Hear me out. In most countries, copyright laws last until a couple of decades since the death of the creator of the book or whatever. In practice, you are going to have gray hair before the work of an author who died on your day of birth becomes available for public domain.

But that is unfair for video games. Video games age faster than movies and Way faster than books.


Therefore, i believe that the copyright laws for video games should be lowered. If the owners of the IP do not release the game for digital purchase, then after 15 years the game gets released into public domain


I think that would be fair to gamers


Thoughts?

every laws are outdated

Copyright laws for everything is outdated.

And every "If" clause can be exploited: I can release the game for digital purchase with the price of 1 million dollars in an obscure website unsearchable by Google, and I've fulfilled your arbitrary rule to prevent my games from becoming public domain.

It should be lowered, period. No extension. No ifs and buts.

Everything is outdated, even our political system, its no doubt created when people held a cross and bible in their hands. Game industry should make a game about it.

Nice idea, could bring many old titles to Gog. But it will never happen, unfortunately.

Can't really see why it would be different from movies and the like, but I definitely agree copyright has been extended way too far. Disney and the rest have great lobbyists though.

So did you really come up yourself with that unoriginal thought, or did you just happen to read some local "pirate party" manifest and wrote it here? Most of your threads sound like you just read some old article about something and then write it here. No new fresh ideas that you came up with yourself.

There is no right or wrong answer to that kind of question, only different opinions. People pick the answer that would benefit themselves the most, ie. most consumers would pick a shorter time for release to public domain, while content creators and publishers would pick a longer time. But they would be public domain, so you wouldn't have to pay anything for them, right?

Or does "public domain" mean that whoever grabs it first, reclaims the IP rights and it is not public domain anymore?

I disagree.

The creators have the right to sell the game, they also have the right not sell the game, if they choose to do so.

Also, houses and real estate, or even a creative work like paintings, can be passed along in the family for centuries, games only few generations (for all practical purposes), so they are already treated very differently than any other property.

Of course in some cases it sucks when some great games are no longer available anywhere, but laws can't be built around "gamers want to have it".

Having said that, immaterial ownership could be made somehow more clear and easier to manage, so that those who really want to release something as PD can do so. The problem often is that the current owners are some companies, who got that ownership through some merger, bankruptcy, or whatever, and have no interest in managing whatever they have accidentally come to own.

Also companies should be more realistic when it comes to older stuff. Like when Al Lowe's eBay auction of Leisure Suit Larry source code was stopped by a company who has never owned the IP, but according to them, may have some common code in the game engine (of those 30 years old games which have long ago been reverse engineered by fans), that's where it gets ridiculous.

why cant be built around users(gamer)? lots of laws are like that , this can be the same
laws are there to benefit the public

companies need their rights cut back

agree with the ownership should be way more clearer, if it needs lawyers and such to understand what you can copy and what you cant than it is way too complicated , an average person should be able to know the limits of those rights

If there was a rule that games from an author would become public domain after n years of his/her death, then I fear many eager gamers would go on a killing spree (killing techniques learnt from violent games I'm sure), killing as many authors of great games as they can find, just so that they would get those games free a few years later.

Who would make great games after that? No one. Everyone would create just poor games, in order to avoid sudden death.

DRM...

and they can get the account or just money and buy the stuff :P

2FA.