Even better would be broad copyright reforms. Fair Use needs to be expanded and clarified. History has shown players are able to keep games alive themselves by emulators, reverse engineering, custom servers, etc. Expand Fair Use to say that these things are protected if needed to keep the game functional.
Fair use is already pretty good, but we shouldn't need to rely on it to preserve older games. The reform we need is a dramatically shorter term for copyrights. All older games should be completely out of copyright.
I'd add better handling of copy-protected titles as well. If a game wants the benefit of copyright, they need to make a version of it without DRM available in escrow (held by some entity like the Library of Congress) for when the copyright expires.
One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock even if the work is in the public domain, so that needs to be accounted for as well.
>One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock
My understanding is that the Library of Congress has the authority to designate situations in which it is legal to remove DRM on electronic copies of books you have purchased, such as to run it through a TTS program for those that are visually impaired. Does this not apply to other art mediums?
I wish, but shortening existing copyright terms would be legally very thorny. It would run into Takings Clause challenges and violate treaties the US has signed.
If the government banned fracking it wouldn't need to compensate owners of oil rich land when it becomes worthless. Devaluing property is not the same as taking it.
And the legal basis is completely different, copyrights are created as an artificial right in the Copyright Clause, given for a limited time and purpose. They are not property in the traditional sense and Congress has absolute power over them.
The fact is, copyright extensions have served corporate interests well and is likely to continue to get extended even more, and more draconian, given how many decompilation and recomps have been done recently.
Yes, obviously, that's why terms have been extended so far. My point is that, for the same reason, existing legal structures make this much harder to undo than to do.
All the relevant treaty clauses were strong-armed into those treaties by the US - no other country gives a shit about DMCA 1201 except insofar as the US forced them to.
Oh don’t worry. If the US can bail on the treaty signed with Ukraine and repeatedly threaten to not honor NATO commitments, then this is small-fry stuff.
The incumbents would probably file lawsuits, but would they win?
If Congress can set copyright terms retroactively, why can't they set copyright terms retroactively?
What happens if they do the thing where you have to file for a renewal every year and the first 14 years are free and automatic, but then the renewal fee starts at $1000 and doubles for every year over 14?
> violate treaties the US has signed.
This is just an excuse the industry uses after bribing their way into some documents that can be renegotiated at any time. The US has been the ones pushing for this nonsense to begin with, so if they stopped, most other countries would be happy to enter into a different treaty. And the remaining ones would be the ones with the most to lose if they were the only ones to not sign onto the new agreement at the point when the US and most others pull out of the corrupt one.
This administration would just say that it is in the national security interest of the US to do the thing. Judges are wary to restrict the POTUS prerogatives relating to national defense, so they won't challenge it.
It's the dumbest and most obvious weakness of our system of government and it will never be fixed.
Publication of the source code should be required for software to be copyrightable and copyright should expire much sooner. It makes no sense for a binary to fall into the public domain 70 years later.
"Local copy of Qwen-3.8, you have your own machine. I'm putting a windows game binary in your home directory. Decompile the game and rewrite in Rust. Appropriately document source code and make full testing framework. Make sure any plugins are compatible with the original game. If there are any protections or preventions like DRM, exclude those features."
You seem to be approaching this from the perspective of “I want to play this game” when there is more value to the original source code than simply being able to run something similar.
People are literally doing it right now since about a month ago, and the industries are losing their minds. Most notably some guy just decompiled all the Adobe products, made them free to use and without bullshit, and published them under the name ArtCraft. There've also been successful "port this Mario game to a Skyrim mod", "port this PS5 game to run on PC", and so on.
In the upcoming lawsuit, Adobe is either about to destroy the AI industry by collecting massive damages, or Anthropic is about to destroy the software industry by effectively making software non-copyrightable. There's no other outcome.
And making your software SaaS won't help because the AI tools can infer a server-side implementation based on enough examples of behaviour.
