While in the past doing a reprint of a book, movie or game was expensive and wasn’t worth if something wasn’t popular, now selling something on a digital store has only a small initial cost (writing descriptions and graphics) and after that there’s nothing more. So why publishers are giving up on free money?
I thought to those delisting reasons:
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Artificial scarcity. The publisher wants to artificially drive more sales by saying that’s a limited time sale. For example that collection that included sm64. super Mario Galaxy and super Mario sunshine on switch. The greedy publisher essentially said “you only have 6 months to get this game, act now” and people immediately acted like "wow, better pay $60 for this collection of 3 old games, otherwise they’ll be gone forever!” otherwise they would have been like “uhm, i liked super Mario sunshine but $60 for a 20 years old game? I’ll think about that”
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Rights issues. For books the translation rights are often granted for a limited time; same for music in games; or if it’s using a certain third party intellectual property. Publisher might decide that the cost for renewing the license is too high compared to projected sales, while the copyright owner instead still wants an unrealistic amount of money in a lump sum instead of just royalties. Example is Capcom DuckTales remastered, delisted because Disney is Disney.
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Not worth their time. Those sales need to be reported to governments to pay taxes and for a few sales, small publishers might prefer to close business rather to pay all the accounting overhead. Who’s going to buy Microsoft Encarta 99?
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Controversial content: there are many instances of something that was funny decades ago but now is unacceptable. Publisher doesn’t want to be associated with that anymore
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Compatibility issues. That game relied on a specific Windows XP quirk, assumed to always run as admin, writing their saves on system32, and doesn’t work on anything newer. The code has been lost and they fired all the devs two weeks after the launch, so they’re unable to patch it.
In all those cases (maybe except 5), the publisher and the copyright owners decided together to give up their product, so it should be legally allowed to pirate those products.
If I want to read a book that has been pulled from digital stores and is out of print, the only way to do is:
- Piracy (publisher gets $0 from me)
- Library (publisher gets $0 from me)
- Buying it from an ebay scalper that has a “near mint” edition for $100 (publisher gets $0 from me)
And say that I really want to play super Mario sunshine. Now the only way is to buy it used, even if they ported it to their latest game console and it would literally cost them nothing to continue selling it. But if I buy it used, Nintendo gets the exact same amount of money that they would if I downloaded it with an “illegal” torrent.
In short: they don’t want the money for their IP? Then people that want to enjoy that IP should be legally allowed to get it for free
How about:
If a item isn’t available for sale, the copyright is abandoned and now public domain.
The items would just be kept on sale at hugely inflated prices
Would still be better than today in my opinion
I’m sure we could legislate in such a way that says if it’s purposely priced artificially high to prevent sales, then the same IP abandonment applies.
No you couldn’t, unless you enact government controlled prices for all media.
Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.
we do this for standards and patents: for a patent to form part of a standard, it must be granted on fair and reasonable, non-discriminatory grounds
it’s different in that the party is entering into that agreement voluntarily, however we use language like “fair and reasonable” already
And you can, in fact, regulate market prices.
But that doesn’t make it feasible or convenient. Is a 250 USD collector’s edition from Limited Run on a game that originally cost 15 bucks “fair and reasonable”? I mean, they sell. People buy them. People buy them even when the cheaper option is still available.
Digital goods have wildly diverging prices. Laws take intent into account all the time, but how do you take intent into account on something that is agreed upon via supply and demand if your goal is to guarantee supply?
People are being too simplistic here and assuming that things are either copyrighted or on the public domain, which is already not how this works. You don’t need to set a killswitch for public domain transition based on whether something is being monetized, just a fair scenario for unmonetized redistribution. If you make it so people sharing and privately copying things at their own cost is fine but selling is reserved for the copyright holder it doesn’t matter how the holder prices things. Plus that’s in practice already how we all operate anyway.
It seems to me that any legislation could easily carve out an exemption for any special editions, only applying to the “regular” version.
No it couldn’t “easily” do that because legislation can’t predict every single time a product is going to be brought to market and make exceptions for every time a sales person comes up with a way to license or sell a thing.
Laws work best when they are general principles that can be applied to a wide swath of scenarios via interpretation. People just look at a thing they don’t like and want laws to… you know, stop that kinda thing. But that’s not how it really works, at least when it’s working well. Even the current copyright is guilty of this to some extent, having been designed to effectively ensure that only the original author can profit from selling printed copies of their books and then being beaten into a bloody pulp by the realization that the content of a creative work and its medium are different things.
