Most software you can buy is older than ten years. Do you want to lose copyright to every part of your product that has been stable? Imagine the useless churn as every company needs to make sure every library they use is substantially altered every couple of years to renew the copyright.
Public domain does not mean public. The source code could remain a trade secret.
More of an obstacle is competition from free past versions - a lot of people would be happy with a 10 year old version of Photoshop or MS Office. That's why I think it should be extendable to 20 years with a hefty fee (but not further, or only with a much heftier fee).
If you do not publish source code, your binaries should be ineligible for copyright protection. There is very little creative work in the binaries themselves. Keeping your actual creative work hidden (especially from things like eventually being part of the public domain) but yet still expecting to receive the privilege of copyright is inequitable. Same thing with only publishing under digital restrictions management.
That's impossible for a great number of reasons, at the very least the fact that the distinction between the source and the binary is irrelevant for copyright and impossible to define in the general case.
The GPL defines the source as the preferable working format to make changes and updates to the program, but you can see how that definition blows up in your face when there is no published source to begin with. "Your honor, that 50MB binary file that has a signature of a GCC compiled program IS the preferred working format for our company; indeed, it was created from temporary text files, but they were deleted as they were deemed unnecessary for a technically advanced company such ourselves. All further updates will be made in assembly language via binary patching, for maximum efficiency".
The distinction is that the binary is a derivative work with no added creativity. I'm not saying this is how things are today, but rather I'm saying this is how things should be. In order to qualify for copyright protection, one should have to put the created work in escrow so it can actually enter the public domain when the copyright expires. If one wishes to control access to their work with other mechanisms that prevent fulfillment of even the very lopsided bargain that was struck with copyright, then one shouldn't get the privilege of copyright.
Also if the best of your "great number of reasons" is fallacious legal reasoning of the type software engineers tend to be drawn to, then I don't think that's much of an argument.
Again, how do you prove my binary that I put in your copyright escrow facility is a derivative work and not a handcrafted assembly program? Sorry, but you are just uttering nonsense.
Do you think the idea of binary analysis does not exist? Or that courts don't have a long history of deciding questions of judgement? The problem is also fundamentally quite similar to proving that a published binary is/isn't a derivative work of someone else's work.
Also handcrafted assembly isn't sufficient for your argument, but rather one would have to directly write a binary with a hex editor. Show me any binary larger than say 1 MB that was written with a hex editor. So really the burden of proof would be on anyone claiming that a large binary is direct creation.
> the burden of proof would be on anyone claiming that a large binary is direct creation
That's not how any of this works. Once I've submitted my binary to the escrow, then it's an original work worthy of copyright until challenged. If someone breaks my copyright, I simply assert my originality and get an injunction against it by default. If the adversary claims my work is a derivative, then the legal burden is on them to prove it - because they are the ones rising it as defense against infringement. So I've already quashed 90% of adversaries by this point just by legal intimidation.
Also, you are attacking a strawman version of this problem. In practice, what will be submitted to the repository are binary object files for the core proprietary sections that are unlikely to be changed, for example the file format definitions to preclude interoperability. Anything else can be source, the final linker step is automated etc. The market will also offer tools for binary randomization and compiler signature obfuscation.
So you are left with a technological arms race that needs to be settled in court, on a case by case basis, using expert testimony where the burden of proof belongs to the infringer. It's just absurd to think anything like this could ever work in practice to promote source availability, or there would be public benefits to put such a highly litigious system in place.
> That's not how any of this works. Once I've submitted my binary to the escrow, then it's an original work worthy of copyright until challenged
Are you referring to some existing system? Because otherwise we're discussing in the abstract how this could work. And it would be straightforward for the copyright office to have a rule prima facie rejecting machine-executable binaries being claimed as original works, unless compelling proof were submitted that it had been directly created. Because as I said, show me any substantial executable that has been directly created with a hex editor.
The idea of a company choosing a few critical parts that they then (honestly or dishonestly) claim as original binary works is interesting. But note that this still would go a long way towards making the overall work part of the public domain when it expired - such blobs are highly unlikely to contain references to libraries with API churn and whatnot. And even if they somehow do, since they are small enough to be directly worked on, they can be directly fixed.
Then those who wish profit without sharing will just offer SaaS instead of binaries. Exactly as they do with a significant amount of copyleft-licensed software today.
Pulling back copyright doesn't necessarily force people to share -- people can also keep secrets. A primary purpose of IP law is to encourage sharing.
The point is that if it is not actually working to encourage sharing, as is the case with DRM, compilation, or SaaS, then there is no longer a justification.
Hopefully it does enter the public domain, and I'd be happy if that happened much sooner than it does today. But public domain rights are certainly not needed for people to enjoy the arts. Basically all popular media is enjoyed without the right of people to republish them. Ask anyone to list famous American media, and they will mostly list copyrighted works.
