Housing is regulated aggressively almost everywhere, and the scheme you describe would require a centralized control over how much people are allowed to raise prices to match inflation for games.
And, as mentioned many times already, it doesn’t work with microtransactions or free to play games and it incentivizes setting a very high launch price to work around the limitation of using launch pricing as a benchmark for a product’s entire lifetime.
Also, no, I don’t think I’m misunderstanding what people are saying. It’s definitely not easy to tie “availability” to copyright protection. Which is why in the real world the way copyrights sometimes get extinguished has more to do with enforcement than availability. People ARE arguing that something being up for sale should be the trigger instead, but this is very hard to manage, very hard to trigger and doesn’t come even close to fitting all the ways things are marketed.
I think this is a very, very hard problem to fix, but if you made me try, I’d argue that a deep reform should enable copyright exceptions regardless of whether something is up for sale. I don’t even know why people here are so fixated with that element. The exclusive right should not be about copying a thing, it should be about selling or profiting from a thing. Not copyright, but sale right.
I’m not aware of an instance when media like movies or games would grow in price in time (except for on second hand market due to scarcity). So could be worded so the price might not be higher than on the time of the release or something
If this thread is proving something is that policymaking is very difficult.
That doesn’t work either, things don’t have a single price point in modern media, and it’d be easy to just do what some games are already doing where you give people early access for extra money and save yourself from being price locked later.
Plus, how do you price out subscriptions and free to play games with MTX? Not every individual piece of media has a price, but a lot of dead media comes from broadcast, subscriptions and other nonstandard arrangements.
You guys are too fixated in the scenario where publishers hike prices to retain copyright without actually distributing the content. It’s not as big of a loophole as you think and the idea of tying copyright to a thing being actively sold has bigger problems than that.
No, as we already have a market price for new games. We also have differing prices for differing versions already.
If you’re selling an older less popular or less critically acclaimed game for higher than what newer games with reasonable sales are selling at, then you’re clearly manipulating the market.
We don’t have to micromanage the market. We can set in place mechanisms to make sure it’s efficient and is a true market.
Do we? Could have fooled me. The games I played this week ranged from free to 90 bucks, including 5, 15, 20 and 39. And I used the 250 limited edition example because I had the Virtua Fighter collector’s edition they announced on the TGAs in a cart before I thought better of it.
So I have no idea what the “market price for new games” is supposed to be.
Apparently whatever the person you replied to feels it is supposed to be. Something something common sense.
Command: Modern Operations - All DLC on steam about $150 https://steamdb.info/bundle/12584/
Command: Modern Operations - Multiplayer server, plus live satellight feeds, plus more api access… starting at $60,000 a year…
[http://ftp.us.matrixgames.com/pub/CommandPro/US Mil Licence Types with Pricing.pdf](Professional Edition) … Paradoxically you can tell its really military grade because its a unencrypted ftp server linked to a slide from a power point document
Same game, same engine - different markets (gamers vs real war planners)
have you ever tried to buy out of print media online?
What about it?
I like the alternative better of “support or opensource it” as it can be expanded to nearly any product. You stop selling your game and thus don’t provide support to those that bought it? Better opensource that shit bud. You made some dropship product that sold 100k units but stop supporting it a year later because $reasons? Tough shit, opensource it bucko!
Things like Amazon’s Astro business robots being bricked after a year would be much less interesting to companies. There are probably also a whole lot of devices out there that aren’t supported anymore and just junk, but could be serviced if they were opensource.
I really like the idea, Im currently struggling with the implementation. There are so many issues to cover:
- who enforces the law? It needs to be worldwide (at least for some products)
- how are mergers handled?
- what to do if the company goes bancrupt or is closed otherwises? Who will outsource the code where? And who will be accountable
- does that also count for private people? (e.g.: if I take a picture, I own the copyright for it, do I lose my copyright if I don’t sell the picture? Or does it only count if I sold it once? What if I sold it exclusively to someone?)
