Originally Posted by bridgman
Reply With QuoteIf people just gave copies to friends, there might not be such a stink. The problem is that people put copies up on the server that the whole world can download from.
Let's be honest. If DVD sharing on the Internet were legal, how many people do you think would actually go buy a $20 (or even $5, if we assume prices will drop) copy of Iron Man instead of clicking a few buttons and getting it downloaded for free?
It's not greed to expect that the $200 million you sunk into a project actually gets made back, or to even expect some kind of profit. That's not just business, that's how people survive. Sure, a tiny handful of people make most of that profit, but there's a TON of people that are involved that are making their livings off of the success of those movies. If those movies were no longer financially viable because nobody had pay for them because "all content is free" then all those costume designers, set constructors, make-up artists, audio engineers, lighting engineers, caterers, support crew, assistants, set liasons, effects crews, and the hundreds of other people involved would not be getting paid to make the movies... and you wouldn't get to see them, either.
There is a need for copyright re-reform after Congress ****ed up the copyright law in a major way. The death+70 years part is absolute bullcrap. It ignores how ALL media -- all characters, stories, and ideas -- are formed, which is by building on what came before. It's horrifically broken. But that does not mean that NO copyright is the right idea, either.
You need to let the people who are investing millions of their own cash (or even just hundreds of dollars for small indie projects) to recuperate their expenses and make at least a reasonable profit. That only takes a few years at absolute most, so even a 5-10 year copyright term would keep the business machine running smoothly, but a 0 year copyright term would end most media outside of the crappy little college-kid home project indie movies (imagine: the only movies ever to come out are along the lines of the Blair Witch Project. kill me now.). Yeah, Hollywood pushes out a lot of crap, but they push out quite a number of fantastic movies, too.
And don't get me started on games (my profession). The budgets on these things are massive. The art team alone for a modern big game will burn through a few million dollars just to pay reasonable salaries for the number of people it takes to make all that art content. The programming teams go through what is easily the most difficult programming of all (along with kernel/driver devs and compiler devs), working 60-80 hours a week trying to get the technology finished and out the door before it becomes obsolete. It's HARD, and it's expensive purely due to salaries of the number of people it takes to make a game (and again, quite good but still very reasonable salaries, not like movie stars). Sure, many games could disappear and nobody would shed a tear, but there are a huge number of amazing titles that have been released that have budgets in the dozens of millions of dollars. The sales don't just make executives rich -- the sales are what keep the executives investing, and hence keep letting those artists and programmers and designer keep pushing out creative, fun, wonderful games that are the foundation of much of our youths' media and culture.
Games fall into the software category, and get a little tricky, I will admit. I'm still fine with a 5-10 year copyright term on games. Very few games keep pulling in a profit after 5 years, and while I'm sure Blizzard might fight vehemently against a copyright reform that would make Warcraft or Starcraft public domain, let's be honest: they've made back their investment, they've made a huge profit, and they are in no way hurting for more. I believe people should be able to get rich off their work, but I don't think we need to keep helping the rich get richer at the expense of society by any means. The real problem with software (and hence games) is that simply moving the work into the public domain is not enough. With a movie, you can keep re-encoding and transferfing the content to new media formats as necessary. A game is delivered as low-level machine instructions that rely on a complex set of system interfaces. As those machines and OSes become obsolete, it becomes increasingly difficult to port that machine code to modern systems. Sure, old NES games are safe because the difficulty of writing an NES emulator is relatively low, but a modern Windows Vista + DirectX 10 game is going to be exceedingly difficult to get running on future platforms. Look how long Wine has been around and still can't do it.
Software needs source code to be part of its public domain release. That's the only way to ensure that the impact of its artist relevance is not lost due to the complexities of the encoding of software algorithms for specific systems. This is, in part, one of the reasons for the GPL -- being Free to share is a hell of a lot less important than being Free to keep using the software decades from now when the original system it was written for no longer exists. Unfortunately, the GPL mixes in that Freedom to share, so as a tool for preserving code+media combinations like games, it's borderline useless; it doesn't allow for a real business model that actually works (sure, Red Hat makes a profit... that's approximately the size of the budget for a single triple-A game) in addition to protecting the future Freedom of the work. There is no license or way to really make sure that a game can be released, be proprietary and profitable for say 5 years, and then be open with source and all. The company just has to relicense the work, but there's no incentive to do that. And the fact that many games use licensed proprietary (or even patented) technology means that a company that wants to release a game's source is lot less able to do so. And then the fact that the execs know that they CAN still make a profit 5 years after release makes the less likely to sign off on an open source release.
... short version, we need copyright re-reform, but we also still need copyright. Baby and bath water and all that.
