That’s the thing- no-one is arguing that there shouldn’t be any copyright on games. Just that the current “Forever” is way too long and has led to the unintended consequence of games quickly falling into the Dark Pit Of Obscurity due to reasons outlined several times in the thread.
Oakminster, do you know much about computer games and the gaming industry? It’s really not the same as books or movies or TV.
Take your fence example. Yes, (generic) you’ve built the fence on your property and it’s “yours”. It’s a physical object (in that if you have the fence, then someone else doesn’t) and it’s also performing a useful function for you.
Let’s say the fence is so useful you charge your neighbour a fee for the fence, paid monthly, in lieu of splitting the costs for the fence (It’s an expensive fence for this hypothetical). Now, as long as you’re living at that house, it sort of makes sense.
But, a few years later, you sell the house and move. And still expect your neighbour to pay you a monthly kickback for the use of the fence. Which you no longer own or have any use for whatsoever (and, coincidentally, has long been paid off). And many years later, your neighbour retires and moves to somewhere tropical, and their son and his wife and children move in. And they’re still expected to pay a monthly kickback for a 30 year old fence built as part of an agreement between someone who doesn’t live in their new house anymore, by someone who no longer lives where the fence is, has no interest in the fence whatsoever, and the fence is now falling apart from old age and is in serious need of refurbishment but can’t be fixed because you happen to have fond memories of that fence and think it’s just fine the way it is, even though A) it’s not and B) You have nothing to do with that fence anymore and haven’t for decades anyway
You see how silly that situation is? That’s why copyright for things with a short shelf-life (primarily Entertainment Software) where the person who originally created it and no longer has anything to do with it (and hasn’t for a long time) should, IMHO, be significantly shortened.
The fence example doesn’t work, because I sold the fence when I sold the house. I didn’t have to do that. I could have torn the fence down and had a bonfire, local fire codes permitting.
With intellectual property, I can choose to sell or retain my rights. If I sell them, the new owner can do as he pleases with my former property. If I chose to retain them, then you can purchase existing, legitimate copies, you can persuade me to allow some new form of publication, or you can do without. In my view, the mere fact that you want something that belongs to me does not mean I have to give it to you.
I have a certain piece of furniture in my house. It has now been handed down for three generations. It is mine. It is not for sale. Period. If you try to take it from me, I will fight you. Most people are not going to take that stand on most items, be they physical or virtual. I think your main problem in this thread is identifying who has the rights to the games you want. In most cases, if you offered a reasonable payment, I suspect they’d be willing to work something out with you. Hell, other than that particular piece of furniture, certain pictures, and a very few other items, you can buy anything in my house for the right price. But you’re never going to get the special item. Not while I’m breathing. After then, you’ll need to talk to my brother, or his sons if he has any. They may feel differently.
The difference is that once you sell that piece of furniture, it’s not yours anymore and you can’t enjoy it since it is (presumably) no longer in your house.
Which is different from a game, where someone can make digital copies which are identical in every way to the “original”, and nobody is deprived of the original.
Intellectual Property and Physical Property just aren’t comparable anymore in the modern age, and it’s only going to get more complicated once someone invents a functioning molecular replicator and pretty much anything can be perfectly copied for next to nothing.
You keep mixing unlike things. A fence is tangible personal property and/or a fixture on the land and as such is subject to traditional property rights. The idea of a book, a song, or a computer game (not the phsical medium they are stored on) isn’t a tangible thing, so the laws governing tangible objects do not apply.
Copyright law does apply. And under copyright law, the right to control distribution is part of the bundle of rights protected. Intellectual property is still property. The argument that “I can copy it and use it but you still have it” is flawed, because it ignores the right to control distribution.
Basically, the argument against copyright, or for weakened copyright, as applied to computer games, music, etc. boils down to “I really want something that does not belong to me, so I should have it. Fuck whoever legally owns that property”. I disagree with that notion very strongly.
Because I don’t think it’s a right, or at least not a right god-given unto perpetuity.
I think that a person has the right to choose not to distribute their work, and that they may retain that right unto perpetuity. Nobody can make you sell your stuff and if you don’t nobody has the right to take it from you and hand it around.
I think that a person has the right to collect profit for the use/enjoyment of their work, possibly unto perpetuity. I’m not nearly as certain that this right is salable, though; if somebody ‘sells the rights’ to their work it may merely be a legal artifice, when actually the person has merely collected all their profits for their work in advance and that’s the end of it. I’m willing to sustain an artificial monopoly on ‘sold rights’ to encourage creation, but I don’t really see it as a natural right.
I do not think that a person has the right to get the horses back into the barn. Once they’ve started selling their stuff to the general public, they have explicitly and implicitly stated that the general public has the right to use the property if the creator gets his payment. I do not see the creator as having the right to steal this right back from the general public; once published is always published, to me.
Why do you insist that has something to do with the conversation? Again; the people who do the work have no say in how or if it is distributed. When you defend present copyright law, you aren’t defending the principle you appear to think you are.
And that presumes such a right actually exists of course.
It DOES have EVERYTHING to do with the conversation. You have tried to draw some moral distinction between the person that actually created a particular work, and the person that currently holds the legal rights to that work. I make no such distinctions. I do not care if it was a work for hire (you do understand what those are, don’t you?), the author retains his rights, or if the author sold his rights to a third party.
