While in the past doing a reprint of a book, movie or game was expensive and wasn’t worth if something wasn’t popular, now selling something on a digital store has only a small initial cost (writing descriptions and graphics) and after that there’s nothing more. So why publishers are giving up on free money?
I thought to those delisting reasons:
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Artificial scarcity. The publisher wants to artificially drive more sales by saying that’s a limited time sale. For example that collection that included sm64. super Mario Galaxy and super Mario sunshine on switch. The greedy publisher essentially said “you only have 6 months to get this game, act now” and people immediately acted like "wow, better pay $60 for this collection of 3 old games, otherwise they’ll be gone forever!” otherwise they would have been like “uhm, i liked super Mario sunshine but $60 for a 20 years old game? I’ll think about that”
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Rights issues. For books the translation rights are often granted for a limited time; same for music in games; or if it’s using a certain third party intellectual property. Publisher might decide that the cost for renewing the license is too high compared to projected sales, while the copyright owner instead still wants an unrealistic amount of money in a lump sum instead of just royalties. Example is Capcom DuckTales remastered, delisted because Disney is Disney.
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Not worth their time. Those sales need to be reported to governments to pay taxes and for a few sales, small publishers might prefer to close business rather to pay all the accounting overhead. Who’s going to buy Microsoft Encarta 99?
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Controversial content: there are many instances of something that was funny decades ago but now is unacceptable. Publisher doesn’t want to be associated with that anymore
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Compatibility issues. That game relied on a specific Windows XP quirk, assumed to always run as admin, writing their saves on system32, and doesn’t work on anything newer. The code has been lost and they fired all the devs two weeks after the launch, so they’re unable to patch it.
In all those cases (maybe except 5), the publisher and the copyright owners decided together to give up their product, so it should be legally allowed to pirate those products.
If I want to read a book that has been pulled from digital stores and is out of print, the only way to do is:
- Piracy (publisher gets $0 from me)
- Library (publisher gets $0 from me)
- Buying it from an ebay scalper that has a “near mint” edition for $100 (publisher gets $0 from me)
And say that I really want to play super Mario sunshine. Now the only way is to buy it used, even if they ported it to their latest game console and it would literally cost them nothing to continue selling it. But if I buy it used, Nintendo gets the exact same amount of money that they would if I downloaded it with an “illegal” torrent.
In short: they don’t want the money for their IP? Then people that want to enjoy that IP should be legally allowed to get it for free
How about:
If a item isn’t available for sale, the copyright is abandoned and now public domain.
The items would just be kept on sale at hugely inflated prices
Would still be better than today in my opinion
I’m sure we could legislate in such a way that says if it’s purposely priced artificially high to prevent sales, then the same IP abandonment applies.
No you couldn’t, unless you enact government controlled prices for all media.
Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.
we do this for standards and patents: for a patent to form part of a standard, it must be granted on fair and reasonable, non-discriminatory grounds
it’s different in that the party is entering into that agreement voluntarily, however we use language like “fair and reasonable” already
And you can, in fact, regulate market prices.
But that doesn’t make it feasible or convenient. Is a 250 USD collector’s edition from Limited Run on a game that originally cost 15 bucks “fair and reasonable”? I mean, they sell. People buy them. People buy them even when the cheaper option is still available.
Digital goods have wildly diverging prices. Laws take intent into account all the time, but how do you take intent into account on something that is agreed upon via supply and demand if your goal is to guarantee supply?
People are being too simplistic here and assuming that things are either copyrighted or on the public domain, which is already not how this works. You don’t need to set a killswitch for public domain transition based on whether something is being monetized, just a fair scenario for unmonetized redistribution. If you make it so people sharing and privately copying things at their own cost is fine but selling is reserved for the copyright holder it doesn’t matter how the holder prices things. Plus that’s in practice already how we all operate anyway.
have you ever tried to buy out of print media online?
What about it?
I like the alternative better of “support or opensource it” as it can be expanded to nearly any product. You stop selling your game and thus don’t provide support to those that bought it? Better opensource that shit bud. You made some dropship product that sold 100k units but stop supporting it a year later because $reasons? Tough shit, opensource it bucko!