But at least the core principle behind it was workable initially, the idea of tying copyright to something being available for sale is fundamentally a nonstarter. I mean, I sure hope if I write a story and don’t make it widely available until I sell it to an editor it doesn’t mean that anybody with a copy of it could just share it or sell it themselves just because I’m not making it available. That doesn’t seem like a great idea, fundamentally.
well that’s an easy one - you can have whatever price you like for a collectors edition, as long as some edition of the game continues to be offered at or around the original price (or perhaps average unit sale price) that the game was sold at
again, we sometimes do this for housing in australia in some areas - you can build a luxury apartment block as long as you have a certain amount of affordable housing mixed with it
i think perhaps you’re misreading what people are saying. copyright is an important tool to ensure people get paid for their creative works, and that investment gets put into such projects however the point of copyright is not to make people money - money is itself a tool to maximise the goods and services available. the point is to maximise the availability of goods and services.
i think it’s pretty easy to have a law that days if the work is not available for consumption, it loses at least some of the protections of the copyright system to ensure others can make it available for consumption in some way
i think now we’re kind of agreeing - im not sure that anyone is arguing that monetisation itself is the trigger - the availability of the product to the average (or perhaps original target) group on fair terms is the trigger
It is, very much, not “an easy one”. You’re describing a regulated market, which is what I said above. Housing is regulated aggressively almost everywhere, and the scheme you describe would require a centralized control over how much people are allowed to raise prices to match inflation for games.
And, as mentioned many times already, it doesn’t work with microtransactions or free to play games and it incentivizes setting a very high launch price to work around the limitation of using launch pricing as a benchmark for a product’s entire lifetime.
Also, no, I don’t think I’m misunderstanding what people are saying. It’s definitely not easy to tie “availability” to copyright protection. Which is why in the real world the way copyrights sometimes get extinguished has more to do with enforcement than availability. People ARE arguing that something being up for sale should be the trigger instead, but this is very hard to manage, very hard to trigger and doesn’t come even close to fitting all the ways things are marketed.
I think this is a very, very hard problem to fix, but if you made me try, I’d argue that a deep reform should enable copyright exceptions regardless of whether something is up for sale. I don’t even know why people here are so fixated with that element. The exclusive right should not be about copying a thing, it should be about selling or profiting from a thing. Not copyright, but sale right.
and? governments already track inflation. in australia, our minimum wage and unemployment benefit amount and a lot of other things are legally defined relative to CPI (the “cost of a basket of groceries”)… rental increases are capped at “reasonable” amounts given the increase of other properties in the area… these are not only doable, but already being done in different contexts
that’s true, but this is why we say “reasonably available” as the core metric rather than specifics: we define what IS reasonable, and then let the courts decide outside of that list
which is why i didn’t say launch price - i suggested something along the lines of an average… the cost of the game should be something like the median price that people paid. what most people are willing to pay is “reasonable”
think you’re misunderstand - it’s not “for sale”, it’s “reasonably available” to an average targeted person
sale is irrelevant to the issue though - the issue that we’re trying to solve is general availability to the majority of people the product was designed for. if you are the copyright holder, and you make your work available for consumption then nobody should be allowed to distribute your work without permission (for some reasonable time)… if you decide to stop distributing a work, there’s no public good that comes from that, and thus it should have no copyright protections because copyright protection is meant to increase the volume of creative works
I’m not aware of an instance when media like movies or games would grow in price in time (except for on second hand market due to scarcity). So could be worded so the price might not be higher than on the time of the release or something
If this thread is proving something is that policymaking is very difficult.
That doesn’t work either, things don’t have a single price point in modern media, and it’d be easy to just do what some games are already doing where you give people early access for extra money and save yourself from being price locked later.
Plus, how do you price out subscriptions and free to play games with MTX? Not every individual piece of media has a price, but a lot of dead media comes from broadcast, subscriptions and other nonstandard arrangements.
You guys are too fixated in the scenario where publishers hike prices to retain copyright without actually distributing the content. It’s not as big of a loophole as you think and the idea of tying copyright to a thing being actively sold has bigger problems than that.
No, as we already have a market price for new games. We also have differing prices for differing versions already.
If you’re selling an older less popular or less critically acclaimed game for higher than what newer games with reasonable sales are selling at, then you’re clearly manipulating the market.
We don’t have to micromanage the market. We can set in place mechanisms to make sure it’s efficient and is a true market.
Do we? Could have fooled me. The games I played this week ranged from free to 90 bucks, including 5, 15, 20 and 39. And I used the 250 limited edition example because I had the Virtua Fighter collector’s edition they announced on the TGAs in a cart before I thought better of it.
So I have no idea what the “market price for new games” is supposed to be.
Apparently whatever the person you replied to feels it is supposed to be. Something something common sense.
Command: Modern Operations - All DLC on steam about $150 https://steamdb.info/bundle/12584/
Command: Modern Operations - Multiplayer server, plus live satellight feeds, plus more api access… starting at $60,000 a year…
[http://ftp.us.matrixgames.com/pub/CommandPro/US Mil Licence Types with Pricing.pdf](Professional Edition) … Paradoxically you can tell its really military grade because its a unencrypted ftp server linked to a slide from a power point document
Same game, same engine - different markets (gamers vs real war planners)
have you ever tried to buy out of print media online?
What about it?
I like the alternative better of “support or opensource it” as it can be expanded to nearly any product. You stop selling your game and thus don’t provide support to those that bought it? Better opensource that shit bud. You made some dropship product that sold 100k units but stop supporting it a year later because $reasons? Tough shit, opensource it bucko!
Things like Amazon’s Astro business robots being bricked after a year would be much less interesting to companies. There are probably also a whole lot of devices out there that aren’t supported anymore and just junk, but could be serviced if they were opensource.
