A Dead PC Game That Can't Come Back
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
If we'd had a more reasonable copyright system, No One Lives Forever would have been public domain by now, and anyone would have been free to update it, re-release it, use its assets for other projects, etc. Instead, it's (figuratively) locked away in a warehouse somewhere, like the Holy Grail at the end of Indiana Jones.
The Holy Grail was lost because somebody crossed the seal which enhanced their ability to drop important artifacts.
Corporations feed on money. If you want something from them, you use it as a lure, like bringing a deer to a salt lick.
Second, corporations have teams of lawyers whose whole job is to find marginal infringements of their IP and pursue said infringers. It doesn't matter that it's going to cost the company more money than it's worth in your particular instance. What matters is that the company establishes a reputation for mercilessly pursuing infringers, because such a reputation deters further infringement, and because it precludes the possibility of someone claiming that the work was abandoned or no longer of interest (which doesn't negate copyright infringement claims, but could limit damages; it potentially could negate trademark claims).
Do not fool yourself into believing that your small-time operation won't raise the attention of big corporate lawyers. For the extra cherry on top, note that if you do raise the notice of big corporate lawyers, you'll be forced to comply no matter how wrong they are, since they'll pursue every strategy to make the legal fight as long and expensive as humanly possible and you'll eventually have to settle unless you already have $5 million+ sitting around with your lawyers' name on it.
Uzi Nissan, rightful owner of nissan.com, spent 9 years and approximately 3 million dollars defending against Nissan's attempt to wrest his domain from him, and they're still trying to get at him by filing frivolous trademarks. [0]
That is the MO of big corporate law. They absolutely can and will use their larger position to bully you, and you don't really have the option to take the dispute to court if you aren't pulling in tens of millions in annual revenue.
The Walt Disney Company famously sent a C&D to a day care in Florida [1] for having unlicensed representations of their characters painted on the walls.
IANAL and everything I said is probably wrong.
Still one of the best, most underrated multiplayer shooters in pretty much ever.
It is baffling how something like this could happen, media companies sit on so many properties like this that they will never exploit. I know that in some cases not using the property is some sort of strategy but in cases like this they are leaving money on the table. Might be peanuts to them but it seems like an opportunity for some in-house streamlining to fully exercise dead properties.
That's the thing. It is peanuts. And it's peanuts that would probably be distracting from their primary focus.
Someone at $LARGE_COMPUTER_COMPANY once basically told me that, for them, if something wasn't going to be a billion dollar business, it wasn't interesting. Sure, something smaller might nominally have a positive ROI, but if you factor in the distraction/opportunity cost/etc., they just couldn't afford to deal with yet another $50 million revenue opportunity.
I wonder if Facebook was just a "$50 million revenue opportunity" and that's why Google didn't enter the space until it was too late. Maybe if Square and Westwood would have looked at a few more $50 million revenue opportunities they'd still exist.
Your basic point is fair enough but companies do need to focus and the larger they are the less they can afford to be distracted by small projects/products that have little hope of breaking out into something substantial. In this respect, they're something like VCs.
It's explicitly called out in a lot of business books -- as a small business you often have a lot of cover to undercut the incumbent, because they're just not interested in a niche that may be huge from your point of view.
As for why? Nothing's free for a company to do.
Couldn't there instead be some kind of default and compulsory licensing terms for abandoned works, rather than the original rightsholder losing them? So, in this case, for example, the game could be republished, and Warner/Fox/Activision could split a standard 5-10% share of the profits if they prove their rights (having forfeited an opportunity for a better deal by not bothering to clarify things sooner).
With orphan works specifically, the concern that I've heard expressed by some photographers is that companies will spend exactly 10 seconds trying to track down the copyright holder before deciding it's orphaned and using the work as they see fit.
Isn't that the point of a national copyright registry? I understand that you don't have to register a copyright to be protected by it, and I also understand that it's not desirable to register every work individually, but making use of a copyright registry would alleviate this particular problem.
