Disney made its millions (Billions?) off of public domain stories…say that out loud, they made their money by taking public domain stories and turning them into animated movies, and now don’t want their animated movies to hit the public domain.
that all by itself is a good reason for shorter copy write protections.
Does copyright extension laws get much press? You would think that powerful corporations like Disney and Warner Bros lobby congress to change laws that benefit their bottom line at the expense of the public would garner more attention.
How old is this game? What happens if the creators of the game, or the copyright holders decide to make a Commodore-64 game collection for the PSP or sell it through through Nintendo’s Virtual Console? Bootlegging it decreases demand for the legal copy and the creators lose potential sales.
With the internet, everyone wants everything, and wants it now. Before if you wanted to listen to some unreleased songs or rare singles from a musician, you would wait until they put out a B-Sides and rarities collection. Now people justify downloading it for free because they can’t buy it or it’s currently out-of-print. There’s now less incentive and/or decreased potential profits for the artist to put out a legit version or even re-release.
Then again I can see your point with a more extreme example like Murnau’s Nosferatu film. If it weren’t for bootleggers, that masterpiece of German cinema would have been lost due to copyright holders of the time having all copies of the film destroyed.
I don’t necessarily agree that there’s a viable market. If there was, someone would have licensed the game from the copyright owners and published it. Why don’t you take on this noble project?
The problem with this analogy is there are legal ways for someone living in New Zealand to purchase/acquire a Twinkie bar (like purchasing them online and having them delivered, or buying them while visiting Canada where they’re still being made and bringing them back to NZ with them.)
…irrelevant. Substitute Twinkies for Pizzo’s or Kettle Crunch Cheese and Onion Chips that are no longer made and the point stands: copyright has not destroyed the video game market.
That’s exactly right. The marketplace is the marketplace for all works, including substitutes. No one should expect the right to consume any particular work if that work’s owners choose to take it off the market. Any educational, political, and other public interest purposes are taken care of by fair use.
Although the specifics of the proposal are impractical - basing a fee on previous earnings would be easy for large corporations, but often impossible for individuals, and I can’t see what the justification for that is anyway - it does seem to me that there is some scope for improvement in existing copyright laws. The lifetime of youngest creator and minimum of twenty years law makes intuitive sense to me.
‘Asserting your copyright’ by not letting it go unpublished also makes sense, although five years seems too short and it should include publishing in any sense - ie it wouldn’t be ok to make your own blu-ray just because it’s only available on dvd.
Aren’t there laws against importing foods without a specific licence, or does it apply only to fresh produce? I know someone who was fined for taking an orange into australia.
I don’t think this counters Blakeyrat’s point. It’s just a side effect of reducing the length of time of copyright. His point being that nothing is being done with the content, no reason to lock it up for that long, and I agree with that point.
As a side-note, it’s a funny example because this just happened with one of my video games from the early 80’s. A person wanted to re-create it recently for a different platform and this got me interested in playing my own game, so I had to download illegal copies to do that (I found a floppy in the garage but the computer doesn’t even exist anymore and the floppy was probably no good). (here’s a link of the port Team Pixelboy Official Web Site : Module Man).
It may be hard to set up a practical fee schedule. Percent of revenue wouldn’t work in the case of, for example, commercials. (The copyright owner doesn’t earn money directly for an ad, instead pays to televise it.) And fixed fees would be insignificant for valuable works, yet prohibitive for lesser personal works.
Intellectual property rights are a complicated issue, but the key first step is to realize that the underlying intent of such laws is to benefit society.
An example I like is Winnie-the-Pooh. It is good that copyright laws encouraged A. A. Milne to create his characters and wonderful poems and books. It was fair that his widow get some additional royalties a few decades later. But where does one draw the line? It has been nearly 60 years since any relative of Milne received a royalty for these works. There are plenty of artists who would like to create their own Piglet dolls or movies about Eeyore, but they cannot: Disney owns Winnie. This serves the interest of Disney stockholders, but how does it serve the public interest? (If you reply that Disney “deserves” its “property”, do know that the rights to this property were created by the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, sometimes nicknamed The Mickey Mouse Protection Act.)
I see what you’re saying that the market “Commodore 64 video games” still exists, fair enough.
But that ignores the original intent of copyright, which was to benefit society. If games like Parallax disappear from existence, because it’s illegal to copy them long after all legitimate copies of the product have become unusable, how does that benefit society?
That said, Parallax is probably a bad example because it was published by a major publisher of games at the time, and you could probably trace its actual ownership without too much difficulty. Imagine a game where the original creators are now bankrupt, and haven’t existed for decades. Or the Mystery Science Theater 3000 example, where they move heaven and earth trying to figure out who owns the copyright to the movie Pumaman, and they can’t find them?
I would say that if the international treaty does not take into account this type of situation, then it’s flawed and should be changed.
See my example at end of last page
Another way being in the public domain is useful is through derivative works.