- probably more
There are so many loopholes which corps will use to get out of it :-(
yeah the concept is great, but open sourcing often takes a lot of work. closed source code often relies on proprietary libraries etc and you can’t just publish them, or perhaps there are secrets embedded somewhere - even it source control history
the concept is great, the implementation faces some pretty big logical challenges
yeah the concept is great, but open sourcing often takes a lot of work
Why do you say that?
closed source code often relies on proprietary libraries etc
I don’t see how that matters. If you write code that depends on something and opensource it, your product might not be buildable/compilable/usable without it, but your code is still opensource, and that’s what matters. The same thing will go for the library: if the person/company that made the library stops supporting it, it has to become opensource as well.
or perhaps there are secrets embedded somewhere - even it source control history
That’s up to you to clean it up. It’s just like publishing any repository online.
yeah the concept is great, but open sourcing often takes a lot of work
Why do you say that?
because i’ve been involved in open sourcing products and libraries on many occasions
closed source code often relies on proprietary libraries etc
I don’t see how that matters. If you write code that depends on something and opensource it, your product might not be buildable/compilable/usable without it, but your code is still opensource, and that’s what matters.
that’s not the way a lot of these things goes - especially when you start to talk about hardware. lots of times there are NDAs around even the interfaces to their libraries.
or sometimes there’s things called “vendored” code, where the library is included with the source. sometimes that’s easy to pick apart, but sometimes it’s not, sometimes someone’s copied and changed code from the library and barely documented what’s been done
code is often very messy. it’s easy to say ugh what shit devs! but that’s the reality, and we all write code sometimes that we look back on in a year and think it should have been a crime
or perhaps there are secrets embedded somewhere - even it source control history
That’s up to you to clean it up. It’s just like publishing any repository online.
that’s what i’m saying - it’s not like open sourcing is free. open sourcing software has a cost. people asked above different questions about eg who does that when a company has gone bankrupt?
i’ll add my own: how do you ensure a company doesn’t skimp on the dev time to open source, and accidentally release a secret that opens vulnerabilities in devices that people still use? like a signing key
who enforces the law?
There are many ways to solve this, but you could have a regulatory body that does spot checks itself or where companies must register their products and their end of life / end of support dates with links (or whatever the law stipulates) to the source code, schematics, designs, etc. . Companies that don’t abide by it get slapped with a fine (if the law is well-written it’s a percentage of global revenue), repeatedly, until they are taken to court.
It needs to be worldwide (at least for some products)
Doesn’t have to. Any goods imported into a zone have to fulfill it, otherwise they are not allowed. There many regulations for products to be imported, so this would be one of them. If some small country introduced it, they might see their imports drop, but if the EU introduced it, even Apple would have to abide by it. See EU’s Digital Markets Act or the CE Marking.
how are mergers handled?
I’d assume the way they always are? If the end result is a product being discontinued or unsupported --> opensource.
what to do if the company goes bancrupt or is closed otherwises? Who will outsource the code where? And who will be accountable
Not sure why this would be different from current proceedings. When your company goes bankrupt it doesn’t wipe the slate clean, nor are you absolved of all laws. If that were the case then a company could kill people, wave the bankrupt “get out of jail free” card and move on.
This is also where insurances come in. You’d have to be insured against the loss of your product designs, code, schematics, etc. as losing them would mean inability to abide by the law.does that also count for private people? (e.g.: if I take a picture, I own the copyright for it, do I lose my copyright if I don’t sell the picture? Or does it only count if I sold it once? What if I sold it exclusively to someone?)
I would ask back: if you sell something on ebay that you designed and made, do you legally have provide support for it? If not, then this wouldn’t apply to you. If it does, then the law applies to you.
I don’t think you need to put something in the public domain immediately. And obviously that would immediately destroy any protections for physical media (in that the moment a physical book is published and sold through it immediately becomes “not available for sale”).
But you can make exceptions for free distribution that work both online and physically. Libraries existed long before the Internet did. You can enable private distribution of free copies without fully removing the right of the copyright holder to own an exclusive right to sell an item, which is fundamentally different than something being in the public domain.
I’m fine with you being able to sell a copy of the Iliad but not one of Metal Gear Solid 4. That’s not to say putting a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4 up for download should be illegal.
that the moment a physical book is published and sold through it immediately becomes “not available for sale”
Because that specific book now has a new owner who can keep it or sell it as they see fit. Like people still do with physical games.
If you mean that a book becomes generally unavailable when it’s between printings, though, you’re wrong.