Things like Amazon’s Astro business robots being bricked after a year would be much less interesting to companies. There are probably also a whole lot of devices out there that aren’t supported anymore and just junk, but could be serviced if they were opensource.
I really like the idea, Im currently struggling with the implementation. There are so many issues to cover:
- who enforces the law? It needs to be worldwide (at least for some products)
- how are mergers handled?
- what to do if the company goes bancrupt or is closed otherwises? Who will outsource the code where? And who will be accountable
- does that also count for private people? (e.g.: if I take a picture, I own the copyright for it, do I lose my copyright if I don’t sell the picture? Or does it only count if I sold it once? What if I sold it exclusively to someone?)
- probably more
There are so many loopholes which corps will use to get out of it :-(
yeah the concept is great, but open sourcing often takes a lot of work. closed source code often relies on proprietary libraries etc and you can’t just publish them, or perhaps there are secrets embedded somewhere - even it source control history
the concept is great, the implementation faces some pretty big logical challenges
yeah the concept is great, but open sourcing often takes a lot of work
Why do you say that?
closed source code often relies on proprietary libraries etc
I don’t see how that matters. If you write code that depends on something and opensource it, your product might not be buildable/compilable/usable without it, but your code is still opensource, and that’s what matters. The same thing will go for the library: if the person/company that made the library stops supporting it, it has to become opensource as well.
or perhaps there are secrets embedded somewhere - even it source control history
That’s up to you to clean it up. It’s just like publishing any repository online.
who enforces the law?
There are many ways to solve this, but you could have a regulatory body that does spot checks itself or where companies must register their products and their end of life / end of support dates with links (or whatever the law stipulates) to the source code, schematics, designs, etc. . Companies that don’t abide by it get slapped with a fine (if the law is well-written it’s a percentage of global revenue), repeatedly, until they are taken to court.
It needs to be worldwide (at least for some products)
Doesn’t have to. Any goods imported into a zone have to fulfill it, otherwise they are not allowed. There many regulations for products to be imported, so this would be one of them. If some small country introduced it, they might see their imports drop, but if the EU introduced it, even Apple would have to abide by it. See EU’s Digital Markets Act or the CE Marking.
how are mergers handled?
I’d assume the way they always are? If the end result is a product being discontinued or unsupported --> opensource.
what to do if the company goes bancrupt or is closed otherwises? Who will outsource the code where? And who will be accountable
Not sure why this would be different from current proceedings. When your company goes bankrupt it doesn’t wipe the slate clean, nor are you absolved of all laws. If that were the case then a company could kill people, wave the bankrupt “get out of jail free” card and move on.
This is also where insurances come in. You’d have to be insured against the loss of your product designs, code, schematics, etc. as losing them would mean inability to abide by the law.does that also count for private people? (e.g.: if I take a picture, I own the copyright for it, do I lose my copyright if I don’t sell the picture? Or does it only count if I sold it once? What if I sold it exclusively to someone?)
I would ask back: if you sell something on ebay that you designed and made, do you legally have provide support for it? If not, then this wouldn’t apply to you. If it does, then the law applies to you.
I don’t think you need to put something in the public domain immediately. And obviously that would immediately destroy any protections for physical media (in that the moment a physical book is published and sold through it immediately becomes “not available for sale”).
But you can make exceptions for free distribution that work both online and physically. Libraries existed long before the Internet did. You can enable private distribution of free copies without fully removing the right of the copyright holder to own an exclusive right to sell an item, which is fundamentally different than something being in the public domain.
I’m fine with you being able to sell a copy of the Iliad but not one of Metal Gear Solid 4. That’s not to say putting a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4 up for download should be illegal.
that the moment a physical book is published and sold through it immediately becomes “not available for sale”
Because that specific book now has a new owner who can keep it or sell it as they see fit. Like people still do with physical games.
If you mean that a book becomes generally unavailable when it’s between printings, though, you’re wrong.
Publishers overlap print runs and begin selling the first paperbacks before they’ve sold out the initial hard cover prints PRECISELY to avoid the situation you seem to think happens with every single book.