From what I've gathered, and I'm still feeling like I'm missing something, most people don't seem to be doing that. They seem to pass the binary in, say to decompile it, and out the other side is something that looks similar but not exact. https://youtu.be/qFEuYUfauNY .
On the recent WAN show LTT said they tried the recent Photoshop clones and they were buggy, feature missing messes. If they were truly reverse engineer decompiles (minus needing a subscription) they would work just as well. But they don't so they're not.
That's the view you hear from doomers - the view you hear from boosters is that it's basically Adobe quality. I haven't tried it so I don't know which is actually true.
I also heard a lot of people rave about Affinity and all kinds of Lightroom alternatives, but so far I found it all terribly disappointing and am back to CS5 and Lightroom 4 (because I own those on disc)… There is a lot of useless hype around.
No chance the AI industry gets destroyed. China wouldn't care if Adobe somehow sued and won (so really it would just be America destroying its economy), and this point nvidia could buy Adobe and shut it down mid lawsuit just to make it go away.
I've reverse engineered multiple proprietary things around the house thanks to a local Qwen-3.8 running under Strata and Hermes.
Some have been USB, some have been BT, and some were android binaries. I explain what's going on, how they should work, investigate, and write compatibility layers or hack the binaries to do my thing.
And right now, we're seeing flagship consoles getting emulators and compatibility layers to run the games on computers. And those are machine assisted as well.
Just go look at how bad Sony fucked up with 'no ownership of PS5 games' heh. Everybody's attacking and downloading and pirating PS5. LLM tooling makes it not just doable, but actually easy.
With the right harness, it's doable today. Obviously quality will be what you end up actually spending time manually testing and what surfaces when testing this, because agents won't be able to even get 80% there without strict hand-holding. But with the right individual driving the right harness, definitely doable.
20 years is short enough for someone to wait for it to expire rather than pay a licensing fee. You ideally want it long enough that someone can benefit from their work, without being so long that society is unduly prohibited from creating derivative works.
If you look back at what was created in the past, 30 years seems like an absolute minimum, 50 years seems about right -- perhaps with a registration requirement for the full term so that works with an unclear publication date and ownership can be easily traced. That would mean the film Logan's Run would just be leaving copyright protection now.
For context, I believe in the UK, there is a 50-year term for broadcasts, computer-generated works, Crown Copyright (125 years or 50 from first commercial publication if within 75 years of creation), and certain classes of films. There's a schedule here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-...
50 years is insane for software. There may be 1 or 2 versions of 1976 software that people still buy today, although I’m skeptical. 30 years is also far too long; same deal for 1996 versions of software. Who’s buying new copies of Windows 95 today? 20 years seems about right.
Continuing down that line, Windows Vista turns 20 in a few weeks, and is equally irrelevant. IIRC even the default Windows 7 installer has issues with AHCI, so your SATA SSD won't even work correctly out of the box, much less NVMe. And then of course there will be no video or networking drivers for modern hardware.
10 years seems closer to obsolescence, and that's for productivity software.
> You only would license something that’s already successful.
That's the point. Someone finds something not successful, sees that they could make a lot of money off it, takes it for their own, has copyright over their new content. The labels you're talking about would gladly just mine what was released ${term}+1 years ago.
The point is that everything is copyrighted by default, unless you release it into the public domain.
> Right now if I want to sample a song made 50 years ago I still have to pay thousands to license it even if everyone involved has long since left.
And that's right. Why should someone else get to make money off someone else's work without compensating them for it, if they haven't released it to the public domain?
> The labels you're talking about would gladly just mine what was released ${term}+1 years ago.
This will happen regardless. We've already built a massive wealth of recordings over the last 100 years that, if the law is followed, will eventually become available for free use. Unless the idea is to lock it up forever in order to keep present artists from having to compete?
