I find it way more understandable than the massive rant we're all talking about and it makes a way more coherent argument to boot.
My personal opinion is that the best solution (if I specifically had the power to alter history such that CONTU's 1978 final recommendation was different) would have been to establish a sui generis right for software distribution monopolies that lasted 10 years and required source-code escrow. This is cribbed from the existing sui generis right for IC designs. Copyright would be explicitly barred from covering software, but it would still cover embedded creative works within the software.
Under this regime, a videogame would have it's engine code covered by software-rights, but it's art assets covered by ordinary copyright. This would mean that, for example, old videogames would be freed from the constraints of having to relicense middleware and engines. We wouldn't have massive preservation hazards like, say, Adobe Flash Player that wind up rendering entire art scenes inaccessible until manually remade by their copyright holders. By the time the software is abandoned, anything a decade older would be free to preserve and adapt.
(If you're wondering: this is the licensing model id took with their old game engines: once the engine was no longer being licensed, they just dropped GPL'd source code. You still needed to buy DooM if you wanted to play DooM, as the source drop didn't come with any levels or models, but if you just wanted to play with the game engine or build your own game with it, you were free to do so.)
Video codecs are one of the few areas of software where patents are preferred over copyright protection; or at least they were until H.265's three patent pools broke the licensing model and everyone fled to AOM AV1. MPEG is also trying their hand at another royalty-free codec (even though ISO's patent disclosure policies make it difficult to do so). So I wouldn't be surprised if the standard shifts to Free software implementations of unpatented codecs with widespread hardware implementations.
Part of the apprehensiveness people have over patents is that they're much broader. This is also why creative works are born copyrighted (you only need to register to sue) but inventions aren't born patented. You have to apply for patents and prove to multiple countries' patent offices that your invention is novel. But patent offices do a terrible job at this; their incentive is to approve everything so they can collect filing fees and let the victims of patent trolls bear the burden of proving obviousness to a court. That's why I would really prefer some kind of "copyright-lite" to a patents-based approach.
I find it way more understandable than the massive rant we're all talking about and it makes a way more coherent argument to boot.
My personal opinion is that the best solution (if I specifically had the power to alter history such that CONTU's 1978 final recommendation was different) would have been to establish a sui generis right for software distribution monopolies that lasted 10 years and required source-code escrow. This is cribbed from the existing sui generis right for IC designs. Copyright would be explicitly barred from covering software, but it would still cover embedded creative works within the software.
Under this regime, a videogame would have it's engine code covered by software-rights, but it's art assets covered by ordinary copyright. This would mean that, for example, old videogames would be freed from the constraints of having to relicense middleware and engines. We wouldn't have massive preservation hazards like, say, Adobe Flash Player that wind up rendering entire art scenes inaccessible until manually remade by their copyright holders. By the time the software is abandoned, anything a decade older would be free to preserve and adapt.
(If you're wondering: this is the licensing model id took with their old game engines: once the engine was no longer being licensed, they just dropped GPL'd source code. You still needed to buy DooM if you wanted to play DooM, as the source drop didn't come with any levels or models, but if you just wanted to play with the game engine or build your own game with it, you were free to do so.)
Video codecs are one of the few areas of software where patents are preferred over copyright protection; or at least they were until H.265's three patent pools broke the licensing model and everyone fled to AOM AV1. MPEG is also trying their hand at another royalty-free codec (even though ISO's patent disclosure policies make it difficult to do so). So I wouldn't be surprised if the standard shifts to Free software implementations of unpatented codecs with widespread hardware implementations.
Part of the apprehensiveness people have over patents is that they're much broader. This is also why creative works are born copyrighted (you only need to register to sue) but inventions aren't born patented. You have to apply for patents and prove to multiple countries' patent offices that your invention is novel. But patent offices do a terrible job at this; their incentive is to approve everything so they can collect filing fees and let the victims of patent trolls bear the burden of proving obviousness to a court. That's why I would really prefer some kind of "copyright-lite" to a patents-based approach.