Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a joke.
Aha, as a non-gamer perhaps I should just stay out of this thread :)
I refuse to believe that there are any non-gamers on HN.
Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
111–120 of 163 posts
Re: Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
#112Re: Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
if I hire you to write a HN News app, do you feel like you're entitled to royalties?
I mean, your app is making use of either scraping or using an API that's not yours. You may own the app but there's not much of value you can copyright. I wouldn't feel entitled to royalties becsuse you're not getting royalties to begin with. But for BOTD: tech workers tend to get paid well to deliver one specific project so the industry doesn't have as strong demand for royalties as art. Especially since tech isn't…
> tech workers tend to get paid well to deliver one specific project so the industry doesn't have as strong demand for royalties as art
It's not exactly that; a builder doesn't get well paid, but still delivers one specific project. That builder won't get royalties from all the transactions that happen from building a shop building.
We've just decided that we'll special-case art so people can live off the proceeds for work done in decades past.
Re: Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
#114Hey, if anyone's gonna do it, my bet is on the company that revived Battletoads ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
#115Activision is also actively selling the Zork collection on Steam. I'd expect that to show up on Gamepass. It includes: Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, and Planetfall https://store.steampowered.com/app/570580/Zork_Anthology/
also on GOG, DRM-free: https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_zork_anthology
Not just those; Return to Zork, Zork Grand Inquisitor, and Zork Nemesis are there too.
(Zork Nemesis is pretty unlike other Zork games.)
Re: Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's nice to make works that no longer have commercial value enter the public domain by default. Another justification: if the harms increase for giving an author exclusivity for a longer time, society should demand a larger payback. This may only be justified for the most prominent works It feels a little out of calibration. How about free for 20 years; $500 for 10 more, and then 100x for every 10 additional years.…
Copyright was never meant to give perpetual rights, which is what your scheme would do (as it does now). So might as well not change the current system, because the conclusion is the same. The final arbiter was never "does it have commercial value still?" until today. That's a purely modern perspective pushed by companies like Disney, because of course it is. That's all they care about. We don't have to care about th…
How many copyrights are worth half a billion dollars to register from 50-60 years? Presumably zero are worth registering for $50B to protect from 60-70 years.
This hardly seems perpetual in practice.
Re: Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
#117I think Zork sank into the swamp long ago. "Want some rye, 'course ya do..." I mean, come on, let's not clutch our pearls after that abomination.
Why hate on that game? It had both great puzzles (challenging yet approachable) AND was pushing the envelope of CD-ROM as a new technology, specifically the use of video + celebrities.
There was a lot to love about Return to Zork, but it was made in the Sierra model of suddenly killing you whenever you made a mistake that, in most cases, couldn't even have been foreseen to be a mistake.
Oddly, the text adventures were nowhere near as punishing.
Re: Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
All copyright is way too long but authors go completely off-piste at anyone who suggests that it should be something more reasonable (I kinda like 21 years myself). Part of the issue is that the loudest voices are that 0.01% of authors whose work still has some commercial value decades after its creation.
> All copyright is way too long but authors go completely off-piste at anyone who suggests that it should be something more reasonable (I kinda like 21 years myself). > Part of the issue is that the loudest voices are that 0.01% of authors whose work still has some commercial value decades after its creation. My favorite scheme is that all copyright last for 10 years by default. You can register it for $100 for anoth…
> That way commercial works that are very economically valuable can be protected for a pretty long time, but everything makes it into the public domain relatively quickly.
But wouldn't we want the valuable works to enter the public domain faster than the worthless works?
Re: Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
20 years, same as patents. People aren't writing books because of the profits they might make 25 years from now.
Sure they are. Plenty of film and streaming projects are based on older work. Sapkowski's Witcher series comes to mind. If his rights to the IP had expired after 20 years then not only would Netflix been able to rip his work off for free, but he wouldn't have benefitted at all from the resurgence in popularity that his novels garnered. It would've just been gravy for some publishing company -- how would that be fair?…
> If his rights to the IP had expired after 20 years then not only would Netflix been able to rip his work off for free, but he wouldn't have benefitted at all from the resurgence in popularity that his novels garnered. It would've just been gravy for some publishing company -- how would that be fair?
Presumably in the same way that if you sell the mineral rights on a plot of land to someone else, and then they find oil or rubies there, it's thought of as fair that they get the money from that and you don't.
Or how if you sell someone a stock, and it goes up, they get the money from the appreciation and you don't.
Or how if your neighbor finds buried treasure on his land, and you find none on yours, he gets a big finder's fee and you don't get anything. (Indeed, in this case, there are commonly accusations of unfairness, but those tend to focus on the treatment of the neighbor being unfair. You deserved the nothing that you got.)
What's a scenario where this kind of event wouldn't be called fair?
Re: Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another annoying thing about the 1976 Copyright Act/Berne Convention is that copyright is automatic. You don't need to register with any organization, any "original work of authorship fixed in a tangible form" is copyright. This is the real problem with public github repos that don't have a license file, because they also likely lack a copyright imprint with a date. This is not related, but another problem with curre…
That's not the most annoying thing about the 1976 Copyright Act. The most annoying thing about the 1976 Copyright Act is that copyright is only nominally automatic. To be clear, it casts a huge shadow over all creativity that would have otherwise been uncopyrighted. But on the other side, there's still a registration system . You need a registration in order to sue infringers, and you don't get statutory damages on i…
It is a fundamental truism of American "capitalism" that, if there is a law for something, it was written to protect established "capital" from competition. There are no free markets in the US.