I don’t understand why these legacy game license owners don’t start licensing out their old games on the cheap to game services like Apple Arcade or Steam to get extra revenue on them. They learned that lesson in video streaming and it gave a ton of mostly dead IP new life.
That’s a great frickin idea…never crossed my mind
Because there’s a chance Sintendo will release another port of that one obscure NES game that absolutely nobody is buying their online service for on their next Gen console. If they license any of their games, how can they rape the consumer financially? Can’t you think of the hungry employees at this small indie company that is going bankrupt because little 5 year old Timmy downloaded a copy of a game on N64 Sintendo doesn’t even have the rights to anymore?
/S
Probably, in the same way Steamboat Mickey is.
Just part of the whole valuing property, in this case intellectual, over actual labor and people that our species loves so fucking much.
Imagine if IP from drugs to technology to fiction had a 5-10 year max window before other people could work with and expand on it. It would be a better world for most.
Oh you only get to make exclusive income on that thing you came up with for SEVERAL YEARS OF YOUR LIFE before you need to contribute in other ways to keep making money, boo fucking hoo. Where’s the sympathy for people working 2 jobs, burning their life up to meet basic needs, who don’t get several years of passive income on an idea that popped into their head 4 years ago.
Drugs do use patents with reasonable time limits.
For some reason they are allowed to make miniscule changes and get new patents, but the old ways are then available for generics.
It would be great if copyright switched back to reasonable time limits. Media companies would still live on as repositories that could sell access to high quality source copies and remasters to make income. They would only lose the control over other people using what is already in the public domain.
In the US or Germany: Straight to jail
In Japan: Your organs are now the property of Nintendo to repay this heinous crime.
Rest of the world: it depends.
I thought there was a site that let at most x number of people play games where x is the number of physical copies the site creator had on hand for that game. The industry doesn’t like this either, but the industry can go fuck itself. They’ve already practically taken away the public domain by making the period for copyright expiration too damn long.
Not as long as copyright holders believe it is better to sit on a property unused than sllow it to expose future generations to the technologies that gave birth to their current way of life
I guess Antstream is kind of such a library? (Just answering the question in the headline. I haven’t read the article.)
Depends if it can go into public domain, I have no knowledge on copyright law so Im just guessing
If copyright law is involved then you’re looking at 70 years after the author’s death or 95 years depending on which expires first for it to be public domain and only the original iteration is released into the public domain. That’s for the USA and different countries have different laws and I’d imagine that would complicate things massively as an online library would have to be compliant with various laws of different countries
So take Mickey Mouse for example he’s now in the public domain but only in his original form in the Steamboat Willie cartoon, anything that uses something more recent than that like his red shorts for example would be taken down.
Who counts as the author of a game? The publisher? The dev team?
In works for hire like that, it’s a different standard. Basically 95 years from publication.
deleted by creator
Maybe ever, but currently…?
After the expiry of the copyright i assume.