Anti Commercial-AI license
I really like the idea, Im currently struggling with the implementation. There are so many issues to cover:
There are so many loopholes which corps will use to get out of it :-(
yeah the concept is great, but open sourcing often takes a lot of work. closed source code often relies on proprietary libraries etc and you can’t just publish them, or perhaps there are secrets embedded somewhere - even it source control history
the concept is great, the implementation faces some pretty big logical challenges
Why do you say that?
I don’t see how that matters. If you write code that depends on something and opensource it, your product might not be buildable/compilable/usable without it, but your code is still opensource, and that’s what matters. The same thing will go for the library: if the person/company that made the library stops supporting it, it has to become opensource as well.
That’s up to you to clean it up. It’s just like publishing any repository online.
Anti Commercial-AI license
because i’ve been involved in open sourcing products and libraries on many occasions
that’s not the way a lot of these things goes - especially when you start to talk about hardware. lots of times there are NDAs around even the interfaces to their libraries.
or sometimes there’s things called “vendored” code, where the library is included with the source. sometimes that’s easy to pick apart, but sometimes it’s not, sometimes someone’s copied and changed code from the library and barely documented what’s been done
code is often very messy. it’s easy to say ugh what shit devs! but that’s the reality, and we all write code sometimes that we look back on in a year and think it should have been a crime
that’s what i’m saying - it’s not like open sourcing is free. open sourcing software has a cost. people asked above different questions about eg who does that when a company has gone bankrupt?
i’ll add my own: how do you ensure a company doesn’t skimp on the dev time to open source, and accidentally release a secret that opens vulnerabilities in devices that people still use? like a signing key
There are many ways to solve this, but you could have a regulatory body that does spot checks itself or where companies must register their products and their end of life / end of support dates with links (or whatever the law stipulates) to the source code, schematics, designs, etc. . Companies that don’t abide by it get slapped with a fine (if the law is well-written it’s a percentage of global revenue), repeatedly, until they are taken to court.
Doesn’t have to. Any goods imported into a zone have to fulfill it, otherwise they are not allowed. There many regulations for products to be imported, so this would be one of them. If some small country introduced it, they might see their imports drop, but if the EU introduced it, even Apple would have to abide by it. See EU’s Digital Markets Act or the CE Marking.
I’d assume the way they always are? If the end result is a product being discontinued or unsupported --> opensource.
Not sure why this would be different from current proceedings. When your company goes bankrupt it doesn’t wipe the slate clean, nor are you absolved of all laws. If that were the case then a company could kill people, wave the bankrupt “get out of jail free” card and move on.
This is also where insurances come in. You’d have to be insured against the loss of your product designs, code, schematics, etc. as losing them would mean inability to abide by the law.
I would ask back: if you sell something on ebay that you designed and made, do you legally have provide support for it? If not, then this wouldn’t apply to you. If it does, then the law applies to you.
Anti Commercial-AI license
I don’t think you need to put something in the public domain immediately. And obviously that would immediately destroy any protections for physical media (in that the moment a physical book is published and sold through it immediately becomes “not available for sale”).
But you can make exceptions for free distribution that work both online and physically. Libraries existed long before the Internet did. You can enable private distribution of free copies without fully removing the right of the copyright holder to own an exclusive right to sell an item, which is fundamentally different than something being in the public domain.
I’m fine with you being able to sell a copy of the Iliad but not one of Metal Gear Solid 4. That’s not to say putting a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4 up for download should be illegal.
Because that specific book now has a new owner who can keep it or sell it as they see fit. Like people still do with physical games.
If you mean that a book becomes generally unavailable when it’s between printings, though, you’re wrong.
Publishers overlap print runs and begin selling the first paperbacks before they’ve sold out the initial hard cover prints PRECISELY to avoid the situation you seem to think happens with every single book.
You’re missing the point, though. The concern copyright has isn’t the physical book. If we were operating on physical books we would be fine with 20th century copyright.
The concern is the difference between the physical book and the contents of the book. You can make a book and send it off into the world as a physical object and have no new copies being printed while that book remains physically stocked in stores where you can go buy it.
What happens to that book in the interim? Is it okay to republish the contents of the book?
And yeah, sure, media that is constantly selling often has multiple prints. This scenario still happens when they stop making new prints, though, since some stock won’t have sold through. And plenty of media is made on limited runs, too. Monthly magazines, collector’s editions…
Hell, what happens to movies once they are out of cinemas and not printed in physical media or available for streaming in your scenario? Do you give up copyright if there isn’t an overlap? That seems harsh. TV shows that are broadcast once live but not available on streaming or physical media until the season is over?
Also, somebody below raises a great point: what happens to the copyright of things not commercialized by companies? If you make a picture and don’t sell it, does that mean I can use it? Sell it myself? Because people around here seem… not okay with that one.
Careful what you wish for- with cheaper storagesolutions and advance in ai someday it might come true. How about a limit ln copyright for say at most 20 years like for medicine ip? It is sick medias copyrights can be held in practical perpetuity.