We need to kill indefinite (or even long) copyright and the music industry has been one of the worst offenders.

Every sentence you wrote was a question. Do you have a solution to suggest to any of your questions? Or even an idea on how come up with or evaluate proposed solutions to any of them?

> the characters? does an abandoned ET game open up the franchise to public domain?

I'm confused. I specifically called those examples out and suggested one way they could maybe be carved out to avoid being shut down by that exact concern. Even if my suggested 'way to carve' is dumb, my point was that lack of granularity, prevents carving out anything at all. Do you agree more granularity of some kind in copyright would help?

Yes. The original idea of copyright was to encourage more original creation AND later modification by granting exclusivity for a limited time in exchange for making it non-exclusive forever after.

The Copyright Act of 1790 set the duration at 14 years, with a 14 year extension if the author was still living after the first 14. It's been extended 4 times and is now 70 years after the death of the author or 95 years after publication / 120 years after creation. I agree it's now a cruel mockery of the original intent.

I have no hope this is fixable in any major way because it's now a fully bi-partisan issue. For decades now, RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobbyists have demonstrated absolute, long-term control of both major party's IP-related votes (despite what any politician claims while campaigning). There are only a handful of politicians for whom this is a hill they're willing to shed political capital on. And, in an honest moment, they'll admit the congressional process is stage managed such that regardless which party is in power at the moment (or even a super-majority), meaningfully restricting copyright closer to its original intent will always lose by at least one vote as long as the two-party duopoly controls the U.S government.

Given that sad, disgusting reality, my post was trying to suggest a way to claw back the smallest, most limited win for non-commercial retro preservation that might: A.) Have the slightest chance of actually happening, and B.) Actually be the slightest bit better than the shit sandwich we have now. The ironic part of making any constructive suggestion to improve things even 1%, isn't that even THAT will almost certainly be killed by the RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobby anyway, it's that those who agree with me will bury it under objections it doesn't do enough (or doesn't abolish all IP rights).

Oops, meant to reply to the GP.

Will EA sell me Need for Speed Underground 2? Nope! They won't even acknowledge it exists on their website:

https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed

Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu. It's not even there in the sense of "we're proud of our heritage, look at a history of our old games."

I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. I bought the 4K remaster of Lawrence of Arabia for $5 on the Apple TV Store recently, and that's a very fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.

I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:

If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work, or is no longer for sale in a manner reasonably consistent with its original form of sale (e.g., they used to sell Need for Speed Underground 2 as a one-time purchase but now it's only available as a subscription, or the price has been changed from $50 to $3,000), people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work. The redistributor would also not be allowed to represent themselves as the rights-holder or do anything that would confuse people into thinking they were the original source of the work.

They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.

Now, please vibecode me a winxp directx driver that serializes calls to its wasm counterpart, to enable graphics acceleration for such VMs. Sounds highly doable: virgl, virtio-gpu and Venus exist. Might be even simpler to do it for Vulkan and port dxvk to XP.

one could say it seems to already have budged.

In the case of NFSU2, a game which EA refuse to make available anywhere, I’m fine with people throwing a free version on the internet but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Copyright is a part of what allows small indie studios making fun things possible because it means it’s viable to sell those things and pay people’s salaries. Maybe if along with the machine god and death of copyright we also get some form of wealth distribution which means people don’t need to fund food and shelter via their work I’ll get on board but I’m not holding my breath here.

> yet people still go out and buy the official game.

Not all people, especially not if piracy is easy.

i worked at a place where to get anything done, you had to demonstrate "Business Impact": is what you're about to do going to actually help revenue? if not, move on to something that does

i agree, a suit should only be taken seriously if the company can demonstrate that they are actively losing revenue because of the game preservation effort, otherwise toss it in the bin

why are big name businesses wasting money on litigating against small sites that dont actually impact them anyway? perhaps if they knew that their lawyers were wasting time chasing frivolous suits and actually costing their company's good will, while not actually giving their business impact...

It costs EA nothing and their owners have funds from sources that make the cat-and-mouse game expensive for the reuploaders.