Sure. I think our disconnect is that I don't think it's appropriate to use the word "share" to describe this. Exchanging something for money is not "sharing", it's business. So when you said "the primary purpose of [imaginary property] law is to encourage sharing", I took that to be referencing when a work enters the public domain after the exclusive copyright term.
And my overall point is that a work that has been compiled/DRMed/etc will never enter (be shared with) the public domain even after the copyright term expires - rather it will still remain subject to the technical protections. And so I don't think it's at all appropriate to use the word "sharing" to describe such works.
The type of "sharing" that copyright was intended to facilitate is "make it part of the corpus of cultural works enjoyed by the people" in contrast to "art is something that rich people commission and then hoard in a palace". You can disagree with my choice of word if you want, it's orthogonal to the point I was making above -- people can access more media today than ever, art and culture is flourishing. Copyright (in general) is observably fulfilling the purpose it was intended to serve. Kings do not sit in their palace and listen to Taylor Swift and watch Marvel movies, the people do.
> compiled/DRMed/etc will never enter (be shared with) the public domain even after the copyright term expires - rather it will still remain subject to the technical protections.
You could argue da Vinci did the same with his underdrawings. And many other artists have similarly not shared their sources. You're making more of an argument about a right of collaboration, which is not only a completely different argument, it is the opposite of what copyright attempts to do, which is to give rights to the original artist.
If you're making the suggestion that artists should be compelled to share sources, I disagree and think that is extremely shortsighted. Sharing should be done voluntarily by the artist, and if they don't want to share their sources and methods, they shouldn't be required to. In absence of that right, chilling effects on artistic freedom are an obvious outcome. I love FOSS licensing, but those types of arrangements should be voluntarily chosen by authors, not compelled by the force of law.
Then isn't your argument just the standard imaginary property maximalist argument in support of creating a unilateral property right? All of that access/enjoyment/whatever you're talking about can still occur under the complete control of the publisher. Whereas copyright law at least purported to strike a balance between those receiving the artificially-created property rights, and the rest of society having created it for them.
And no I'm not talking about a right of collaboration. "Collaboration" implies the original author is still alive and even participates with some back and forth. I'm talking about the ability to simply use creative works after they're supposed to have become part of the public domain - not still locked behind the non-expiring technical block of digital restrictions management, not unusable due to API churn, etc.
StarCraft 2 is still competitive 14 years later. I’m not sure I’d personally have an issue with it becoming public domain but the game is still well-stewarded today.
Even Brood War is still satisfactorily supported 26 years after its release. Though I think that’s definitely long enough to consider the option of public domain.
#1 - It was LAN first, offline, distributed as Shareware. The forgiving netcode and leniency of distribution ended up with it as a standard install on any Internet Cafe on the planet in the early 00s. It also hit Korean culture at exactly the right moment for it to go so popular as to become a cultural touchpoint. There's a Malcolm Gladwell book in there somewhere - it literally became South Korea's unofficial national sport [1]
#2 - It was subject to a high-profile remaster as part of Blizzard's "Classic Games division", who also did rushed and careless remasters of Diablo 3 and Warcraft 3. The post-release monetization here is quite telling, as it was basically all aimed at the Korean market - popular South Korean StarCraft casters and Children's TV hosts providing the available announcer packs, with the main cosmetic being a chibi-'cartoonised' version of the standard asset pack.
The question is if that stewardship would be ruined by making it free to play the offline, single player version. More generally, would Starcraft2 and similar titles still would have been made if Blizzard knew it only had 10 years to recoup the costs?
The copyright lobby frames that question in a profoundly toxic way: are there any marginal profits that can still be milked for our IP portfolio? Of course there are, you can milk pennies even from "Steamboat Willie" and Chaplin movies, but that doesn't mean we should have perpetual copyright.
What matters is the first few years where 90% of the profits are made, that's what motivates the creator; motivating the creator enough to create and "promoting the useful arts" are the purpose of copyright, there is no "natural" right to one's ideas and creation. It's a social and political compromise for the good of all.
Would Blizzard have made Starcraft 2 at all if they had predicted the paradigm-shift towards microtransactions and cosmetics, with the 'game' itself as a loss-leader? This basically forced their hand to make the game free-to-play 7 years into the initial release cycle.
Indeed, Blizzard developer Jason Hall previously revealed that a single cosmetic skin for your horse in WoW made more money than the entirety of sales from Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.
The only reason that Starcraft2 is alive at all is the late-cycle introduction of a co-op mode, with microtransaction gated cosmetics, 'commanders', and commentator voicepacks. The online is all but dead, with almost no moderation and stewardship, and plagued by maphackers at all tiers. Even something as basic as the EU MMR brackets for tier ranking are completely broken for nearly a year.