Best example I can think of: Robin Hood. We’ve had plenty of Robin Hood movies made. Some crap ones, sure. But some really awesome ones, too.
Imagine if a popular franchise like Star Wars were in the public domain. We might have someone make a good star wars movie(and undoubtedly some bad ones, sure).
Or imagine if the Stoker family still owned the concept of a vampire? Oh, sure, you could have blood sucking monsters in movies, but you couldn’t call them vampires.
All of those disney movies we love? Dang near every one of them reproduced from public domain works. Including Robin Hood.
I’m a writer, and I wanted to include lyrics in a story for a contest from a song written in 1958. I think it’s ridiculous that I have to dance around a pop song everyone has heard and was sent out into space on Voyager 1 on a golden disc, but for legality reasons I have to edit around the full lyrics losing some of my story’s “punch” so as to try to dance around a 50+ year old song.
As an artist if more was in the public domain, it would certainly prove a richer creative environment if copyright was a reasonable amount of time. Reasonable means “quite a bit shorter than it is now”. So speak for yourself when you say no content creators would support a shorter copyright length.
Trust me on this: your life has been made that much richer. 
Seriously though, information has different properties. There’s virtually no cost to making another copy of an additional game, so denying it to me serves no purpose. And in the context of books, maintaining copyright protection for texts that have been out of print for decades serves no purpose either.
Twinkies and physical products are different. If you value a twinkie at $1, you won’t be able to get one: the costs of delivery exceed your benefits. But if you valued it at $50, there wouldn’t be a problem.
I think your points about rule of law and proper procedure apply though. I’m just pointing out that the status quo fails on efficiency grounds and that copyright deserves careful reform.
News:
Cory Doctorow calls on his fans to call their Congressmen and “support the sensible-yet-extraordinary copyright reform memo put out by the Republican Study Committee Friday night.” The author of the memo is Derek Khanna, a staffer in his 20s.
In the back of my mind is the concept “Opening Salvo”. Presumably the staffer proposed 12 years, knowing that the actual period would be longer.
In terms of fees, presumably the percentages in the memo could apply to future revenue: they would work like a withholding tax. That might be easier to administer.
I’ve (unpopularly) said before I believe the copyright term for individuals should be life of the author plus 20 years or so, and for computer entertainment software it should expire after 15 years or so if nothing has been done with the game’s IP in that time.
The problem with computer games is that unlike books (which can be periodically republished without too much effort) or movies (periodically re-released on new formats with minimal effort for the most part), getting old computer games to play on new systems can simply be more trouble than it’s worth - especially if the ownership of the copyright is uncertain.
Generally I believe they only apply to fresh food, meat, and dairy stuff. But check with the Quarantine people first and if you’re not sure, definitely declare it. FWIW I’ve never had any trouble bringing confectionery into Australia (or NZ).
I would say a flat number of years. I’m fine with anything between 20 and 40.
I disagree with those who are saying Life + X. Copying stuff, and building on it, is how we’ve got to where we are; both in technology and the arts.
You own your idea but not the right to stop anyone building upon it.
Society makes a contract with you and artificially stops anyone from copying your idea just to encourage creativity, and I’m fine with it being for a limited time.
Here’s the thing—copyright protections don’t stop anyone from building on your idea. They stop people from copying your expression. And this is a huge, huge distinction.
Disney’s copyrights don’t stop anyone from using their ideas or building on them. Anyone can adapt the stories of Cinderella, Snow White, Pocahontas, the Little Mermaid, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Anyone can, and they routinely do. They find their own creative expressions.
What they’re stopped from doing is copying Disney’s specific expression—the specific drawings of their characters, voices, etc. This is not a loss to society or culture. In fact, it’s a benefit. We get something different, because anyone who wants to copy Disney’s ideas is allowed to do so, but they must do it with different expression.
Take the example of Dracula. Leaving aside the fact that Dracula is now in the public domain, let’s look at what it represents—a vampire story. We have an explosion of creativity in the realm of vampire stories. And the fact that every new writer of a vampire story can’t just rip off Anne Rice’s Lestat characters pushes the creation of works towards more creativity, not less—more variety, more competition, more benefit to society.
As to what happened with Nosferatu, I’ll say that there might be several criticisms—such as the remedy or the determination of substantial similarity. The Nosferatu situation doesn’t say to me that Bram Stoker’s work shouldn’t have been protected.
On the question of music—chord progressions underlying pop tunes are by themselves are not protected.
Once upon a time, I composed logic puzzles professionally and thought it would be fun to base them on the same seven characters: Sneezy, Grumpy, etc. My editor informed me that this was not an option: “Disney Corp. had too many lawyers.” Justice deferred by fear of lawyers is justice denied.
IANAL and have no idea whether your claim is correct or not, Acsenray. But can you point to non-Disney non-royalty uses of Snow White or Little Mermaid, etc.?