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Someone made a thing. They get to decide who they share it with. It's very smug and entitled to then go to that person and tell them "actually no. the thing you created.. its not yours anymore. It's now ours - and we're going to use it how we want to use it".
It's cool you like to play my game and you had fun - but that doesn't mean you suddenly have a right to play it whenever you want - unless we came to that agreement. I'm not a creator myself, but I could see how that just feels incredibly violating. I frankly feel this copyright-reform sentiments come from people that have never created anything that they felt personal ownership over.
I'd argue that copyright expiration is not at all about some imagined exchange of legal protections for .. the use of courts (since when is the use of courts treated as a privilege?) and is more about historical preservation and the fact that ownership is often eventually lost. Most copyright provisions are so long that by the time they expire there is noone left to feel robbed, slighted or taken advantage of. It's a fuzzy line but at some point graverobbing becomes archeology
That is the entirety of copyright in a nutshell, though. There comes a time when it really isn't entitlement to say "you don't get to control this work anymore", and that time has to come before copyright expiry in a practical sense, or there would be no works to enter the public domain, in a very real physical sense. Copyright owners are horrible stewards of their work, thousands of works have been lost due to gross mismanagement of archives (if the company even decides to give a shit about archiving anything).
Today's pirates are tomorrow's preservationists. Without the works that are being pirated, right now, they run the risk of being lost to time.
If used game sales actually resulted in money going to the copyright holders, I might have some more sympathy for that argument. But whether I pirate a copy of game X, or buy it from a secondhand seller, the original copyright holder sees zero of that money, and that's actually a good thing, and protects actual property rights, those of the person who buys a physical copy of a piece of media.
But I have a larger issue with the premise. So say I write a book - it seems to me you're saying I have a moral obligation for that book to be preserved for future generations to read. How about if I actively don't want that to happen? Should the cops come to my door and take it away?
Or if let one other person read it, now they inherit some right over my work to reread it?
I just don't find the whole anticopyright argument cohesive and coming from a clear moral premise
A lot of it kinda boils down to companies mismanage their IP and it's annoying. And the weird particulars of the medium of exchange. Okay, SNES/PS1 games came on cartridges/CDs, so you can physically introspect and extract the data... you feel entitles to circumvent whatever protections there are. In the future its likely games will be streamed and played in the cloud. You will never have physical access to the actual executed bits. Does that mean your rights as a user are different now? Or should you send the cops to seize the code on the servers at some point?
You're always free to not publish your work, and you'll never be compelled to publish your work. But at some point, you (or your heirs) will lose the right to use copyright law to prevent other people from publishing your work.
> Or if let one other person read it, now they inherit some right over my work to reread it?
Copyright only gives authors/owners a limited set of exclusive rights over their works, mostly concerning physical copies, derivative works and public performance: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106 Copyright law is not about ideas or knowledge in your head. Reading a book is not an activity that copyright law is concerned with.
> In the future its likely games will be streamed and played in the cloud. You will never have physical access to the actual executed bits. Does that mean your rights as a user are different now?
Being a user isn't what gives you rights under copyright law. Being a legal owner of a copy of a game is what matters. If you only use a streaming service, you probably have never purchased a copy of the game. You may have purchased a license authorizing a hosting provider to run their copy of the game on your behalf (commercial software vendors like to use contract law to try to wield powers that copyright law doesn't grant them).
> Being a user isn't what gives you rights under copyright law. Being a legal owner of a copy of a game is what matters.
This is meaningless legal/semantic gymnastics. If that's your definition of "owning a legal copy" then companies will simply not sell you a "legal copy" and instead will give you an "indefinite lease" or some other jargon they make up. Or make you sign an EULA.
The fact that "legal copies" are distributed is 99% of the time not because companies want to allow you to copy their games - it's simply a practical limitation on the means of distribution. In the system you describe (which might correspond to the current reality) a cloud streamed game just inherently will always have more legal protection that a physically distributed game. There is no way to transmit a person executable bits without "loosing control" of them.
The big cloud providers would love this reality! The end result is that everyone is compelled, by market forces in effect, to shift their distribution to a jankier alternative because the physical medium doesn't allowed the same level of IP control.
So in the end your societal objectives are not achieved. It's in fact severely hampered.
- People get a worse products - everything turns to online streamed garbage
- People loose complete access at the whim of the company - when they decide to shut down their servers.
- The IP never ever reaches the public domain b/c it's never "distributed"
The game is eventually probably lost to time as some intern wipes the last copy from some backupdisk
You also create a weird universe where linear media that's streamed and can be captured (eg. a movie or a book) can be copied b/c you necessarily received "every bit" while something nonlinear like games can't - b/c you never get all the bits to "rerun" it locally. The whole setup is just nonsensical
Well, you're simply wrong on that score. The US Constitution empowers Congress to establish copyright laws thus:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
It's not about archeology, it's about promoting the development of new stuff. To that end, at some point it's better to free a work for others to build upon than to allow continued profiteering by the existing author/owner.
As would the legal recognition of format shifting in multiple jurisdictions around the world…
I bought it and the hardware stops working… I still have the legal right to do what I want with the data on that disk.
If I’m a legitimate customer and you sold not licensed me the software… fuck you Nintendo I have the right to emulate your hardware (which I also own thus providing a right to whatever software was sold on that device, so that angle isn’t a solid argument either.)
The only question that should be legally argued over is do the documented infringement cases of people recording themselves doing this on streams, have a legal defence for the allegations Nintendo could level at them. They are innocent until proven guilty by law and it would be more effort for Nintendo to bring charges…
So they took the morally reprehensible cheaper action of going after the legal emulator software rather to save themselves time and money attacking developers not in a position to fight back because while they are standing firmly in legal territory making the software, you would have to be very optimistic to think the arguments Nintendo could make with their expensive lawyers about “facilitating crime” wouldn’t be persuasive.
Yes, you can. You own the product, you may choose to stop selling it.
You also can’t mandate what formats a publisher makes their media available on.
"Stop selling it" isn't the same as making everybody "stop experiencing it". A publisher can choose to stop selling more copies, but they can't undo what they've already sold, and they have limited powers to control what people do with the copies they previously bought, and those powers have an expiration date—which may need to be moved closer to the present.
First of all, despite the legal handwaving around the topic, copyrights and related works are not property in and of themselves. They can manifest in physical property, but they are not property themselves. I reject the use of the term "intellectual property", as it is a complete misnomer.
Secondly, copyrights are not absolute. There are acts that the rightsholder would not want you to do, but that are still legal.