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Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

how would music rights work in such a situation when they were licensed? how much of a game is licensed from someone else? the engine? the characters? does an abandoned ET game open up the franchise to public domain?

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I'd argue so! The music producers made their money, the original company made their money. The game isn't sold or updated anymore. Music was part of the game, it stays part of the game. Noone is profiting from it (with this clause, ie: non-commercial is the main thing for community/public domain takeover). For the music and similar assets the clause is usually already clear even nowadys, as long as the music is being displayed alongside the game, it's fine (that's how 99% of the music copyright works nowadays with modern games re streaming, unless the music company is backwards because they are greedy).

We need to kill indefinite (or even long) copyright and the music industry has been one of the worst offenders.

If you are talking about music licensing deals for a specific game, usually they expire after a set amount of time, similar to certain assets like cars. Now if you are talking about the music itself, you have think about the composition rights and performance rights so to speak. The first is tied to the composer and the sheet music while the second could be tied to the people who performed in the actual recording . A particular performance could become abandonware if the master is lost, no reissues are made or the record company is acquired and its records get tangled in legal issues that prevent new reissues. For the second part, a musician can reconstruct the original composition sheet with enough time, but it would hard to replicate the original performance.

I don't have all the answers. IP rights are complete shit show. My point was that instead of trying to "fix it all" or "chuck it all" (which I don't think political reality will allow anytime soon), maybe we can start by slicing off a few less contentious, smaller wins (like non-commercial, out-of-print >20 years, code only).

Every sentence you wrote was a question. Do you have a solution to suggest to any of your questions? Or even an idea on how come up with or evaluate proposed solutions to any of them?

> the characters? does an abandoned ET game open up the franchise to public domain?

I'm confused. I specifically called those examples out and suggested one way they could maybe be carved out to avoid being shut down by that exact concern. Even if my suggested 'way to carve' is dumb, my point was that lack of granularity, prevents carving out anything at all. Do you agree more granularity of some kind in copyright would help?

Once you start changing the rules you’re no longer constrained by the old rules. Abandonware going free inherently means all the IP used by the game is free to use as part of the game. It doesn’t require individual assets to be free independent of the game.

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