WHOEVER owns the rights to a particular work is currently, and should remain, protected by copyright laws.
You keep wanting to just hand wave away any objection to being able to take other people’s stuff, without permission, and do whatever you want with it. That is not the law.
Then you throw away any plausible claim that this is about the rights of the creator. The idea that the legal holder of the rights over some creation is an arbitrary legal declaration, not some moral principle.
No, I want to change the law to allow that, in large part because I don’t think that it IS “their stuff” by any moral standard. It’s only “their stuff” in this case because the government has arbitrarily defined rights over a work as something that can be bought and sold. And the reason it did that in the first place was to encourage people to disseminate their creations instead of sitting on them; if that isn’t working then the law needs to be changed so it works as intended.
Without the efforts of the author/creator AND/OR the current owner, the stuff you want to take without permission would not exist or otherwise be publicly available at all. Yes, some artists contract their rights away, either by accepting a “work for hire” arrangement, or otherwise selling their rights. If the people providing the money in either scenario aren’t going to be allowed protection on their investment, they will chose other investments, and less work will be created.
But the major disagreement we have here is that you appear to want something for nothing. Fuck anybody that holds legal rights you find inconvenient. You want what you want and you want it now. If some mean old lawful copyright owner won’t give you what you want, preferably without compensation, you want to change the law to screw him out of what is rightfully his. That is not fair.
Much of the point of this thread is that a great deal of work ISN’T publicly available at all.
No, that is typical copyright-worshiping rhetoric, to insist that anyone who doesn’t hold up present copyright law as holy writ is a thief. I want access; for pay or for free, but I want access. If you aren’t willing to pirate software or music - which I don’t by the way - that means there’s a great deal that simply isn’t available to you for any price.
This isn’t about the rights of the creators, and it isn’t about any unwillingness to pay. This is about the availability of goods, under a system of laws that was created to encourage that availability but isn’t doing the job.
Your desire for the goods to be available simply does not trump the rights of the lawful owner of said goods. Doesn’t matter if you have any respect for the law or not. The lawful owner has the right to decide whether his property will be distributed, and if so, under what terms. You do not get to force his hand. If you can’t persuade him to release the goods, then you simply can’t have them, and there is absolutely nothing legally or morally wrong with that result. Program your own computer. Write your own music/books/plays/poems/whatever.
Put another way, neither the creator nor the owner have any obligation to give any consideration whatsoever to your desires regarding their property.
It does if the says it does. He’s only the “lawful owner” because the law says he is; the very status of “lawful owner” for something like software only exists because the law says it does. And you presume that anyone even knows who they are, or that they know that they are.
Unless the law is changed, and then he doesn’t have that “right” anymore. So yes, if people can get the law changed his hand can be “forced”.
Considering that they are relying on a legal system that was created to encourage them to disseminate their work, yes they DO have an obligation. If they aren’t, then there’s no reason to keep that copyright system at all; the arguments for it go away.
OK, so it seems we agree that under current law, the lawful owner has certain rights.
What we have not established is whether, how, and why you (generic you–which though I haven’t previously specified has been my intent throughout this thread, this isn’t personal) have any rights to the works. Yes, you want them…but why should you have them?
Because that’s the point of the very system that defines those “rights” in the first place. If I and others aren’t getting access, then that legal framework isn’t working and it needs to be replaced.
You are taking a system that was created for utilitarian reasons, to encourage the dissemination of inventions, and treating it as an innate moral right. It’s not.
Oakminister, I’ll make this easy. I now officially utterly reject that the creator’s moral right of control over their work can be sold. So henceforth whenever you try to conflate purchased rights with moral rights I will dismiss everything you say as nonsensical gibberish.
You are conflating moral rights and legal rights. Doing so is torpedoing your argument and making you fundamentally wrong in your conclusions, and pretty much guaranteeing you’ll never convince anybody of anything.
I think this is getting to the point where we’re just repeating the same arguments over and over. We aren’t going to agree here. That said, I will concede that the law may ultimately evolve along the lines you and others desire. Perhaps technology will force a drastic reconsideration of IP law. It isn’t there yet, and frankly, I hope it doesn’t get there.
Actually, I think courts would interpret things pretty much along the lines I’ve been arguing under current law. If you start trying to sell somebody else’s computer game, and you get sued for infringement by the lawful owner, you are likely to be found liable.
Which has zippo to do with moral rights, and is completely irrelevent to a question of what the law should be - which is the topic of this thread.
Please try to keep up. Nobody is saying that computer games are not currently consigned to obscurity and oblivion when their legal publishers stop publishing them decades before their copyright expires. Nobody is saying that there aren’t books that are nigh-currently unavailable because they are out of print and nobody is selling them. Nobody is saying that Disney doesn’t have a perpetually-extending copyright on Steamboat Willy that will last until the sun burns out.
What people are saying is, regardless of yours or Disney’s feelings on the matter, that they think that society would benefit by certain modifications to copyright law. Now, for these people to be right, it necessarily follows that their solution needs to not scare all content producers out of the market and bring about the end of creativity and civilization as we know it. However I think that several solutions have been proposed that might achieve that.
If you disagree that copyright could be modified without ending civilization, then you could present arguments that society would indeed be destroyed. That would certainly be more interesting than your current pointless borderline-off-topic assertions.