FWIW starcraft 2 is free to play, just not “offline”. And only one single player campaign is free, the other 2.5 costs money. Continuing revenue is primarily generated via cosmetic sales.
It’s had 2 subsequent major changes with massive differences in units, game balance, and pacing … to the point of almost being three different games. The most recent and current era is called “Legacy of the Void” and is about 9 years old. Since then changes have been fairly conservative, mainly just unit stats changes. Though some “units” like infested terrans have been removed in the past nine years, which could be considered semi-major/semi-minor.
It gets regular balance updates. They've slowed quite a bit, but there was one in the last few months, and I believe the one before that was like 2 years or so.
There's also the matchmaking, which is a service they provide.
The issue here isn't so much, "Are Blizzard allowed to charge for SC2?", but "What would happen if Blizzard pulled the plug on SC2 servers?" It would very much be a shame if a game like that were suddenly ripped out of the culture.
The patches are for the Ranked multiplayer - the balance patches are literally to nerf dominating pro-players who found meta-breaking strategies. They're not designed to serve their core userbase and end make the game less interesting and more frustrating for anyone other than the top 64 Worldwide bracket.
The recent resurge of interest and player activity based on a wildly unbalanced and broken but fun 'Broodwar Units in SC2' mod is testament to this [1].
Does it? For single player games you can just still use and distribute the original, unpatched version.
I agree that there is lock-in with online multiplayer games, but it's more on the game servers than the distributed content. So it's only marginally a copyright issue.
I think the person above you meant “If the copyright clock for the original release keeps getting reset every time an update drops…” and you’re talking about “If each updated version gets its own copyright clock upon release”.
Copyright (and patent) law generally follows the latter in western nations, but there’s nuance because third-party derivative works can easily contain elements which the original IP owners might feel are “derivatives” of newer innovations from subsequent updates, even if the third-party feels they only based their work on the original release.
There’s often a lot of room for reasonable minds to disagree, and it can be difficult to create quality third-party derivatives which avoid any similarities to newer versions of the IP.
Think of creating a modern representation of Mickey Mouse. If you create a new version of Mickey Mouse based on the 1928 version in Steamboat Willy, it is difficult to make something that looks relatively contemporary without creating something that looks arguably derivative of the 1953 work “The Simple Things” or the 1940 work “Fantasia”. You could play it safe by using something that looks like a carbon copy of Steamboat Willy, but if your personal artistic vision involves a more contemporary art style, it is understandably difficult to make it unambiguously not a derivative of more recent depictions that are still under copyright.
For the Starcraft 2 example - in a thought experiment where the 14 year old “Wings of Liberty” version is now public domain but the 11-year old “Heart of the Swarm” expansion pack and current 9-year old “Legacy of the Void” version of StarCraft 2 are both still under copyright. You want to make a new single-player campaign which takes place after LotV and doesn’t retcon any canon events (many of which are still copyrighted). A careful creator would probably understand they couldn’t make any references to Amon being reborn and defeated by Artanis, because that plot is from the still-copyrighted Legacy of the Void. But would you be able to write a storyline that contains any acknowledgements that Zeratul died? (Zeratul died at the hand of his friend, Artanis, due to some of Amon’s mind-control machinations during that same LotV campaign)
I think a creator would have to be careful precisely how their storyline acknowledges Zeratuls death. If its just a few characters generically lamenting the loss of a great/controversial man…probably fine? What if the loss of their friend Zeratul was specified to have occurred “in battle” with no other specifics about the battle? I have no clue. If your storyline includes a tiny quip about Artanis dealing with unspecified guilt/shame over Zeratul’s unspecified death … then that might be technically infringing until LotV falls out of copyright, because some people may feel that it’s specific enough to be definitely derived from the LotV campaign.
Note that all three of these similar examples are where a creator does in fact intend to create a derivation of copyrighted materials to create a sequel campaign to the uncopyrighted work which is still “in-canon” with respect to still-copyrighted works. Its just exploring where is the line of “how much derivation can you morally and/or ethically and/or legally get away with before at least one reasonable person genuinely feels you have elements that are unambiguously derived from still-copyrighted content?”
For “legally” getting away with something you have to consider the costs of successfully defending yourself against lawsuits from notoriously overly-litigious corporations like Disney/Nintendo/Blizzard. Are you so safe that you could get a summary dismissal or is there any reason it could qualify for awards of punitive damages under Anti-SLAPP laws?
You make good arguments about derivative works on public domain works, where some other derivative works are still in copyright. That's probably difficult to maneuver legally.
However if the goal is to just distribute the original public domain work legally, then that's easy and convenient. That alone would be hugely beneficial for games.
The copyright terms are set by lobbyist and corporations in a political process where the public interest has no representation.