I think a prerequisite to any kind of default licensing would need to be a documented good-faith effort to find the actual rightsholder. Futhermore, if they can't find them, I think they should have to put the default licensing fees into escrow, so it's not they could avoid paying anything.
One way of doing it would be shift copyright to a short free-and-no-required-registration period, with longer protection requiring registration, declaration of stated value, and payment of an annual ad valorem tax on that value; during the extended period, any individual or group could buy the work into the public domain by payment of the declared value, which would be forwarded to the copyright owner.
Not at all. I doubt the "free money" would be enough to pay for all the lawyer time needed to sort things out.
- Goldeneye on the N64 — James Bond franchise rights issues. There was a "reimagining" developed and release, but it's an entirely different game.
- Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Sega Saturn — IIRC the source code was lost, and a combination of that, Saturn emulation being tricky, the relatively small number of highly in-demand exclusive releases for the Saturn, and Sega no longer releasing their own consoles mean that official emulated Saturn support for the title is unlikely.
[EDIT] I should add that the situation of these two games in particular is made worse by the less-than-stellar state of open source emulation for those systems, especially in the case of the Saturn. I think it's fair to say that both are in a worse state than the Playstation, or even the newer Gamecube/Wii thanks to Dolphin.
It's a system for which it is unsurprising to encounter difficulties emulating a given game, even if it's worked for you in the past.
I'm not a lawyer but if there is a writ you could file to have the courts declare it abandoned, that would work too, perhaps @rayiner will step in on that question.
I can hand you a disk full of my source code, but unless I give you permission to reproduce it it'd still be illegal to reproduce.
Otherwise all the property rights of anyone can be nullified just by one person with access to it, clearly that's impossible in our legal framework.
That may limit their liability, but it won't prevent them from losing their investment.
> Since the aim is to revive a game for its own sake rather than exploit it commercially
I think that's incorrect. I do not get the impression that Night Dive Studios exists as some kind of game preservation charity. It seems like a business that occupies a small niche around reviving old games to exploit them commercially.
Honestly it sounds like Fox offered a pretty reasonable deal: "They [said they] might or might not have physical records to support their position, and the location of those records was not determined. So if we wanted to do a deal that paid them enough as a kind of guarantee, they would look into their records to see if they had anything. And if it turned out they didn't have ownership, they would refund that up-front guarantee. We chose not to pursue this option [and] they said, basically, 'Fine, whatever.'" I'm curious why they (Night Dive) didn't want to take that.
Last week, Night Dive founder Stephen Kick and director of
business development Larry Kuperman emailed me to let me
know that while they had indeed planned to re-release No
One Lives Forever and its sequel, they'd hit a wall and
been forced to give up. ... Night Dive is currently
abandoning its efforts to revive No One Lives Forever.I think he said that this came from the preface of a mathematics textbook, where the author used this to criticise what he therefore viewed as the unhelpful parsimony of many textbooks, but I think that the point holds in general.
Of course, the style in which repetition is done may still be criticised for poor aesthetics, but I don't see an aesthetic problem here either.
At least twice. "Twice" is the absolute minimum, and there are better or worse ways to do it, but anything you only say once is only useful for a reference text.
Repetition certainly seems like an extremely effective method for drilling something into someone's subconscious, even if that person is making overt assertions that the brand's pervasiveness annoys them. I would guess that people have a natural bias toward things they recognize, so even if one thinks he/she is annoyed, they're still more likely to patronize the most familiar identity. I'd be interested in reading a more thorough treatment of this topic.
NOLF will probably get remade as a mod or fan game.
Sadly, such long (40+ hours) single player first person shooter games that offered a innovative gameplay, very good story and humour are a thing of the past.
New games that focus on gameplay and learn why Deus Ex 1 and No One Lives Forever 1 were such outstanding games, would be great. But such games can only be created when creative game designers are let alone with enough cash, and no business people in sight.