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from the you-pays-your-money--you-takes-your-chances dept.
Ars Technica has an interesting tidbit today about one of our more hotly discussed topics here... whether or not "abandonware" should continue to receive copyright protection — Entertainment Publishers fight to block third-party revival of “abandoned” game servers
This article concerns the trade industry response to a brief filed by the EFF last November.
A major game industry trade group is fighting back against a proposed DMCA exemption that seeks to give gamers the right to modify games with abandoned online servers in order to restore online gameplay and functionality. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA), with support (.pdf) from the Motion Picture Association of America and Recording Industry Association of America, argues that the proposed exemption would amount to "enabling—and indeed encouraging—the play of pirated games and the unlawful reproduction and distribution of infringing content."
[...] The US Copyright Office will be holding public hearings [PDF] on the proposed DMCA exemptions May 19 through 21 in Washington DC and Los Angeles. The final round of written comments on the rule will be closed on May 1.
My own thoughts on this is likely our payment systems are just as unworkable as copyright law. Mechanisms are now in place to take our money, give us something, then abandon it, yet prohibit us from using it. Maybe its high time we consider a "Millennium Digital Currency Act" for payments so when the vendors want to abandon the service, the money transfers back to to the buyer, and the copyrights transfer back to the seller.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2015, @01:50AM
I think that this should apply to GPLed software, too. Old versions of GCC or other GNU software, which haven't been updated in years or decades, should enter the public domain now, rather than sometime in the future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2015, @02:17AM
Don't worry, GCC will be abandonware real soon, after everybody has switched to clang.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Sunday April 12 2015, @04:22AM
But it has been updated. Further, if you find a truly abandoned Free Software, you are already free to update it as you wish and restore it to usefulness.
(Score: 3, Informative) by cykros on Monday April 13 2015, @06:03PM
Not if you're a company, intending to use it in the pursuit of your own closed source/for profit (depending on license) product.
This of course is why there is such a heated debate about GPL, BSD, MIT, and other variants of open source licenses in the first place. BSD/MIT licenses are barely more than saying "this is public domain" in the first place...the GPL is very much not the same thing, with rabid defenders and opponents alike.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2015, @02:28PM
We're not talking about having abandonware enter the public domain, but about allowing the people who rightfully bought the software (games) to make the necessary modification to allow them to keep using it after the official servers are shut down.
With GPL software, you already have that right.
If you live in Europe, you probably also have that right for commercial software (reverse engineering for compatibility).