But 20+ year old culture largely loses relevance. Even in a world where people pay for access to everything via streaming, the most popular music from 2006 is basically unknown to gen alpha. Only the very coolest people are still listening to Jibbs' masterpiece, "Chain Hang Low." In fact, one might argue that if it did cause people to retain their connection to previous culture, that such "mining" would be a positive (indeed, Jibbs could not have produced what he did without standing on the shoulders of his predecessors).
If the thing wasn’t successful in 20 years, someone else taking it and making it successful will do more good to the original creator than letting it languish in obscurity until they die and then someone takes it anyway.
> 20 years is short enough for someone to wait for it to expire rather than pay a licensing fee.
“Someone” might, but most people won’t. Do you think studios are going to announce the next blockbuster and most people will be like “eh, I’ll just wait 20 years, maybe I’ll have a kid and raise them until adulthood to pass the time”?
Portal is going to be 20 next year. I bought Portal 1 and 2 for a couple of bucks like a decade ago already.
I’d even say 20 years default is two long. Especially because there are things which are just abandoned. Make it shorter and add limited options to renew for limited time.
You're assuming copyright exists to protect studios first. No, it protects everyone equally. A studio can't take a 20 year old story and make a blockbuster out of it without licensing the story. That is precisely what would happen with a short-term copyright system. It won't be that studios will wait 20 years, they'll just look predominantly at 20 year old publications to see what just became available.
The studio doesn't need to, they're powerful enough to change it enough to be legally distinct and advertise it enough that people forget the original.
That is a laughable fantasy. It protects those with money and legal resources to enforce it, and that’s it.
I’m reminded of the case where some late night show played a video they found online as part of a segment, then later were able to copyright strike the original video. The original creator, being an individual, had no recourse.
> A studio can't take a 20 year old story and make a blockbuster out of it without licensing the story.
Again, laughable. Disney has done it but was never sued for being too big. It was done to Harlan Ellison too (who did spend years fighting it and won). Ripoffs happens frequently, you don’t hear about them that much precisely because studios in general know to rip off those without the means to put up a fight.
This seems tough-to-unworkable for some games. I'll use World of Warcraft^1 as an example.
WoW launched in an essentially unfinished state. Molten Core, the first 40-man raid, didn't have a loot table. I'm not sure it was even accessible on launch day. And when it did get a loot table, it had placeholder graphics for the tier 1 set.
This was fine: it would take months for players to be able to tackle end-game content, so the game didn't need to launch with it all ready to go. But a law requiring Blizzard to keep a launch-day WoW available wouldn't be especially satisfying.
Even if you changed it to be "its full functional state" or something similar, that gets weird. After Molten Core was BWL, which you couldn't reach on launch. And so on and so forth. WoW changes a ton over an expansion, and each expansion brings even bigger changes (do you play pre-Cata or post?). Do we require Blizzard to keep available each and every patch version? Hotfix version? How do players decide which they want to play? I really enjoyed the Argent Tournament, but I bet most preferred actually reaching ICC (which itself had a bunch of time locks before you could reach Arthas, himself).
[1]: Even beyond everything outlined, WoW gets weird when you consider Classic and now Forever.
Your complaint is probably moot foot dragging. Companies aren't held liable for breaking a law that didn't exist at the time they released a product.
An ever-evolving game with properties of a SaaS would likely not exist under this new law.
Blizzard already knew how to build self-contained products with self-contained expansions even before WoW was released. StarCraft was the original game and StarCraft Broodwar was the expansion. It will affect game release cycles and properties of what you get with the game, but that's seems like part of the point of the legislation.
For example, massive expansion of free to play games with cosmetic microtransactions.
When the game ends... what is it that you've bought? The cosmetics, you never bought the game. If they give you an offline "shooting range" mode where you can wander the maps in the cosmetics you bought, have they satisfied the requirements? Again, you never bought the game you bought the cosmetics.
