[tiltowait]

Is Mario art?

Putting that question aside: why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time? Why are their wishes at best secondary? Now, to be clear: I am pro-emulation. If someone is no longer selling a game, I see no ethical problem with pirating it. I don't, however, think anyone has a right to the game simply by virtue of it existing.

And you can share your copy of SMB3. You can lend someone your cart or give it away. No one will stop you. No law will punish you. But that's not the same thing as dumping the cart's contents and putting them online for anyone with a computer to download.

[DecoySalamander]

A different question to ask is why the public is obligated to enforce artist's rights in perpetuity? And don't forget that artworks don't just spawn from a single mind - they are buit upon existing, freely available art and general culture, which isn't a subject to special protection in the first place.

[barnabee]

> why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time?

If it’s digital it’s free by default, even protected IP that isn’t digital is often cheap to copy or substantially replicate

So a better question is, why should people be prevented from making copies of things they like at their own expense forever?

The rights we give creators over their creations are not fundamental rights, they’re legal rights given because society decides the positives (incentivising creation, enabling creation to be an industry) outweigh the negatives (artificially restricting the flow of information, reducing and gatekeeping access to valuable art and knowledge, etc.).

There’s no particular reason to believe that the optimal solution here is either a complete lack of “IP” protection or giving creators absolute control and exclusivity in perpetuity.

It’s almost certainly neither, but IMO it’s quite clearly much less protection than creators currently enjoy.

[whatnow37373]

I don’t particularly care either way but I can see the argument that any human no matter how brilliant is a product of the society he/she was raised and thus purely personal ownership does not exist. Your work is our work, we just play pretend for a few decades but in the end the pieces return to the box they came from.

[Buttons840]

> why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time?

This will never be required. An artist is free to keep their art for themselves and never make a copy.

Once an artist has distributed a copy however, the question becomes, why aren't other people free to do things they are capable of doing, like making additional copies?