[Cthulhu_]

Just because a company doesn't have their IP available for modern systems doesn't mean they abandoned the IP, see also all the remasters and remakes coming out today.

That said, my gut feeling says it's mainly about them not willing to invest in it, because they can't see the economic viability. If GoG were to go to the rights holders and say "Hey lad, we have a platform and a lot of experience in reviving older games, you'll get x% of revenue", I'm sure some would be like "ok".

Of course, I'm also sure these rights holders have received offers like that from various parties for a long time now.

[Zambyte]

See all the remasters and remakes that didn't happen because they weren't legally able to. We are worse off as a society that enforces artificial scarcity on ideas than we would be if we returned to a world that did not have such bogus laws (not that long ago, but beyond the memory of anyone alive).

[1980phipsi]

I think it's reasonable to argue something like, "some IP protection is good, but too much is bad, and we probably have too much right now." It would be impossible to calibrate the laws so that the amount of IP protection is socially optimal, but we can look at the areas where the protection is too much and start there.

[observationist]

It's not impossible at all. We should do 5 year copyright - 99% of all commercial profit of all media is collected within 5 years of publishing.

Copyright is granted to media creators in order to incentivize creativity and contribution to culture. It's not granted so as to empower large collectives of lawyers and wealthy people to purchase the rights and endlessly nickel and dime the public for access to media.

Make it simple and clear. You get 5 years total copyright - no copying, no commercial activity or derivatives without express, explicit consent, require a contract. 5 years after publishing, you get another 5 years of limited copyright - think of it as expanded fair use. A maximum of 5% royalties from every commercial use, and unlimited non-commercial use. After 10 years, it goes into public domain.

You can assign or sell the rights to anyone, but the initial publication date is immutable, the clock doesn't reset. You can immediately push to public domain, or start the expanded fair use period early.

No exceptions, no grandfathering.

There's no legitimate reasons we should be allowing giant companies like Sony and HBO and Paramount to grift in perpetuity off of the creations and content of artists and writers. This is toxic to culture and concentrates wealth and power with people that absolutely should not control the things they do, and a significant portion of the wealth they accumulate goes into enriching lawyers whose only purpose in life is to enforce the ridiculous and asinine legal moat these companies and platforms and people have paid legislators to enshrine in law.

Make it clear and simple, and it accomplishes the protection of creators while enriching society. Nobody loses except the ones who corrupted the system in the first place.

We live in a digital era, we should not be pretending copyright ideas based on quill and parchment are still appropriate to the age.

And while we're at it, we should legally restrict distribution of revenues from platforms to a maximum of 30% - 70% at minimum goes to the author. The studio, agent, platform, or any other distribution agent all have to divvy up at most 30%.

No more eternal estates living off of the talent and creations of ancestors. No more sequestration of culturally significant works to enrich grifters.

This would apply to digital assets, games, code, anything that gets published. Patents should be similarly updated, with the same 5 and 10 year timers.

Sure, it's not 100% optimal, but it gets a majority of the profit to a majority of the creators close enough and it has a clear and significant benefit to society within a short enough term that the tradeoff is clearly worth it.

Empowering and enabling lawyers and rent seekers to grift off of other peoples talent and content is a choice, we don't have to live like that.

[temp84858696945]

I'm fairly certain that would not work at all for media such as sci-fi/fantasy books, where a system like this would result in people just forever reading older books which are free and effectively kill the market.

There is a limited amount of time to read in a day and the amount of 10+ year old content that is still amazing is more then anyone could ever read, and it's hard to compete with free.

I think video games is actually kinda an anomaly when it comes to copyright because they have been, on average, getting better and better then games released even in the recent past, mostly due to hardware getting better and better. Also any multiplayer game has the community issue where older games tend to no longer have a playerbase to play with.

Same could be said about movies/tv shows that rely on CGI up until somewhat recently where the CGI has pretty much plateaued.

[bombcar]

I think the sales of books is pretty much uncoupled from the supply or price, as piles and piles of great books are available for free online or at the local library.

More recorded shows exist than any one man can watch in a lifetime, and yet there are multiple concurrent series ongoing right now.

I think the real kicker is that IP law was built around things like books, that don't suddenly stop working or need to be maintained, etc. Modern laws should take software into account and deal with it differently.

[zimpenfish]

> 99% of all commercial profit of all media is collected within 5 years of publishing.

If that were true of music, companies wouldn't be buying back catalogues for (upwards of) hundreds of millions[0][1].

[0] https://apnews.com/article/music-catalog-sales-pop-rock-kiss...

[1] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ranked-biggest-music-catal...

[bombcar]

If it were modified to "99% of media has commercial profit collected within five years" it's probably pretty close to the mark, given how much is released and never reprinted/etc.

However, even 1% of a very large market is a huge tail, which is valuable.

[observationist]

Regardless, change the game. If you have a valuable, useful platform, and compete with other platforms for quality and delivery of service, then you're optimizing for the right things. If you have valuable media and the platform only serves to collect fees for the privilege of accessing the media, then you're optimizing the thing that is net negative for society, and ends up with adtech and degraded service and gotchanomics to try to nickel and dime you at every opportunity.

Imagine a world in which spotify and youtube and netflix had to compete on product and service quality, instead of network effects and legal technicalities. In which you could vibe code an alternative platform and have it be legally feasible to start your own streaming service merely by downloading a library of public domain content, then boot-strapping your service and paying new studios for license to run content, and so on.

The entire ecosystem would have to adapt, and it would be incredibly positive for creatives and authors and artists. There wouldn't be a constant dark cloud of legal consequences hanging over peoples heads, with armies of lawyers whose only purpose in life is to wreck little people who dare "infringe" on content, and all the downstream nonsense that comes from it.

Make society better by optimizing the policies that result in fewer, less wealthy, and far less powerful lawyers.