A step farther, loot drops in loot boxes that take time to unlock, on the order of days, weeks or months. You buy something to accelerate the unlock process down to hours. What have you bought? Just a faster unlock of something you'd have received anyway. So what are you owed when the game goes end of life? You didn't buy the game, you didn't buy the contents of the lootbox.
I didn’t really read the bill, but I see no problem in subscription games. I don’t remember how wow was ‘sold’ when released. But if I buy a game on a 12 month subscription, I understand I’m not purchasing a game forever.
What you want is to repeal DMCA 1201. It is specifically 1201 that is responsible for the most anti-preservation rulings. Custom servers are legally imperiled because Blizzard, the patient zero of the technofeudalist takeover of the US, sued a developer for releasing a Battle.net custom server and won because he didn't implement the CD Key check. It is fairly trivial to make a central server have DRM checks that a third-party replacement can't replicate, even though they legally have to, which makes them effectively illegal.
Expanding exceptions to copyright law would be nice for different reasons, but custom servers and emulation were already legal before companies figured out they could put arbitrarily difficult roadblocks in the way of them.
Also while we're here, DMCA 512 was also a piece of horseshit, albeit less because it curtailed online freedom and more because it isn't a good way to adjudicate low-stakes copyright claims.
You'd think custom server developers would find it easy to operate in closed networks and Tor. This isn't valuable enough for the US to break Tor for. Server hosts might have a harder time but a lot of them are closed communities like Minecraft servers are, so they don't get attention.
This sounds like fairy dust for this use case. You’re playing a real time game where latency matters, and you’re running all that latency sensitive traffic through a network of relays running on altruism - each hop would introduce latency and you’d deal with contention in the network.
Imagine the cultural impact of a Dune movie showing the Butlerian Jihad, in which commoners rebel and overthrow a ruling class that maintains power via machines.
It's just foreign enough that perhaps it could be made--I'm assuming that popular films that just straight up depict overthrowing the ruling class wont happen--but if you add a little sci-fi and focus mostly on overthrowing the machines that are controlled by that ruling class...
Well, it would speak to a lot of people I think. It would make some interesting sci-fi too, and the Dune movies are popular right now.
The only thing that could possibly be worse than the BH KJA books covering that era would be a Hollywood rendition of those same books made to capitalize on the success of Dune Part I, II, and III.
Agreed, and also: what's with the obsession with filling every possible gap in stories, leaving nothing to the imagination?
I remember when the Butlerian Jihad and the Clone Wars from Star Wars were complete mysteries. We readers and watchers were left mostly with our imaginations. My own feelings about the Clone Wars, mentioned off hand in the original Star Wars, turned out to be way better than the pedestrian stuff that George Lucas later concocted. And the less said about Brian Herbert's books, the better.
I get why the industry must rehash and fill every possible gap: it makes business sense, and they are risk averse for blockbusters.
But the fans? Why do nerds want everything spelled out for them? It boggles the mind.
> But the fans? Why do nerds want everything spelled out for them? It boggles the mind.
Because it's enjoyable when done well. As a teenager I read LOTR, and noticed all the references to the larger mythos Tolkien had worked on - references to Fëanor, Elbereth, Valinor, and so on. Those were very intriguing, and the greatest joy I've ever had reading a book was when I finally read the Silmarillion and got to see what those things were all about. I concede that filling out the world can be done poorly (though I haven't read the Brian Herbert stuff and can't comment on whether he did a good job). But when done well, it is truly magical to have those elements in the background of the story take on a life and detail of their own.
Good point on Tolkien, though I would argue it's different because the Silmarillion was written for his own satisfaction, not his fans, and actually it was The Lord of the Rings which was initially written as "another Hobbit story" (though the story later "grew in the telling").
