One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock even if the work is in the public domain, so that needs to be accounted for as well.
Bad laws passed by the elite to the elite for the benefit of the elite is the real problem. Why should I respect that?
Just because it's a law?! That's the poor flimsy justification?
My understanding is that the Library of Congress has the authority to designate situations in which it is legal to remove DRM on electronic copies of books you have purchased, such as to run it through a TTS program for those that are visually impaired. Does this not apply to other art mediums?
not that has stopped the US doing something.
The fact is, copyright extensions have served corporate interests well and is likely to continue to get extended even more, and more draconian, given how many decompilation and recomps have been done recently.
It's the dumbest and most obvious weakness of our system of government and it will never be fixed.
The incumbents would probably file lawsuits, but would they win?
If Congress can set copyright terms retroactively, why can't they set copyright terms retroactively?
What happens if they do the thing where you have to file for a renewal every year and the first 14 years are free and automatic, but then the renewal fee starts at $1000 and doubles for every year over 14?
> violate treaties the US has signed.
This is just an excuse the industry uses after bribing their way into some documents that can be renegotiated at any time. The US has been the ones pushing for this nonsense to begin with, so if they stopped, most other countries would be happy to enter into a different treaty. And the remaining ones would be the ones with the most to lose if they were the only ones to not sign onto the new agreement at the point when the US and most others pull out of the corrupt one.
And the legal basis is completely different, copyrights are created as an artificial right in the Copyright Clause, given for a limited time and purpose. They are not property in the traditional sense and Congress has absolute power over them.
I've reverse engineered multiple proprietary things around the house thanks to a local Qwen-3.8 running under Strata and Hermes.
Some have been USB, some have been BT, and some were android binaries. I explain what's going on, how they should work, investigate, and write compatibility layers or hack the binaries to do my thing.
And right now, we're seeing flagship consoles getting emulators and compatibility layers to run the games on computers. And those are machine assisted as well.
Just go look at how bad Sony fucked up with 'no ownership of PS5 games' heh. Everybody's attacking and downloading and pirating PS5. LLM tooling makes it not just doable, but actually easy.
In the upcoming lawsuit, Adobe is either about to destroy the AI industry by collecting massive damages, or Anthropic is about to destroy the software industry by effectively making software non-copyrightable. There's no other outcome.
And making your software SaaS won't help because the AI tools can infer a server-side implementation based on enough examples of behaviour.
Wow, what an interesting binary when 80% of all cases end in settlement.
On the recent WAN show LTT said they tried the recent Photoshop clones and they were buggy, feature missing messes. If they were truly reverse engineer decompiles (minus needing a subscription) they would work just as well. But they don't so they're not.
Are they gonna sue the user's power company because they supplied power for a nefarious activity without making the human agree to use it for innocent purposes only?
We already have reverse engineering tools, and the vast majority of 20 year old media isn't producing new revenue.
Will never ever happen. Disney alone would spend billions to stop any meaningful copyright reforms
If you look back at what was created in the past, 30 years seems like an absolute minimum, 50 years seems about right -- perhaps with a registration requirement for the full term so that works with an unclear publication date and ownership can be easily traced. That would mean the film Logan's Run would just be leaving copyright protection now.
For context, I believe in the UK, there is a 50-year term for broadcasts, computer-generated works, Crown Copyright (125 years or 50 from first commercial publication if within 75 years of creation), and certain classes of films. There's a schedule here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-...
“Someone” might, but most people won’t. Do you think studios are going to announce the next blockbuster and most people will be like “eh, I’ll just wait 20 years, maybe I’ll have a kid and raise them until adulthood to pass the time”?
Portal is going to be 20 next year. I bought Portal 1 and 2 for a couple of bucks like a decade ago already.
I’d even say 20 years default is two long. Especially because there are things which are just abandoned. Make it shorter and add limited options to renew for limited time.
That is a laughable fantasy. It protects those with money and legal resources to enforce it, and that’s it.
I’m reminded of the case where some late night show played a video they found online as part of a segment, then later were able to copyright strike the original video. The original creator, being an individual, had no recourse.
> A studio can't take a 20 year old story and make a blockbuster out of it without licensing the story.
Again, laughable. Disney has done it but was never sued for being too big. It was done to Harlan Ellison too (who did spend years fighting it and won). Ripoffs happens frequently, you don’t hear about them that much precisely because studios in general know to rip off those without the means to put up a fight.
How much money does George Lucas need, I guess he’d only have a networth of a few hundred million vs a few billion.
I make music and buy tons of it. I’ve never been like, yo Nas is coming out with a new project, I’ll just wait 20 years to buy it on sale.
Right now if I want to sample a song made 50 years ago I still have to pay thousands to license it even if everyone involved has long since left.