Publishers overlap print runs and begin selling the first paperbacks before they’ve sold out the initial hard cover prints PRECISELY to avoid the situation you seem to think happens with every single book.
You’re missing the point, though. The concern copyright has isn’t the physical book. If we were operating on physical books we would be fine with 20th century copyright.
The concern is the difference between the physical book and the contents of the book. You can make a book and send it off into the world as a physical object and have no new copies being printed while that book remains physically stocked in stores where you can go buy it.
What happens to that book in the interim? Is it okay to republish the contents of the book?
And yeah, sure, media that is constantly selling often has multiple prints. This scenario still happens when they stop making new prints, though, since some stock won’t have sold through. And plenty of media is made on limited runs, too. Monthly magazines, collector’s editions…
Hell, what happens to movies once they are out of cinemas and not printed in physical media or available for streaming in your scenario? Do you give up copyright if there isn’t an overlap? That seems harsh. TV shows that are broadcast once live but not available on streaming or physical media until the season is over?
Also, somebody below raises a great point: what happens to the copyright of things not commercialized by companies? If you make a picture and don’t sell it, does that mean I can use it? Sell it myself? Because people around here seem… not okay with that one.
Careful what you wish for- with cheaper storagesolutions and advance in ai someday it might come true. How about a limit ln copyright for say at most 20 years like for medicine ip? It is sick medias copyrights can be held in practical perpetuity.
A few weeks ago there was this article posted here about why some game companies are trying so hard to kill their old video games and give 0 shits about preservation (as in delisting them from stores, not selling them anymore, etc.).
One of the answers given by the publishers in the article basically boils down to “old, preserved games would compete with the newer ones and eat into their sales”, which does say quite a lot - they don’t care about losing sales of older video games, all that matters is the sales of the newer ones, preservation be damned.
Alongside this comment was an equally damning comment: “if your past games are competing with your new games then your new games aren’t worth buying in the first place.”
It also somewhat says they know the new games are nowhere near as good as the good ol’ ones, which is one of the big reasons to pirate older stuff.
Additional opinion: piracy is always morally good if the reason for your piracy is inability to buy something. That includes when the item is delisted, as in the OP, but also when you can’t afford it.
[I agree with the OP by the way. Specificities should be ironed out, but in spirit it would be a good law.]
If it’s not for sale any more it I don’t even consider it piracy. It’s abandonware and thus free for all.
If I can’t buy it, and own it, for a reasonable price - Piracy is acceptable. Copyright holders are required to sell/license their product in an accessible and reasonable manner in order to assert their copyright over consumers.
If I can’t legally obtain a copy for a period of time longer than a year - Piracy is acceptable. Withholding copyrighted products to make them artificially scarce or to manipulate sales of other products is the same as the previous scenario; it is a failing to sell your product in an accessible manner.
If the only manner of sale is ‘a streaming license of the content’ - Piracy is acceptable. If I cannot go to any retailer and buy a physical copy legitimately, expect users to ignore unreasonable terms of sale to access their content in a format of their choosing. This physically sold copy may be reasonably more expensive than the digital license edition; but not over significantly in excess of the cost of box/media/cover art. Make a profit; not a mint.
If the only version of physical media is over-encumbered with Rights Management or other digital restrictions - Piracy is acceptable. Sold physical copies must be playable on any compatible device as determined by the media format with minimal exceptions. We shouldn’t need to connect our BluRay players to the internet every month to pull fresh certs down and lose the ability to play new BluRays when the player runs out of cert storage or becomes unsupported.
Let’s be real, this should extend even beyond piracy.
History is full of examples of companies buying patents for good innovations and intentionally burying them because they compete with or are too similar to the company’s offerings.
Think about that - literal pieces of human innovation, steps in the ever-evolving game of technological development… just buried for no reason other than because some company thought they’d make more money without it and had the capital to force the situation.
It’s gross.
We as a people should absolutely reject the idea that which has been brought into our world through the creativity of humanity should be able to erased by the greed of monsters.
Free knowledge, free humanity.
Think about that - literal pieces of human innovation, steps in the ever-evolving game of technological development… just buried for no reason other than because some company thought they’d make more money without it and had the capital to force the situation
in defense, if the patent was better, it would’ve been used, otherwise it’s going to be about the same as the existing patent.