I think a more suitable example of what I find annoying is the extra material for the small and big screens, such as The Hobbit movies, suffering from movie elephantiasis; and The Rings of Power, which (over)explain and show the past of characters such as Galadriel, Elrond, and Sauron's rise to power, which in my opinion are best left as the ancient past of LotR (and maybe belong in the Silmarillion, but do note the latter is not as expository as the TV show). And does anybody really think The Hunt for Gollum was necessary?
Yet, if they make them, it's because they are sure fans will lap it up. To be honest I consider this need for endless "filling in the gaps" a sign of immaturity.
It would be also nice to depict the attempts of the ruling class to present machines as sentient and self-conscious to write all their liability off and use as a cover for their atrocities. I hope there will be movies like this in the future, and that they'll be documentary.
> Imagine the cultural impact of a Dune movie showing the Butlerian Jihad, in which commoners rebel and overthrow a ruling class that maintains power via machines.
What now? Move the goalposts! I see movies about historical uprisings as more of a "those governments in the past were sure bad, good think the good guys overthrew them"--I mean, that's the story of the founding of America if you watch the movies.
I was looking more for movies that depict overthrowing the government in the near future, and depicting it as a good thing. I think those types of movies are a little more distasteful to audiences, and perhaps for good reason.
Well, The Hunger Games series is exactly about that. Of course, it portrays the rebels as utterly heroic, self-sacrificing, and ultimately victorious.
However, I prefer to take a more nuanced reading, in context, considering the entire story. The rebels of The Hunger Games really don't succeed in building a better world. I mean, that's pretty obvious by how their first "President" Alma Coin goes about things and her fate. And it's fairly obvious, in the epilogue, that Katniss has a placid married life with Peeta and their children, but they are permanently and profoundly damaged by the entire revolution thing in their past.
So, while most people would say "rah rah brave Katniss and the rag-tag rebels overthrew The Oppressive Man", I would contend that, after all that bloodshed and revolution, nearly nothing changed.
My other favorites, of course: Star Wars is about the rise and overthrow of a villainous, oppressive galactic government, albeit a long time ago and far, far away.
And Harry Potter is also about the rise and overthrow of a tyrranical, fascist, supremacist "government" [within a government] as a very positive and necessary thing.
> My other favorites, of course: Star Wars is about the rise and overthrow of a villainous, oppressive galactic government, albeit a long time ago and far, far away.
Well, about a militant group of religious fundamentalists overthrowing a secular, oppressive galactic government.
Only a handful of the rebels are visibly religious. Most of the rebel leadership seems to consist of displaced aristocrats (senators, princesses) who no longer have elite positioning since the Empire took their jobs and started doing a better job of guaranteeing security and providing energy and resources.
Half of the action and sci-fi movies US has been producing in the 2000s is some form of this. Man vs. Evil Government. Man vs. Evil Corporation. People vs. Evil Government. Etc.
Frankly, it's boring at this point.
And actually makes me wonder whether the cause-and-effect isn't the opposite to what people assume. Perhaps it's not that the movies reflect people's sentiment. Perhaps it's the movies that cause the problem in the first place.
I usually draw the line for myself by setting a timer. "Okay, I'm starting to get frustrated, if 20 minutes pass with no progress I'm going to look online for clues."
But how would you actually do it? Ban the exchange of money for delivering specific messages? I guess it could work. It would require judgement calls, but we have other laws that require even more subtle judgement calls.
We might get someone like Obama again who "looks forward and not backwards"... a logic that would result in all crimes being ignored if consistently applied.
Because people were (and still are) struggling and wanted something to change. Trump was the change candidate. Harris straight up said she wouldn't change anything.
The election was a rejection of stability.
At least, that's how people in the middle, who decide election results, saw things.
We rolled the dice and lost. But things still aren't working very well in society, so we'll roll the dice again.
Those are my conclusions as well, though I want to note anyone who paid attention to her campaign rather than getting it second hand or third off of vibes would not have made the claim that she “straight up said she wouldn’t have changed anything”.