Most of the money goes to some massive label.
Likewise, I don’t think Nas would struggle if his older albums were made public domain.
He’s still the only one who can perform the tracks live. He can still make new music, like the 6 projects he made in the last few years.
Sony/Columbia would only stop profiting off the deal they had an 18 year old sign decades ago.
That's the point. Someone finds something not successful, sees that they could make a lot of money off it, takes it for their own, has copyright over their new content. The labels you're talking about would gladly just mine what was released ${term}+1 years ago.
The point is that everything is copyrighted by default, unless you release it into the public domain.
> Right now if I want to sample a song made 50 years ago I still have to pay thousands to license it even if everyone involved has long since left.
And that's right. Why should someone else get to make money off someone else's work without compensating them for it, if they haven't released it to the public domain?
You're assuming that copyright protects the big labels -- it protects your creations too. The most famous case of this is Charles Dickens: https://foleyhoag.com/news-and-insights/blogs/making-your-ma...
Pretty hard to send money to the afterlife.
50 years after the album came out means that most of the original artists aren’t going to be here.
With LLMs training on everyone’s copyrighted material anyway we’ll need to rethink copyright anyway.
A lot of media is defacto lost anyway as the rights holders refuse to republish it.
A 20 year period makes it much easier to save this stuff.
This will happen regardless. We've already built a massive wealth of recordings over the last 100 years that, if the law is followed, will eventually become available for free use. Unless the idea is to lock it up forever in order to keep present artists from having to compete?
But 20+ year old culture largely loses relevance. Even in a world where people pay for access to everything via streaming, the most popular music from 2006 is basically unknown to gen alpha. Only the very coolest people are still listening to Jibbs' masterpiece, "Chain Hang Low." In fact, one might argue that if it did cause people to retain their connection to previous culture, that such "mining" would be a positive (indeed, Jibbs could not have produced what he did without standing on the shoulders of his predecessors).
10 years seems closer to obsolescence, and that's for productivity software.
Expanding exceptions to copyright law would be nice for different reasons, but custom servers and emulation were already legal before companies figured out they could put arbitrarily difficult roadblocks in the way of them.
Also while we're here, DMCA 512 was also a piece of horseshit, albeit less because it curtailed online freedom and more because it isn't a good way to adjudicate low-stakes copyright claims.
This sounds like fairy dust for this use case. You’re playing a real time game where latency matters, and you’re running all that latency sensitive traffic through a network of relays running on altruism - each hop would introduce latency and you’d deal with contention in the network.
The play experience would be awful.
WoW launched in an essentially unfinished state. Molten Core, the first 40-man raid, didn't have a loot table. I'm not sure it was even accessible on launch day. And when it did get a loot table, it had placeholder graphics for the tier 1 set.
This was fine: it would take months for players to be able to tackle end-game content, so the game didn't need to launch with it all ready to go. But a law requiring Blizzard to keep a launch-day WoW available wouldn't be especially satisfying.
Even if you changed it to be "its full functional state" or something similar, that gets weird. After Molten Core was BWL, which you couldn't reach on launch. And so on and so forth. WoW changes a ton over an expansion, and each expansion brings even bigger changes (do you play pre-Cata or post?). Do we require Blizzard to keep available each and every patch version? Hotfix version? How do players decide which they want to play? I really enjoyed the Argent Tournament, but I bet most preferred actually reaching ICC (which itself had a bunch of time locks before you could reach Arthas, himself).
[1]: Even beyond everything outlined, WoW gets weird when you consider Classic and now Forever.
An ever-evolving game with properties of a SaaS would likely not exist under this new law.
Blizzard already knew how to build self-contained products with self-contained expansions even before WoW was released. StarCraft was the original game and StarCraft Broodwar was the expansion. It will affect game release cycles and properties of what you get with the game, but that's seems like part of the point of the legislation.
For example, massive expansion of free to play games with cosmetic microtransactions.
When the game ends... what is it that you've bought? The cosmetics, you never bought the game. If they give you an offline "shooting range" mode where you can wander the maps in the cosmetics you bought, have they satisfied the requirements? Again, you never bought the game you bought the cosmetics.
A step farther, loot drops in loot boxes that take time to unlock, on the order of days, weeks or months. You buy something to accelerate the unlock process down to hours. What have you bought? Just a faster unlock of something you'd have received anyway. So what are you owed when the game goes end of life? You didn't buy the game, you didn't buy the contents of the lootbox.
This is actually true of a large market segment.
Consider, there are existing laws against libel which were written before video screens existed. Did those laws encounter insurmountable, analogous circumvention issues when the printed word was no longer "printed" with ink?
Problem is with “purchase” imho.