Nintendo’s Wii U and 3DS online services will shut down in April

I think this might be an accurate perception of creativity that we need to accept instead of fear.

Yes, the majority of creative works are not going to be like Beethoven’s 9th, for example. The majority of them are going to be much closer to my attempt at writing a symphony (not very good, to be clear).

But if just one work out of a million that wouldn’t otherwise exist is great, isn’t that enough? I mean, we’re not forcing people, Clockwork Orange-style, to consume all this bad media!

And that is leaving aside the subjectivity of value in media. Some people even enjoy “bad” media (“so bad it’s good”).

A good chunk of the history of copyright law is publishers finding creative ways to front-run their own authors. Publishers would agree to publish your book in, say, the US - where they'd be bound by US copyright law - and then abscond with it in a country where US copyright didn't apply, and therefore the translations would be a new work wholly divorced from the author's ownership. Modern copyright law is written with the assumption that any unauthorized sale is a lost one, because nobody is going to buy the same work twice unless we take away the one that wasn't paid for correctly.

After copyright law was maximized in this way, publishers pivoted to demanding total control up-front. This created the modern creative industry with hordes of "creative working class"/"below the talent line" professions that wouldn't exist if control were atomized to individual creators negotiating licensing agreements for everything. One quirk of this new business model is that certain legacy rights became far more lucrative. Publishers realized that they could take works off the market and then bring them back to profit off FOMO, or sell 'better' versions of the same work twice anyway.

You still come to the same conclusion I have, though, which is that the problem is term length. Instead of carving out new loopholes, variable term lengths, etc... just make them smaller overall. The publishers won't negotiate with us, why negotiate with them?

Wu-Tang Clan intended this to be a weird kind of performance art, so I won't judge them for this. However, this kind of artificial scarcity is absolute bullshit. The whole reason why we have copyright law is so that creative works are created and made widely available, not to create new asset classes for the ten-figures class to park money in.

Nintendo's argument wouldn't be that they only intended to make so many Wiis. Their argument would be that copyright is about control, they're entitled to control, and if you don't like it you can go fuck yourself[0]. To them, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is just copyright maximalist extremism: yes, if we think we'll make more money selling one copy and denying the rest of the world access to the work, then it's our right, and anything less than our right is equivalent to setting loose a home-invading rapist[1].

[0] This is rhetorical, I do not actually intend for any commenters on HN to do that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Valenti#Valenti_on_new_te...

Wii and DSi were released during the time when digital game stores were just emerging and were not nearly as commonly used as they are now, so, at the time, it felt like they were an afterthought. It was the first generation of consoles that even had digital stores in the first place (as Wii and DSi were a part of the same generation as Xbox360 and PS3, and GameCube/PS2/Xbox [from the prior generation] didn’t have digital stores).

Almost 2 decades later, in the present, digital game stores are the primary method of purchasing games for tons of people, and their share only keeps growing. I think these days, it is a bit more difficult and damaging to just abruptly sunset them the same way it went with Wii and DSi.

We will see how it goes, but I will save my outrage until Nintendo actually does or announces doing such a move. Otherwise, I would just be fighting the windmills created by my projections of what Nintendo might theoretically do in the future.

Love your username btw.

This is yet another case of falsely advertised "ownership", that is really a rental.