Jeremy is now posting game-related pieces here instead of at When Games Suck.
I’ve long been critical of extensive copyright terms for computer software.
In an industry where the shelf-life of most titles is a matter of months, copyright terms of decades simply result in a lot of software being lost. Most profit is made within a shortish window of a game’s release (about eighty percent in the first two weeks), and only a tiny amount is made after the first year or so. After that, companies without any commercial interest in maintaining a title simply abandon it; but those who would pick up the slack and voluntarily preserve the titles find themselves operating in a risky grey area and liable to prosecution at any moment. And every time the US State Department goes a-lobbying for the content industries, those terms – and the punishments for infringements – get longer, and more ridiculous.
Those defending this system argue that even if a piece of software no longer has direct commercial value, they might conceivably revive that game in the future. (Or, in the case of Nintendo, simply keep re-releasing it on each new console it makes.) It might not be worth anything today, but we might be able to sell it to you again as a piece of nostalgia some time in the future.
If it isn’t lost in the meantime, that is.
Consequently, those companies view sights preserving their games for free as unfair competition. Why would anyone pay to run them on a new console if they can run them for free on an emulator?
Microsoft’s new Games Room might provide a hint at the answer.
Why would anyone pay? If you add features. The Games Room sells Xbox users old arcade games for $5 or so each (hard to price exactly because it’s in MS banana dollars) with convenience features like
- keeping track of high scores with your friends on Xbox Live; and
- making it painless to run the game on your HD TV.
I suspect people will pay $5 for the privilege, even though there are countless free arcade emulators out there. Because MS has actually done some work to earn a small amount of cash on the re-release.
We call it “Smome”.
And that’s the kicker – why should governments give companies monopolies they’ll abuse with neglect, that’ll result in the loss of a whole lot of valuable IP over the years, when all companies need to do to make gamers shell out again is a little bit of work? Copyright terms don’t need to be obscenely long, and abandonware sites don’t need to be shut down – if a company wants to profit on an old title, all it has to do is tidy it up and make it easy for a new audience, and they’ll happily pay for the privilege.
It’s a far better solution than expecting the public’s representatives in government to help you destroy your industry’s heritage.
[...] written a new post on the subject of preserving older games from the ravages of extreme copyright laws, as [...]
Good post mate and it’s hard to disagree with
[...] Preservation vs Profit – can copyright laws be more sympathetic to those preserving games, whilst still enabling creators reasonable opportunity to profit from their work? [...]
[...] talked about preserving old games already, and why it’s vital that copyright laws not be used to punish those who are doing the archivists’ job for them [...]