A lot of voters in the middle aren’t taking the time to understand why things seem to keep not changing (somewhat understandably so, but also unfortunately given the need for an engaged electorate in a healthy democracy). Both parties are being sticks in the mud, but one in particular is doing a lot more to keep change from happening than the other.
In the usa we have an overemphasis on the president, but we’ve slow walked ourselves into a dysfunctional congress that just can’t do anything. The point of democracy is to let the best ideas win, and part of that is being able to try those ideas out, and respond when they don’t work. Having a senate with two votes per state regardless of population, that are only replaced a third at a time, with an archaic but also recent rule that effectively requires 60/100 vote to pass almost anything meaningful, is just a recipe for failure.
End the filibuster as it is today. If you want a filibuster, force people to talk for it the way it worked for the first ~150 years of our country at least.
To be fair she was asked in an interview how she would differ from her predecessor and she totally choked. It was like she'd never even considered that was a question somebody might ask her. She just didn't have an answer.
She might've been a fine president and she might've actually changed some things. But even more fundamentally than whether she would've changed anything, Harris was a lousy campaigner with an ineffective track record as a politician. As you point out, catching a former prosecutor flat footed with an easy interview question is inexcusable. A last minute shove to the top of the Democrat ticket was burdened with all of that downside from the very beginning.
> In the usa we have an overemphasis on the president, but we’ve slow walked ourselves into a dysfunctional congress that just can’t do anything.
Isn't that cause and effect? In essence, what the US is showing is that the executive has so much power now that congress is largely obsolete.
If there was a better balance of power and less executive power, the only way the executive branch can get something done is to work with congress.
Obviously that doesn't work in all cases, conflict in particular. But in my experience that's where most democracies have drawn the line on executive power, basically for emergencies.
We should go back to indirect election of senators. Something needs to represent the will of the states as distinct entities.
Having some slimy Mitt Romney types doing math about various state industries and interests when wording bills and trading votes would be a huge improvement over the equally slimy jerks we have now scheming up ways to serve their donors (who's interests correlate with the voters even less than the state's despite that bar being low to begin with) while leveraging abortion this guns that wedge issues to get re-elected despite screwing their voters.
The distribution of senators to states would also matter less if they weren't direct elected and therefore as beholden to party platforms and funding systems and whatnot.
> Something needs to represent the will of the states as distinct entities
Why? And why is indirect selection of senators better for that? Won't it just hand power to backroom operators at the state level, instead of to the people of the state?
I would agree in principle, but from outside at least (I'm in Canada), BOY did President Trump and the accompanying cohort bring in some change. It's just... not even remotely change I would have personally sought. But USA's reputation, and relationship, with huge number of countries has changed significantly. This will have short and long term impact (positive or negative) on USA citizens - imports, travel, cost, employment and otherwise. The "new normal" of insance news, complete corruption, blatant lies from official sources, decimation and mistrust of both scientists and competent personnel, dismantling of regulations, completion implosion of the health department, etc... this feel like changes from the outside, but perhaps it's all business as usual and feeling the same on the inside :)
How much room do y'all thing there is in further understanding neural networks?
I feel like I'm in Dunning–Kruger land myself. I know a little, and keep having all kinds of ideas about what to try or investigate, but surely it's all been tried before... right?
You're right. People will roll the dice if the government isn't working for them. That's why we got Trump, both times. Harris's campaign was clear, "it will be more of the same", and people didn't like that so they rolled the dice on Trump. They will roll the dice again too, maybe one day we'll roll the dice on trying a new form of government.
We haven't had any big changes for a very long time. People want change. They felt Trump was the change candidate, so they tried him.
Obama did the ACA, which was a compromise with Republicans by implementing the Republican plan, that was the most recent substantial change I can thing of, but it doesn't actually fix anything fundamental (and Republicans are forever at a loss about how to fix healthcare, because their plan was already implemented by Obama, so they can't actually say anything good about their own plan).
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