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Comment by elthran | Hacker News Reader

This stuff always depresses me when I hear about it - I definitely feel we need stronger laws to aid people in reviving abandonware. I'd love to know more about Warner's reasoning for not going forward with a deal - it's essentially free money

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Other well-regarded games that are difficult to play without pirating them or playing on aging equipment that will eventually stop working:

- 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.

I was under the impression that N64 had fantastic emulators. I remember playing several games in High School on an N64 emulator and they ran perfectly.

Support is just very spotty, and one's experience will depend on the games one tries to play, the platform the emulator's running on, game-specific config settings, plugins in use, et c. In this regard it's barely advanced from where it was years ago.

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.

Ah, fair, I haven't kept up with how it has progressed (although I did see that Project64's installer is now malware-ridden, that's sad) over the years and I haven't played an N64 emulated game in a long time. I do remember a long time ago that Dolphin wasn't that great and had spotty game support, so they must have really worked hard on it over the years.

I'm a big fan of the update blog posts they do over at Dolphin.

Actually, GameTap had a Saturn emulator that provided Panzer Dragoon Saga to subscribers a few years ago.

While I'm sympathetic to the basic emotion, it's hard to see what it would mean within a legal framework. Effectively, you'd be saying that if someone isn't exercising their rights under copyright with sufficient vigor by making something available for sale, they'd lose those rights. That's not inconsistent with the supposed function of copyright. However, in practice, orphan works legislation tends to be most opposed, not by large corporations, but by organizations representing creators like photographers who worry that such laws would be used to strip rights if paperwork wasn't all in order.

As for why? Nothing's free for a company to do.

> Effectively, you'd be saying that if someone isn't exercising their rights under copyright with sufficient vigor by making something available for sale, they'd lose those rights.

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).

The issue with orphan works (which overlap with abandonware) it that it's often unclear who the rights holder or holders is and, sometimes, what other third-party IP rights are involved. For example, in the case of software, are there licensed libraries that would need to be stripped out. As companies shut down, get bought, sell assets, etc. figuring out ownership and rights can be difficult.

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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

In most cases, there is no "default licensing fee." Mechanicals in music are really the exception rather than the rule. (And this is probably less of an issue with music than elsewhere in any case because of the royalty clearing organizations.)

> While I'm sympathetic to the basic emotion, it's hard to see what it would mean within a legal framework.

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.

"it's essentially free money"

Not at all. I doubt the "free money" would be enough to pay for all the lawyer time needed to sort things out.

The lawyer time is already paid for, they are house counsels.

There's still a cost even if it's just an opportunity cost.

Who are sitting around with nothing else to do? I imagine that they've got jobs, have to show status on those assignments, and this would get in the way.

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