121–130 of 163 posts
The comments are quite interesting. Reaching out to people at microsoft in the actual comments. This is the real value of activitypub, and completely transparent to visitors to the blog.
Have been gaming since the mid 80's and text adventures were a main feature. Years later and I owned Lost Treasures 1 and 2 then the Masterpieces CD. I topped that with IUB.zip - pretty much everything Infocom. Jason Scott then produced Get Lamp - I have a coin - which brought so much of that era together. I view text adventures, be they Infocom, Level 9 or others, as an inspiration to others. A re-release could only…
Text adventures are awesome. I'm sad that I missed out on that era. What do you think about all the modern text adventure games built on stuff like Inform7?
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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.
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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.…
I think only 5 years should be free, then maybe $100 for another 5, then exponentially increasing after that. A lot of stuff simply has no commercial value after 5 years. This is for software, BTW; for movies or books, different terms might make more sense.
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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…
Pretty quickly the cost to renew exceeds the amount of money in the world.
This scheme tosses the few powerful creators a small bone while shortening duration of all copyrights.
In addition to generating revenue from these large creators, and shortening their total term of protection... it also diminishes their power by creating a vibrant public domain with a whole lot of contemporaneous works in it.
I think copyright law should be different for originators vs. owning individuals vs. legal entities. Once the legal rights of a work are separated from the originator, the work should pass to the public domain faster.
I think copyright law should be different for originators vs. owning individuals vs. legal entities. Once the legal rights of a work are separated from the originator, the work should pass to the public domain faster.
Which harms the originator since a potential buyer can't realize as much value for the purchase of the IP. If the originator isn't in a position to exploit their creation directly, their ability to offer it to someone who can is reduced. So the extended time an originator could hold on to it would only serve larger originators; smaller creators would see their work devalued.
If a company or different individual hires someone to create work for them, the work would transfer from the originator to the company or individual, thus putting it on the faster track automatically.
I think copyright law should be different for originators vs. owning individuals vs. legal entities. Once the legal rights of a work are separated from the originator, the work should pass to the public domain faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Infocom wasn't that punishing, but back in the day a lot of other IF was. It was very common for a while to have some random "guard" who would kill you - this was entirely a random number generator that you would be killed when walking into the room. Players hated it: the only thing you could do is save often and restore and try again, which was a big waste of time (really bad if you were loading from floppy on an 8…
Lucasfilm was already doing very well with no-failure-state graphical adventure games in 1992.