You’re missing the point, though. The concern copyright has isn’t the physical book. If we were operating on physical books we would be fine with 20th century copyright.
The concern is the difference between the physical book and the contents of the book. You can make a book and send it off into the world as a physical object and have no new copies being printed while that book remains physically stocked in stores where you can go buy it.
What happens to that book in the interim? Is it okay to republish the contents of the book?
And yeah, sure, media that is constantly selling often has multiple prints. This scenario still happens when they stop making new prints, though, since some stock won’t have sold through. And plenty of media is made on limited runs, too. Monthly magazines, collector’s editions…
Hell, what happens to movies once they are out of cinemas and not printed in physical media or available for streaming in your scenario? Do you give up copyright if there isn’t an overlap? That seems harsh. TV shows that are broadcast once live but not available on streaming or physical media until the season is over?
Also, somebody below raises a great point: what happens to the copyright of things not commercialized by companies? If you make a picture and don’t sell it, does that mean I can use it? Sell it myself? Because people around here seem… not okay with that one.
They should be legally allowed to be pirated anyways
My Hypothetical Policy would be:
If a thing doesn’t show up in a store for a time totaling 5 years, it should be able to be freely copied without repercussion.
So if you publish a thing, you need to keep selling it. Once you pause the sales, timer starts to tick, until you resume sales (in good faith, no intentionally limiting quantities of items), whenever you pause sales again, timer begins to tick again, once the 5 year timer is up, no more protections.
And theres also the normal copyright expiration to factor in as well. (Which I think should be somewhere around 10-20 years after initial publication, no extensions)
I think this is quite a fair policy.
Edit: Also, they can’t set the price to more than 150% of the average pricing of the item. (Almost forgot this loophole of intentionally “selling” the item at high prices but not actually wanting to continue selling)
Lots of impractical wishful thinking in this one. Laws don’t work very well when you have to add “but you need to be nice about it”.
This is a very hard problem to solve for that reason, but in fairness, it’s not like the current implementation tries very hard or is working very well. It’s just that finding a working solution would be hard even if that wasn’t the case.
I don’t think that a random person on Lemmy is going to be able to write a law that has zero issues. They’re just suggesting an example and government should build on that and make it complete.
Yeah, of course. Writing laws is hard.
Which is my point.
This one is way harder than average, if anything.
Additional opinion: piracy is always morally good if the reason for your piracy is inability to buy something. That includes when the item is delisted, as in the OP, but also when you can’t afford it.
[I agree with the OP by the way. Specificities should be ironed out, but in spirit it would be a good law.]
Happy cake day!
Thanks!
Yet another opinion. Everything published goes into public domain, copyright only gives commercial (and public?) distribution rights
It’s hard to get this right, but I do think the system needs fundamental reform.
I think the principle that only the copyright holder is able to profit from the media for a period of time is pretty sound, although there are also questions about creatives having no say in the copyright of the things they create if they are working for a corporation, which I also think need adjustment.
The real issue is what happens to other types of distribution. In practice, private non-profit use of media is already commonplace and bans aren’t particularly enforceable. And then there is the derivative use, that is inconsistently supported and held to weird, arbitrary standards created ad-hoc for a handful of big platforms.
By the letter of the law, Google is by far the biggest pirate on the planet, it’s just so big that unwritten rules have been created about it and now effectively the global copyright law has more to do with Google’s detection algorithms than any kind of enforcement. We clearly need a better alternative.
I have a better idea. Define piracy as profiting off of the creative work of another without compensation. Piracy for personal use is theft only in the amount it was offered for sale. For torrenting it could be argued you have stolen 1 copy plus your seed ratio. However, lots of content isn’t even available for legal purchase, only subscription for viewing. Owning a copy of this content is not piracy because it did not interfere with the sale of the item (since it’s not offered for sale). Therefore, an act of media preservation is theft by this definition, but the amount or value of that theft is $0, because it’s not currently offered for sale.
Piracy for personal use is theft only in the amount it was offered for sale.
copying is not and cannot be theft
Once you put something out into the world, it’s no longer yours really.
-Bandit Heeler
