SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 5, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Sunday April 12 2015, @06:42AM
No, copyright law has always had the good of the public *and* the creator's right to compensation & control of their work intertwined, because without an income, to quote a pamphlet pressing Parliament on the matter, "Learned men will be wholly discouraged from Propagating the most useful Parts of Knowledge and Literature."
The first copyright law, the Statue of Anne in 1710, put it this way:
Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books ...
The SoA had an interesting system for granting copyright length: for works written after it was enacted, 14 years would be granted upon registration, which the author could apply to renew twice before the book would enter the public domain — though the chances of actually outliving copyright (42 total years on top of the author's starting age) were pretty damn slim back then. If the USA ever gets around to fixing the copyright system, the Statute of Anne's limit approach sounds like a reasonable one to me.
Interestingly, when I looked into it, it turned out that from the time the printing press was invented, it was only the 15 years prior to the Statute of Anne where there were no laws controlling who could print which books. The situation before that point was in some ways surprisingly similar to our own now (corporate monopolies resulting in a virtual moratorium on works going into the public domain, varying degrees of censorship of anti-government attitudes) and what some people want to come next (a free-for-all with potential self-publishing). Here's what I learned, in a nutshell:
-- From 1556-1695, the Stationer's Company controlled, by law, who could own/use a printing press and what books they could publish under the government's censorship rules. Once a publisher's application to publish a book was granted, that publisher had control of it until/unless it let the book fall out of print for 6 months and didn't reproduce it when requested; at that point, it would be granted to another publisher. Writers weren't paid well, had very little respect from the public, and their deaths had no impact on "copying rights" as they were owned by the publishers.
-- Under massive pressure from the public, the government decided to not renew the above setup when it came up for vote in 1695. For the next 15 years, they struggled to come up with an acceptable replacement, so anybody could own a printing press and copy whatever the hell they wanted — basically the situation many geeks advocate for. This caused the price of books to plummet and the dirt-cheap pricing made GB an international publishing hub.
A lot of writers from the era evidently tried to self-publish, but to quote Daniel Dafoe, “One Man Studies Seven Year, to bring a finish’d Peice [sic] into the World, and a Pyrate Printer, Reprints his Copy immediately, and Sells it for a quarter of the Price…” Unable to earn a living, the authors joined pressing Parliament to come up with something that would give them control of their own work again. The "for the good of the public" rationale came from a 1706 pamphlet stating that unless authors were the ones profiting from their work, "Learned men will be wholly discouraged from Propagating the most useful Parts of Knowledge and Literature."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2015, @03:19PM
No, copyright law has always had the good of the public *and*
Not in the US. The US constitution explicitly states copyright's purpose, which is solely to promote science and the arts. That it allows companies and people to make money is merely a means to an end and nothing more. I think this is a more sensible way to look at it. Without a clear public benefit, there is no "right" or privilege to control the data stored on other people's equipment.