Really the only crime here is removing innovation from the open market. And bringing it into the closed market, Which is, less than ideal.
I have a better idea. Define piracy as profiting off of the creative work of another without compensation. Piracy for personal use is theft only in the amount it was offered for sale. For torrenting it could be argued you have stolen 1 copy plus your seed ratio. However, lots of content isn’t even available for legal purchase, only subscription for viewing. Owning a copy of this content is not piracy because it did not interfere with the sale of the item (since it’s not offered for sale). Therefore, an act of media preservation is theft by this definition, but the amount or value of that theft is $0, because it’s not currently offered for sale.
personally i like to think of piracy as dissemination of illegal copies for personal gain.
Remember that in the US (whose laws have been extended by trade agreement through most of the world), intellectual property laws are To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts according to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (or the Copyright Clause of the Constitution of the United States
(Europe has older stuff based on guild secrets and has had literal wars waged over things like cloth buttons vs. brass buttons)
Since we have a long list of instances now in which Science and useful Arts have been inhibited or simply robbed from their developers (case in point Charles Goodyear) within the current system, we might get better art and science without any IP law at all rather than trying to reform the system we have, which is used entirely to control and inhibit progress.
And the efforts by software publishers to inhibit the archival of old games, and the effort of book publishers to eliminate libraries are only the latest examples of how IP is only an instrument of oppression in the 21st century, and has been pretty much since Disney.
When you pirate, you’re not stealing from the developers or authors or creators. You’re stealing from the shareholders, and they are already fat and marbled.
So fuck intellectual property rights.
So how is stopkillinggames.com doing?
We still need massive support for the EU initiative.
Yes we do
Yet another opinion. Everything published goes into public domain, copyright only gives commercial (and public?) distribution rights
My Hypothetical Policy would be:
If a thing doesn’t show up in a store for a time totaling 5 years, it should be able to be freely copied without repercussion.
So if you publish a thing, you need to keep selling it. Once you pause the sales, timer starts to tick, until you resume sales (in good faith, no intentionally limiting quantities of items), whenever you pause sales again, timer begins to tick again, once the 5 year timer is up, no more protections.
And theres also the normal copyright expiration to factor in as well. (Which I think should be somewhere around 10-20 years after initial publication, no extensions)
I think this is quite a fair policy.
Edit: Also, they can’t set the price to more than 150% of the average pricing of the item. (Almost forgot this loophole of intentionally “selling” the item at high prices but not actually wanting to continue selling)
Lots of impractical wishful thinking in this one. Laws don’t work very well when you have to add “but you need to be nice about it”.
This is a very hard problem to solve for that reason, but in fairness, it’s not like the current implementation tries very hard or is working very well. It’s just that finding a working solution would be hard even if that wasn’t the case.
I don’t think that a random person on Lemmy is going to be able to write a law that has zero issues. They’re just suggesting an example and government should build on that and make it complete.
Yeah, of course. Writing laws is hard.
Which is my point.
This one is way harder than average, if anything.
legally allowed
pirated
😑
It’s hard to get this right, but I do think the system needs fundamental reform.
I think the principle that only the copyright holder is able to profit from the media for a period of time is pretty sound, although there are also questions about creatives having no say in the copyright of the things they create if they are working for a corporation, which I also think need adjustment.
The real issue is what happens to other types of distribution. In practice, private non-profit use of media is already commonplace and bans aren’t particularly enforceable. And then there is the derivative use, that is inconsistently supported and held to weird, arbitrary standards created ad-hoc for a handful of big platforms.
By the letter of the law, Google is by far the biggest pirate on the planet, it’s just so big that unwritten rules have been created about it and now effectively the global copyright law has more to do with Google’s detection algorithms than any kind of enforcement. We clearly need a better alternative.
ok whatever you think.
I think having a sense of entitlement to any IP is wrong by default. That’s not to say that there’s no merit in conservation efforts, but just have the balls to say you want something for no other reason than you wanting it and stop pretending there’s some form of universal right at play. Be honest about when your selfishness makes you want to bend the law. The value of laws is subjective and so is morality. Period.
