Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea

Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
blog.zarfhome.com

They ought to be public domain by now.

In fact, games should have a shorter copyright term since they're harder to preserve and less valuable over time.

I still have a box legally-purchased of Zork games (CDROM editions) and manuals and a copy of Planetfall here, but should I feel any shame about pirating them? I don't think I should.

Counterargument to myself and trivia: All the authors of Zork are still living. (I assume they receive no royalties, though, based on how the game industry generally works).

Just like Mickey Mouse or movies from the 1960s? Or the Lord of the Rings books?

> In fact, games should have a shorter copyright term since they're harder to preserve and less valuable over time.

I don't understand how that's an argument for the length of the copyright either way? If I draw with water-colours on a fallen maple leaf, that is really hard to preserve and because of lack of artistic skill, was never valuable in the first place (mostly due to lack of artistic skill); but I don't thing that should have its own special copyright term length.

Rights to some artifacts being less valuable over time already factors into the severity of punishment when you get caught pirating (if memory serves right): aren't damages based on revenue supposedly lost from pirating?

> Counterargument to myself and trivia: All the authors of Zork are still living. (I assume they receive no royalties, though, based on how the game industry generally works).

That shouldn't make a difference: when they agreed on the deal to sell their rights (assuming they did so), the parties took into account how long the sold copyrights were likely to last.

> I still have a box legally-purchased of Zork games (CDROM editions) and manuals and a copy of Planetfall here, but should I feel any shame about pirating them? I don't think I should.

I don't much like most of current copyright law. Whether you want to feel any shame is up to you, it's a moral decision, not a legal one.

Even today, creation and publication has become a lot easier and cheaper since Shakespeare's times already. But people still like his work, despite a flood of new material having come out since they were first published.

Of course, Shakespeare is exceptional in his cultural cachet.

> We should adapt new copyright policies to not only preserve these works, but to push people to keep innovating.

What do you have in mind? Archiving is already mostly allowed by current copyright policies. And I'm not sure how copyright policies can 'push people to keep innovating'? At most you can try to get out of the way.

Or, if you are being sneaky, you can lobby for arcane and arbitrary censorship rules: after all, limitations breed creativity. Eg East German political jokes were a lot better than West German ones.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo