So you can't buy it, but you can play it, and the source is available. Is this really a problem? I know the article mentions this in passing, but preservation & the ability to actually play a 25 year old game is more important than its capitalization, IMO.
Well, no, you can't play it because the source code doesn't include assets like the 3d models and textures and levels and sound files. You need to acquire those some other way if you want to build a playable version of the game.
It's like GZDoom, you have to supply your own copy of DOOM.WAD
That isn't at all what they are saying.
They are saying that you need to provide all the game assets. Exactly like you do if you want to play the original Doom with modern source ports.
Since the game is not available to buy, this means either pulling those assets from an original retail copy, or pirating them.
> preservation & the ability to actually play a 25 year old game is more important than its capitalization
> Even if you don't want to pirate it, there are lots of copies for multiple platforms available to buy just on eBay.
This feels like a contradictory position.
On the one hand the important thing is the preservation and availability of a work. On the other hand it's okay if the it is only available as 20+ year old used copies and pirated copies.
And any preservation or restoration project is under the shadow of 3 companies (Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox) which have all recently "complained that they may have rights to [NOLF] and may sue over it"
Seriously though, break a law that no one is interested in enforcing? What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
ETA: This aside from the fact that you can buy a used copy and play it...
> What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
It may not bother you, but there are many people who would prefer it if they didn't have to break the law to play the game. Used copies won't be around forever, at which point those people will be SOL.
I assume the community goal would be to find out who owns the rights and get them to either use them or give them up formally and bless the community project?
Used copies won't be around forever, it would be better to have a proper community version.
Something like what happened with UT99 and the original Unreal: the source was made available to a dedicated community group (who continue to push out patches for the games), and when the games were no longer commercially useful, they allowed them to be posted on the Internet Archive for free access.
The rights holder can give permission to use the assets and IP let the community basically own the game. Marathon and Project Aleph is a good example of this where Bungie gave it up, and so the open source version of the engine has fixes and things now.
Nothing from the article suggests that is on the table here, but rather Nightdive wants the rights so they can sell a remake of the game without the threat of getting sued.
I struggle to understand why the (potential?) rights-holders are so intransigent about this.
If a company came up to me and said "We have interest in reviving an IP of yours. We will take on the development costs, we will take on all the risk, all you have to do is say yes and you will get a fixed percentage of every sale"--that seems like an easy win-win, does it not? The only reasons I would imagine you would say NO were if:
1) Concern that the company will do a crappy job and tarnish the brand's reputation (which, fair, but Nightreign studios and/or GOG seem to have a pretty solid track record on this)
2) Your company's bean-counters are both so greedy and risk-averse such that their thinking is, "We only wish to allow something if it will be a guaranteed hit...but if it is a guaranteed hit, we want to do it internally so that we get to keep all of the profits!" In which case, the requirements are almost impossible to satisfy, since there is inevitably some level of risk undertaken during the remaster/re-release effort.
I think it's basically just "this is complicated, complicated means corporate lawyers, corporate lawyers are expensive enough and the potential profit is small enough that it's not worth it." It's not just "will this be net positive," either. There's an opportunity cost. Those corporate lawyers are needed for other important projects that might make more money.
But also, I kind of think it becomes a thing where it's too small potatoes for anybody senior enough to actually approve all of the legal stuff to care enough to make happen. Sure, it's basically free money, but it's not a lot of free money.
I agree with your points and would add one more: the TFA gives a second-hand recounting of what the various company's lawyers supposedly told the potential reboot licensor and quotes the erstwhile licensor's conclusion they were basically threatening legal action. But this isn't consistent with the companies also indicating they weren't sure what rights they may have (if any).
However, it IS consistent with a thing prudent lawyers would typically do when discussing an unknown future hypothetical. They'd reserve their client's rights should the client later discover they have grounds and wish to pursue it. Depending on how it's phrased, that could be confused with a 'legal threat', but I suspect the lawyers may have just been careful to not unintentionally relinquish any future rights.
I'm basing this on being involved in similar licensing discussions between lawyers. While some lawyers and clients are assholes, not all are. Even if they were trying to be 'good guys', it's not clear they could be in this situation. Since they don't even know if they have any rights, they don't have grounds to grant any kind of permission (and doing so in the absence of having any rights could make their client liable - at least in theory).
Nobody was asking them to give indemnification or grant the license. Each of the potential holders just need to put it down on paper they aren't going enforce rights if they had any, not give the developer a complete license to use. Second can incur liability, first is pretty common clause used in many settlement agreements.
These things typically only work when you are well connected to senior management in these orgs, the ones who can sign off on such one-off requirements. Business processes are designed for the 80% of use-cases. More often than not, we end up hitting a wall with any long tail/unique requests.
Also, it's not clear who actually owns the thing -- the original game was developed by Monolith Productions and published by Fox Interactive (PC) and Sierra (PS2). Following the tree of deals, there's a bunch of different big corporations that could have a claim on the IP:
- Fox Interactive was eventually sold to Vivendi, but most of their library was listed as owned by 20th Century Fox, which has since been acquired by Disney
- the second and third games in the series were published by Sierra, who over the years have been owned by Comp-U-Card, Vivendi, Activision, and eventually Microsoft
- Monolith Productions were eventually purchased by Warner Bros., who shut the studio down earlier this year
Just from that list, there's a huge list of media conglomerates that could have an ownership claim: News Corp, Disney, Vivendi, Warner Bros., Microsoft
Yeah, just reading that list of corporations and the long, twisted IP ownership trail, I'd estimate figuring out who has which rights would take at least a year and a couple hundred grand in legal costs to get each potential stakeholder's attorneys to locate, review and analyze the documents and issue a binding legal opinion.
I've actually been the "business decision maker" in some similar multi-law firm licensing confusion. It was a situation where my company had no significant financial stake in the outcome and was just trying to be the 'good guy'. In fact, all the big companies were aligned on being willing to just help out the small company trying to get the thing to happen. Despite that sincere intent all around, it was basically impossible to do what they needed without significant expense or even potentially creating new liability for ourselves where there was none. The moral being: don't just assume "we can't have a nice things because of big company assholes". That's sometimes the case but not always. There are execs out there who'd be happy to 'do the right thing' if they can. Over probably a dozen similar situations, there were only a couple were I was able to help a good thing happen - despite actively trying to find a way to make it work.
Phrases like "basically impossible" and "if they can" evoke some kind of physical force stopping an action that everyone, in good faith, wants to take. In your example (and in the article's) it just doesn't seem like everyone actually wants to take the good action.
If the game studios were actually not being assholes, they could each say, "You know what, we're not making any money from whatever rights we might or might not have, so, lawyers: scram and go do something else. Here's a signed paper saying we give up all rights to the IP. Go have a ball."
But, they'll never do this because corporations are like Smaug, as another poster put it--they hoard for hoarding's sake and will never voluntarily give up value, even if it's a fractional share of potential value, and even if that value is not materially helping them. They'd rather destroy something they're not using than give it away.
Many of these get stuck in contract hell. The original developer may have had licensed software or assets and at the very least needs to find the agreements and understand how they work for new distribution. It's not uncommon for those agreements to have been time limited, but if you want to renew now you need to find the current successor/rightsholder and negotiate.
Also, the developer/publisher/distributor/etc may have had revenue sharing agreements with various parties. Those need to be found and understood too. Sometimes those are in % of gross income, % of net income, % of sales price, or a fixed amount per copy sold. If anything needs addressing, you've got to find those parties or their successors and negotiate. You should also find those parties anyway, to pay royalties they're due, but if you at least set up an escrow account, you'll be prepared when they find you.
I would hope games contracts are a bit more forward looking now, and try to address these things, but 25 years ago, you would still get old games at computer surplus stores... A handful of developers would put out old games collections, but most games never came back.
I imagine there is a legal/admin cost, to locating the paper contract in Iron Mountain/wherever. So if they wait for the game to go ahead anyways, they could wait and see if its a smashing success, then sue and have a budget for tracking the docs down. Perhaps a lawyer could explain if sending a “cough up the docs in 60 days or we are invalidating your claim” would work.
Game Publishers hoard IP like Smaug. I can't even begin to catalog the IP's in the EA, UBI, and Activision's vaults. In many cases, the original creators can't even get the time of day to ask to use the IP.
We just saw an explosion of streaming platforms because of their version of 2). Instead of continuing to license to Netflix for a percentage, they decided to spend all of the time/money to develop their own streaming platforms in hopes of keeping all of the proceeds. Maybe they have internal dialog looking at this same comparison which has not settled out yet. The streaming platforms have shown rolling your own is not a guaranteed panacea.
3. They believe the IP may have potential that you won't exploit to the fullest.
In other words, they believe that they may be able to do more than you with it, if they ever get around to it.
If your potential market is tiny--and lets be honest, the market for an unpirated version of this is quite small,most people sufficiently interested have pirated it already--then keeping it out of the public in favor of some unknown potential later is a consideration.
What companies hear is, in effect, “Please make it easier for me to create a competing product and take away business from your existing IP:s that you are trying to create mindshare for.”
Copyright kills works when rights cannot be negotiated, usually because the rights holder is not to be found, but in this case because the situation is just "complicated".
I've long thought copyright should only apply if the work is available for sale, or they are actively preparing another printing so they can sell it again in the near future.
Then there would be digital stores where old works go to die. Which might be better than now if price was reasonable and support good. But could easily be expensive, unsupported, and goes after pirates.
Authors already have problems with getting their books back when out of print. Ebooks make it worse cause they can stay in print with low effort.
I like idea of copyright with short span, like 10 years, and then have to register and renew for every subsequent decade. That would give registry of owners who are serious about work. Would never see public domain movies, but there are lots of obscure works that would be public domain.
Copyrights should have a similar schedule to patents. The first period of coverage is no-cost but subsequent renewals increase in price, perpetual copyright should be financially ruinous but copyright should exist so a creator of a work can profit off it for a reasonable duration.
When Microsoft was first looking to do a remaster of Goldeneye from N64, even they couldn't manage the legal trouble of that one.
Microsoft had the original development team, Nintendo had the software and Activision had the James Bond License. Microsoft was willing to develop it for both Xbox 360 and Wii but they simply couldn't get the rights between all three straightened out.
If those three, companies that are no strangers to handling legal issues cannot figure out, it doesn't look good for smaller titles like this.
I remember buying NOLF--it was at retail, in a big box off the shelf at Media Play. I knew nothing about it, it just caught my eye, and the description on the back sounded interesting. I miss that kind of media discovery, our modern always-online world tends to smother serendipity.
It was an excellent game. The idea of a continuation of the series is appealing, but a lot of modern adaptations really stink, so maybe it's better off in the amber of nostalgia.
I did discover a lot of great stuff like that. The funny thing is that there were a few titles that I discovered, absolutely loved and yet apparently were considered bad games. Oh well, I saw the good side of it.
One that I grabbed for $10 was Adrenix, a 'Descent' clone that has very few mentions around and reviewed fairly averagely. I loved it!
As for modern adaptions of games, if they can do it either like 3D Realms retro style like with Ion Fury, or go into the full re-imagined space like they did with Doom 2016. But any middle ground seems to lead to disappointment.
I miss that kind of media discovery, our modern always-online world tends to smother serendipity.
I don't really miss the time of having to choose games this way. If you lucked out it was great, but you were also potentially putting down upwards of $50+ bucks in 1995 dollars on a game that you might end up really disliking.
This was a fun series of games. They are especially fun if you've watched some of the source material they're constantly referencing and alluding to, like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (the 1960s one, not the 2010s movie), Get Smart, etc. Still holds up.
Makes me wonder if a good way to "reign in" on copyright abuse and abandonware is to require copyright holders to pay a tax based on some kind of formula.
More importantly: If no tax is paid, after a reasonable amount of time, (1-3 years,) the work is considered abandoned and automatically moved to the public domain.
Even more importantly, if the work isn't available for general consumption (rental and physical), at a reasonable cost, without a subscription / ads, no copyright claims can be perused for non-commercial piracy. (IE, it would become totally legal to torrent a TV show if it's stuck in a streaming service that requires ads / a subscription.)
Georgism [1] but applied to copyright: If you want to extend your copyright past, say, 15 or 20 years, then you need to estimate the value of that copyright and pay tax on it. You can name any value you want, but someone can then buy it at that value.
Maybe there can be different rules for copyrights owned by humans vs corporations; 5 years free for corporations, 20 years free for humans. Or maybe longer for humans, I dunno. But having corporations sit on IP just because they can is ridiculous.
Disagree. Individuals should have copyright for their entire lives. Not one moment past their death, but it's not cool to tell someone they can't sell the work they created any more.
That being said: I think reforming copyright should allow fair use and incentives for curation. There's nothing wrong with the Beatles' heirs curating the Beatles recordings for streaming, and remastering them; as long as there's no prosecution for torrenting needle drops of old Beatles records, torrenting rips of old Beatles CDs from the 1990s, and making a streaming service of such recordings (the old ones, not the remasters) without needing permission of the heirs.
I loved NOLF and NOLF2. I was actually thinking about pulling them off the shelf and loading them up again the other day. I had no idea that the rights around them was such a mess.
That Bobby Banilla story is nuts. So instead of paying $5.9m in 2000, the Mets decided to defer the payments for 11 years! And also to stretch them out over 25 years! Didn't the Mets realise that just paying the full amount (with interest) 2 or 3 years later cost them a lot less. On the other hand, $1.1m is probably peanuts in terms of Mets expenses these days.
So say someone decides to produce a remaster of NOLF. Does Activision have to produce this piece of paper once they sue to establish standing? If Activision's version of this piece of paper was chewed up by rats in the 90s, does their ownership stake vanish in a puff as well?
If the potential victory from a lawsuit is $20K and Activision estimates it will cost them $50K to find this piece of paper, is the company relatively safe from a lawsuit?
They would need to prove that they have the rights to it to win court, yes. The chances of Activision actually pulling the trigger and suing if you made a remastered version are definitely less than 50-50. They'd have to actually have owned the rights in the first place, they still have the documentation to prove it, and that they'd find a suit a profitable idea? Let's say it's a 1/3 chance. That means if you publish it, you'd have a 2/3 chance of not getting sued by Activision, that can have a positive E(V) if you just go ahead and YOLO it.
But the killer is that WB and Fox (now Disney) also are sitting out there as maybe rights-holders. Let's say that each of them also has a 1/3 chance of suing and that they are all independent. Now you have a 8/27th chance of not getting sued- less than 1/3. So the expected value has to be twice as large as with a normal, single company situation to justify the increased risk of lawsuit from one of three companies. And so no one pencils out the choice as a good one, compared to the opportunity cost of working on some other game with a clearer rights situation.
It is reasonably sure that each party has a 90% chance of suing if they have rights. There is a 90% chance someone will send you a cease and desist just because all 3 are the type that will do it if they think they have rights. There is a reasonable chance more than 1 will send a cease and desist (some weaselly "we are still checking rights but if we have them your notice starts now - just enough to avoid fraud if it turns out they don't have rights)
OK, but according to ChatGPT (so correct me if the AI is wrong), if you ignore the cease and desist, then the process goes into default judgement where the claimants now need to prove standing to collect judgement. You now know with 100% certainty that they need to hire someone to dig through a file vault at Iron Mountain to collect judgment and they're not going to bother doing that so the default judgement means nothing and you can go about your merry way ignoring their cease and desist.
I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that is wrong. Still consult a lawyer if you need real legal advice.
If you ignore the cease and desist their next step is to sue you in court where the lawyers fight it out. They can sue immediately, without a cease and desist at if they want. However the reason to do a cease and desist is it costs a lawyer just a few minutes to write one up, while court often costs millions of dollars - thus if you just stop doing something after the cheap letter it is typically best for them to ignore the what they could have got by taking you to court right away. They can bring a cease and desist to court and show that they gave you time to stop which looks good to the judge and can influence how much the judge awards if they win (if they lose the cease and desists is at best meaningless).
A default judgement is when they sue and nobody shows up in court. Because you don't defend yourself the courts just assume you are guilty (assuming the case isn't completely absurd). Sometimes you can get a default judgement when it is obvious someone is doing something bad but not who, and then if you later identify who you can collect immediately - but that person you accuse can fight the default judgement in a lot of ways.
They also will send a cease and desist when they know there is no chance in hell of winning a court case, but people might stop anyway because they are afraid of getting sued.
Ignoring such letters will result in absolutely nothing. The trick is to know which is which, and that is why you ask an attorney.
If you want to fight it in court, you go fight it in court and waste a bunch of money, but if you don't lift a finger, then it enters default judgement. But in default judgement, the plaintiff still needs to demonstrate standing. Otherwise, I could randomly sue a bunch of random people for random nonsense and bank on most of them entering into default judgement.
If I'm a patent troll spraying and praying patent violation suits, I still at the end of the process still need to prove to own the patent I claim I do.
In this case, we know there is a lower cost to producing the document that Activision will not want to bear because the total they can recover is below just the cost of producing the document that proves standing. Why would I not just let it go into default judgement, knowing it's toothless?
Yes, but I don't know how more clearly to say this, it's not the court bit of it, it's forcing them to go dig into the archives. They will not do that, especially because there's also a risk of them definitively not being able to find this piece of paper and then having an even weaker claim than they had before.
How do you get to 100 percent certainty that they won't do that, or that they need to go through the file vault at all? What if someone just needs to find it in an email server or etc?
In the article: the documents in question was created before email or digital storage was used for this. It is believed that someone still has a copy in a file cabinet somewhere - but it will take a lot of manual effort to find it and nobody wants to do that if they don't have to.
If that’s the best argument you have, then you’ve got nothing.
I, like most people, don’t come here to see AI slop opinions. We can get that approximately everywhere else. We don’t need HN to be filled with AI confabulations, and if it were to happen, we would leave.
It doesn't need to be wrong for it to be incredibly rude to just regurgitate ChatGPT output. That's not having a discussion, that's being too lazy to participate but posting anyway.
This is not advancing a novel argument or creating of a new piece of content, this is about a factual claim about the world. How is it different from According to Google or According to Wikipedia or According to this scientific paper? It's saying this information is 3rd party sourced and I'm open to being corrected if you can point out the flaws in this way of gathering facts from the world.
Why would you set the probability at 1/3rd? It feels closer to 1/100 at most.
They've admitted the documents, if they're anywhere, are buried in a file cabinet at Iron Mountain. You can set a lower limit on the amount of labor required to produce the document. Activision is not going to go on this quest if the labor required * chance of the document existing exceeds the amount they can win in a lawsuit.
It feels like the right thing to do is to preemptively sue all three for a declaratory judgement, similar to obtaining a "quiet title" for a piece of real estate. Then they can put up or shut up. The right thing to do if you're trying to remaster the game, that is. The right thing to do if you just want to play it is to pirate.
I'm sorry, you want to get into an IP lawsuit with the Walt Disney Company, by choice? You think that starting a fight with the most fearsome collection of IP lawyers on the planet is the right thing to do?
(Fox, one of the possible rights holders, was acquired by Disney in 2019.)
How much should the preemptive-plaintiff be willing to spend to get the declaratory judgement? And why would one expect to win? It is very clear that some combination of the three companies have the rights, and all they have to do is agree collectively to win. Each firm individually probably spends more on lawyers every month than normal people do in their lifetime. They have lawyers on staff, so their marginal cost of being hasslesome to you in court is near zero.
It's all risk-adjusted cost/benefit, and there is almost no practical benefit to taking the risk. Yes, it would be nice to clear up the legal ownership rights and to have a non-pirated version available. But as an economic matter, there is almost no value.
Yes, I get that the legal system can be horrible and adds some pretty ridiculous overhead and costs. I was just pointing out there is a path to actually clear this thing up - a process to give the possible-rightsholders notice that they have to actually respond with concrete evidence or drop the matter, rather than lazily sending "we might care" nastygrams. And doing that that would certainly be much less than being on the receiving end of a lawsuit with damages after paying for development.
> Does Activision have to produce this piece of paper once they sue to establish standing?
Yes, but see below.
> If Activision's version of this piece of paper was chewed up by rats in the 90s, does their ownership stake vanish in a puff as well?
No, but complex. Legally the contract is still valid, but they still need to show the court what the details are. All parties to a contracts get a copy, and so Activation can legally force other people who should have a copy of the contract to produce it, any copy is enough (or several partially rat eaten copies may be enough to reproduce what the original said). Activision has all the time they want to find copies of the contract (unlike trademark, copyright isn't use it or lose it), so you are risking the above for a long time. Sometimes enough testimony in court of we did have a contract is enough - when it is obvious there must have been a contract at one time the court will put together obvious details which might be enough to sue. In this case the 3 parties can agree that while they don't know who as rights between the 3 of them the rights must be contained and so they can agree to a 3-way split for purposes of going to court - even if it latter turns out only one party had rights, that party agreed to the split (though if you years latter can prove a 4th party has rights they can sue the other 3).
Of course if rats did eat all copies of the contract the lawyer fees to figure this out are likely more than the game is worth and so it probably isn't worthwhile to sue, so practically it may be as if they no longer have rights to the game just because they can't afford to enforce it. This is a very risky take though and so nobody should risk it.
> This is a very risky take though and so nobody should risk it.
People keep on insisting when it comes to these things that various things are risky in a rather handwavey way but they never fully come out and articulate the risks.
I asked this question to ChatGPT a bunch of ways and tried to understand what the specifics are when people say this is risky and I can't really seem to get to anything that is a nuclear level risk, just a garden variety risk that you need to manage amongst all the other garden variety risks involved in running a business (when inputted with a reasonable set of realistic assumptions, it's possible to create assumptions where this is a nuclear level risk but that doesn't seem to apply to the majority of real world cases, including this one).
You're not going to to get a good answer to this, because 1) 99% of people here aren't lawyers and 2) the ones who are lawyers or know the law have better things to do than argue with the nonsense machine, certainly not via proxy.
Willful copyright infringement means liability for statutory damages, compensatory damages, claims on all profits, and legal fees (yours and theirs).
(I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, chatgpt is a very bad lawyer).
The risks are not something we can know. They are not we put you on death row bad. The courts decide what to do. Every country has their own laws and you could be taken to court in more than one. You can get a better answer from a real lawyer not me, but that will costs money.
The worse case is if they have a registered copyright which means they get to charge triple damages. I'm not completely clear on what triple damages mean. I think that means they subtract your costs to publish the game and count only the profits, but I'm not sure. I'm also not sure if they assume your costs, or what they would have charged if they had done this (that is if you sell the game for $50 but they would charge $100) - you can bet their lawyers will argue for whatever gets them the most, and may also ask for lawyer fees.
Hot take: If no one knows who has the rights to sell it, no one knows who has the rights to stop someone else from selling it. There'd be a legal battle. For a game like this, its probably not worth it. But I bet by the end of it we'd figure it out.
I only played the first one, because the second one was more finnicky and required newer hardware. But I must say, NOLF 1 is one of the best and most unique FPS games ever. It should be far, far more famous than it is.
The reality is that the vast majority of entertainment is ephemeral. A videogame or movie get it's 5 minutes of fame.
There are a few weirdos like me who want to play a 20 year old videogame but how much money can you get out of that and is it worth the trouble?
But seriously, the way the copyright system prevents people from preserving and re-experiencing works as soon as the "rightful owner" stops caring about them is a travesty. I say that when an IP becomes orphaned, stops being claimed by a new rights-holder, or some time after it stops being sold/used, it should be forcibly removed from the grip of copyright and opened up for everyone to use. Otherwise, we're heading to a world where only a slim subset of well-performing properties are being offered, while the rest lie in a gigantic graveyard of things-someone-owns-but-will-never-use instead of being potentially put to use by someone who would actually care.
this is true of a lot of indy films...I remember a talk by this one director, Joe Swanberg, who mentioned a lot of his early movies are in limbo and unwatchable because no one can figure out who has the rights...
So they can't release a sequel, but they could make a new game that has suspiciously similar vibes and call it "Some people eventually dies or something".
I'm torn about whether I'd want a direct continuation. It has similarities to the changing tone of the spy shows/movies and their satires that inspired it in that things change over time, and the reception to the feminism angle would be different now. A sequel would likely mean moving the time period on again which has additional challenges.
I could definitely see starting over with a reboot, which would also give the studio involved a chance to dodge all the rights issues by doing a 'spiritual successor' and renaming everything. 25 years later you're likely trying to attract newcomers much more than you are fans of the old games that want specifically more NOLF. I'd also be interested in a cold war era spy thriller that played it straight, real spy history has a lot to pull from that could be weaved into an intriguing story to play through, and NOLF did touch on some of the issues around spying like taking advantage of people.
One downside is it would motivate companies to get intellectual property registered under a trademark with indefinite protection rather than copyright. Even with our current lifetime + 70 year protection we have companies like Disney getting characters registered as a trademark.
No, the opposite. To be protected by copyright, sources must be uploaded to a Library of Software.
Downside: Movies will be made to not last; Software will be made to be incompatible with everything on a 10-year timeframe; and the country who enabled this open mindset will displease its copyright owners who will move to the other countries.
off topic: My goodness, anyone feel the UI/UX of the website to be really refreshing? I've lately been digging compact/industrialized looking UI vs 'touch'/comfort view that take up way too much real estate.
Any content, once published/distributed/broadcast in the US, that is not made readily available to the public going forward loses copyright protection. This includes revisions.
* A film, TV show, sound recording, book, or any other copyrighted content must, once made available for public purchase, always remain available. If the only streaming service willing to pay to stream your movie has the smallest market share, too bad; the market has spoken on the value of your content. An ebook can fulfill this purpose for a print book; streaming can fulfill this purpose for a theatrical or physical-media film. But it must be available to maintain copyright.
* Compulsory licensing should apply; if Netflix wants to pay the same amount of money as the above-mentioned small market-share streaming service for the film, Netflix must be allowed to do so. The film's rights owner can demand more, raising the price for all, but if every outlet refuses, the film immediately goes into public domain. This process is reversible, but it would set a ceiling to prevent the owner from setting a ridiculously high price to prevent its availability.
* If a Blu-ray of a film or TV show has excised or modified scenes for whatever reason, and the original isn't also made available (whether on a different "theatrical cut" release, or as a different cut on the same disc), the entire original version immediately goes into public domain.
* If NBC posts Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube that have removed "problematic" scenes[1] without explaining the differences—a diff file, basically—the entire original skit loses copyright protection.
Separate issue, but also very worthwhile:
* Streaming services must make all data regarding their content available in some standardized format. Consumers should be able to use one application to access all content they have access to. The creator of SmartTube (a very nice YouTube-compatible player) should be able to add the appropriate API support to search for and play Netflix/Prime Video/Disney+/Paramount+ content.
The above applies to software, too. Legalize abandonware!
NOLF is actually source-available [0][1][2], and it has been since not that long after its original release.
There's also a community-driven project [3] keeping it playable on modern hardware - however, it hasn't seen any activity in several years.
If you haven't played or heard of NOLF before, I highly encourage checking it out. It's a fantastic title, even after all these years.
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20020217233624/http://pc.ign.com...
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20010720053220/http://noonelives...
2: https://github.com/osgcc/no-one-lives-forever
3: https://github.com/haekb/nolf1-modernizer
So you can't buy it, but you can play it, and the source is available. Is this really a problem? I know the article mentions this in passing, but preservation & the ability to actually play a 25 year old game is more important than its capitalization, IMO.
Well, no, you can't play it because the source code doesn't include assets like the 3d models and textures and levels and sound files. You need to acquire those some other way if you want to build a playable version of the game.
It's like GZDoom, you have to supply your own copy of DOOM.WAD
Except that you can get FreeDOOM as a replacement, even for PWADs:
https://freedoom.github.io
Get a daily build.
I hope you aren't suggesting the only way to play the game is to build it yourself first. This is not the case.
No he's stating that getting the executable is the easy part.
That isn't at all what they are saying. They are saying that you need to provide all the game assets. Exactly like you do if you want to play the original Doom with modern source ports. Since the game is not available to buy, this means either pulling those assets from an original retail copy, or pirating them.
Since the game is not available to buy, this means either pulling those assets from an original retail copy, or pirating them.
Not true [1]. It’s available on a bunch of platforms!
[1] https://doom.bethesda.net/en-US/doom_doomii
“the game” is No One Lives Forever, not Doom
Since the game is not available to buy, this means either pulling those assets from an original retail copy, or pirating them.
Even if you don't want to pirate it, there are lots of copies for multiple platforms available to buy just on eBay. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> preservation & the ability to actually play a 25 year old game is more important than its capitalization
> Even if you don't want to pirate it, there are lots of copies for multiple platforms available to buy just on eBay.
This feels like a contradictory position.
On the one hand the important thing is the preservation and availability of a work. On the other hand it's okay if the it is only available as 20+ year old used copies and pirated copies.
And any preservation or restoration project is under the shadow of 3 companies (Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox) which have all recently "complained that they may have rights to [NOLF] and may sue over it"
That a company should be able to profit from something they made 20 years ago (and didn't touch since) feels wrong.
They do mention that you can pirate it. But that is kind of the point of the article, the only way to play the game is to break the law.
Oh, no! Anyway...
Seriously though, break a law that no one is interested in enforcing? What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
ETA: This aside from the fact that you can buy a used copy and play it...
> What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
It may not bother you, but there are many people who would prefer it if they didn't have to break the law to play the game. Used copies won't be around forever, at which point those people will be SOL.
I assume the community goal would be to find out who owns the rights and get them to either use them or give them up formally and bless the community project?
Used copies won't be around forever, it would be better to have a proper community version.
What is "a proper community version"?
Something like what happened with UT99 and the original Unreal: the source was made available to a dedicated community group (who continue to push out patches for the games), and when the games were no longer commercially useful, they allowed them to be posted on the Internet Archive for free access.
The rights holder can give permission to use the assets and IP let the community basically own the game. Marathon and Project Aleph is a good example of this where Bungie gave it up, and so the open source version of the engine has fixes and things now.
Nothing from the article suggests that is on the table here, but rather Nightdive wants the rights so they can sell a remake of the game without the threat of getting sued.
I struggle to understand why the (potential?) rights-holders are so intransigent about this.
If a company came up to me and said "We have interest in reviving an IP of yours. We will take on the development costs, we will take on all the risk, all you have to do is say yes and you will get a fixed percentage of every sale"--that seems like an easy win-win, does it not? The only reasons I would imagine you would say NO were if:
1) Concern that the company will do a crappy job and tarnish the brand's reputation (which, fair, but Nightreign studios and/or GOG seem to have a pretty solid track record on this)
2) Your company's bean-counters are both so greedy and risk-averse such that their thinking is, "We only wish to allow something if it will be a guaranteed hit...but if it is a guaranteed hit, we want to do it internally so that we get to keep all of the profits!" In which case, the requirements are almost impossible to satisfy, since there is inevitably some level of risk undertaken during the remaster/re-release effort.
I think it's basically just "this is complicated, complicated means corporate lawyers, corporate lawyers are expensive enough and the potential profit is small enough that it's not worth it." It's not just "will this be net positive," either. There's an opportunity cost. Those corporate lawyers are needed for other important projects that might make more money.
But also, I kind of think it becomes a thing where it's too small potatoes for anybody senior enough to actually approve all of the legal stuff to care enough to make happen. Sure, it's basically free money, but it's not a lot of free money.
I agree with your points and would add one more: the TFA gives a second-hand recounting of what the various company's lawyers supposedly told the potential reboot licensor and quotes the erstwhile licensor's conclusion they were basically threatening legal action. But this isn't consistent with the companies also indicating they weren't sure what rights they may have (if any).
However, it IS consistent with a thing prudent lawyers would typically do when discussing an unknown future hypothetical. They'd reserve their client's rights should the client later discover they have grounds and wish to pursue it. Depending on how it's phrased, that could be confused with a 'legal threat', but I suspect the lawyers may have just been careful to not unintentionally relinquish any future rights.
I'm basing this on being involved in similar licensing discussions between lawyers. While some lawyers and clients are assholes, not all are. Even if they were trying to be 'good guys', it's not clear they could be in this situation. Since they don't even know if they have any rights, they don't have grounds to grant any kind of permission (and doing so in the absence of having any rights could make their client liable - at least in theory).
Nobody was asking them to give indemnification or grant the license. Each of the potential holders just need to put it down on paper they aren't going enforce rights if they had any, not give the developer a complete license to use. Second can incur liability, first is pretty common clause used in many settlement agreements.
These things typically only work when you are well connected to senior management in these orgs, the ones who can sign off on such one-off requirements. Business processes are designed for the 80% of use-cases. More often than not, we end up hitting a wall with any long tail/unique requests.
Also, it's not clear who actually owns the thing -- the original game was developed by Monolith Productions and published by Fox Interactive (PC) and Sierra (PS2). Following the tree of deals, there's a bunch of different big corporations that could have a claim on the IP:
- Fox Interactive was eventually sold to Vivendi, but most of their library was listed as owned by 20th Century Fox, which has since been acquired by Disney
- the second and third games in the series were published by Sierra, who over the years have been owned by Comp-U-Card, Vivendi, Activision, and eventually Microsoft
- Monolith Productions were eventually purchased by Warner Bros., who shut the studio down earlier this year
Just from that list, there's a huge list of media conglomerates that could have an ownership claim: News Corp, Disney, Vivendi, Warner Bros., Microsoft
Yeah, just reading that list of corporations and the long, twisted IP ownership trail, I'd estimate figuring out who has which rights would take at least a year and a couple hundred grand in legal costs to get each potential stakeholder's attorneys to locate, review and analyze the documents and issue a binding legal opinion.
I've actually been the "business decision maker" in some similar multi-law firm licensing confusion. It was a situation where my company had no significant financial stake in the outcome and was just trying to be the 'good guy'. In fact, all the big companies were aligned on being willing to just help out the small company trying to get the thing to happen. Despite that sincere intent all around, it was basically impossible to do what they needed without significant expense or even potentially creating new liability for ourselves where there was none. The moral being: don't just assume "we can't have a nice things because of big company assholes". That's sometimes the case but not always. There are execs out there who'd be happy to 'do the right thing' if they can. Over probably a dozen similar situations, there were only a couple were I was able to help a good thing happen - despite actively trying to find a way to make it work.
Phrases like "basically impossible" and "if they can" evoke some kind of physical force stopping an action that everyone, in good faith, wants to take. In your example (and in the article's) it just doesn't seem like everyone actually wants to take the good action.
If the game studios were actually not being assholes, they could each say, "You know what, we're not making any money from whatever rights we might or might not have, so, lawyers: scram and go do something else. Here's a signed paper saying we give up all rights to the IP. Go have a ball."
But, they'll never do this because corporations are like Smaug, as another poster put it--they hoard for hoarding's sake and will never voluntarily give up value, even if it's a fractional share of potential value, and even if that value is not materially helping them. They'd rather destroy something they're not using than give it away.
The potential that you spend the money/time just to end up proving that you don't own it is I think the main blocker.
Many of these get stuck in contract hell. The original developer may have had licensed software or assets and at the very least needs to find the agreements and understand how they work for new distribution. It's not uncommon for those agreements to have been time limited, but if you want to renew now you need to find the current successor/rightsholder and negotiate.
Also, the developer/publisher/distributor/etc may have had revenue sharing agreements with various parties. Those need to be found and understood too. Sometimes those are in % of gross income, % of net income, % of sales price, or a fixed amount per copy sold. If anything needs addressing, you've got to find those parties or their successors and negotiate. You should also find those parties anyway, to pay royalties they're due, but if you at least set up an escrow account, you'll be prepared when they find you.
I would hope games contracts are a bit more forward looking now, and try to address these things, but 25 years ago, you would still get old games at computer surplus stores... A handful of developers would put out old games collections, but most games never came back.
I imagine there is a legal/admin cost, to locating the paper contract in Iron Mountain/wherever. So if they wait for the game to go ahead anyways, they could wait and see if its a smashing success, then sue and have a budget for tracking the docs down. Perhaps a lawyer could explain if sending a “cough up the docs in 60 days or we are invalidating your claim” would work.
Game Publishers hoard IP like Smaug. I can't even begin to catalog the IP's in the EA, UBI, and Activision's vaults. In many cases, the original creators can't even get the time of day to ask to use the IP.
We just saw an explosion of streaming platforms because of their version of 2). Instead of continuing to license to Netflix for a percentage, they decided to spend all of the time/money to develop their own streaming platforms in hopes of keeping all of the proceeds. Maybe they have internal dialog looking at this same comparison which has not settled out yet. The streaming platforms have shown rolling your own is not a guaranteed panacea.
They had no choice. The rational choice for Netflix would always be to verticalize and sell their own content.
3. They believe the IP may have potential that you won't exploit to the fullest.
In other words, they believe that they may be able to do more than you with it, if they ever get around to it.
If your potential market is tiny--and lets be honest, the market for an unpirated version of this is quite small,most people sufficiently interested have pirated it already--then keeping it out of the public in favor of some unknown potential later is a consideration.
What companies hear is, in effect, “Please make it easier for me to create a competing product and take away business from your existing IP:s that you are trying to create mindshare for.”
Copyright kills works when rights cannot be negotiated, usually because the rights holder is not to be found, but in this case because the situation is just "complicated".
I've long thought copyright should only apply if the work is available for sale, or they are actively preparing another printing so they can sell it again in the near future.
Then there would be digital stores where old works go to die. Which might be better than now if price was reasonable and support good. But could easily be expensive, unsupported, and goes after pirates.
Authors already have problems with getting their books back when out of print. Ebooks make it worse cause they can stay in print with low effort.
I like idea of copyright with short span, like 10 years, and then have to register and renew for every subsequent decade. That would give registry of owners who are serious about work. Would never see public domain movies, but there are lots of obscure works that would be public domain.
> But could easily be expensive, unsupported, and goes after pirates.
nothing stops that from happening even now, tho
Copyrights should have a similar schedule to patents. The first period of coverage is no-cost but subsequent renewals increase in price, perpetual copyright should be financially ruinous but copyright should exist so a creator of a work can profit off it for a reasonable duration.
When Microsoft was first looking to do a remaster of Goldeneye from N64, even they couldn't manage the legal trouble of that one.
Microsoft had the original development team, Nintendo had the software and Activision had the James Bond License. Microsoft was willing to develop it for both Xbox 360 and Wii but they simply couldn't get the rights between all three straightened out.
If those three, companies that are no strangers to handling legal issues cannot figure out, it doesn't look good for smaller titles like this.
I remember buying NOLF--it was at retail, in a big box off the shelf at Media Play. I knew nothing about it, it just caught my eye, and the description on the back sounded interesting. I miss that kind of media discovery, our modern always-online world tends to smother serendipity.
It was an excellent game. The idea of a continuation of the series is appealing, but a lot of modern adaptations really stink, so maybe it's better off in the amber of nostalgia.
I did discover a lot of great stuff like that. The funny thing is that there were a few titles that I discovered, absolutely loved and yet apparently were considered bad games. Oh well, I saw the good side of it.
One that I grabbed for $10 was Adrenix, a 'Descent' clone that has very few mentions around and reviewed fairly averagely. I loved it!
As for modern adaptions of games, if they can do it either like 3D Realms retro style like with Ion Fury, or go into the full re-imagined space like they did with Doom 2016. But any middle ground seems to lead to disappointment.
I miss that kind of media discovery, our modern always-online world tends to smother serendipity.
I don't really miss the time of having to choose games this way. If you lucked out it was great, but you were also potentially putting down upwards of $50+ bucks in 1995 dollars on a game that you might end up really disliking.
I got it as a pack-in with a video card. I didn't expect it to be anything good, being a pack-in. Talk about being wrong...
There is a team working on a "Spiritual Successor".
This was a fun series of games. They are especially fun if you've watched some of the source material they're constantly referencing and alluding to, like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (the 1960s one, not the 2010s movie), Get Smart, etc. Still holds up.
Makes me wonder if a good way to "reign in" on copyright abuse and abandonware is to require copyright holders to pay a tax based on some kind of formula.
More importantly: If no tax is paid, after a reasonable amount of time, (1-3 years,) the work is considered abandoned and automatically moved to the public domain.
Even more importantly, if the work isn't available for general consumption (rental and physical), at a reasonable cost, without a subscription / ads, no copyright claims can be perused for non-commercial piracy. (IE, it would become totally legal to torrent a TV show if it's stuck in a streaming service that requires ads / a subscription.)
Georgism [1] but applied to copyright: If you want to extend your copyright past, say, 15 or 20 years, then you need to estimate the value of that copyright and pay tax on it. You can name any value you want, but someone can then buy it at that value.
Maybe there can be different rules for copyrights owned by humans vs corporations; 5 years free for corporations, 20 years free for humans. Or maybe longer for humans, I dunno. But having corporations sit on IP just because they can is ridiculous.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
>If you want to extend your copyright past, say, 15 or 20 years,
If you want to extend your copyright past 20 years, too bad. Come up with something new; that one's public domain now. Or it should be at any rate.
Disagree. Individuals should have copyright for their entire lives. Not one moment past their death, but it's not cool to tell someone they can't sell the work they created any more.
They can still sell it if its in the public domain.
Just not exclusively.
I agree in principal.
That being said: I think reforming copyright should allow fair use and incentives for curation. There's nothing wrong with the Beatles' heirs curating the Beatles recordings for streaming, and remastering them; as long as there's no prosecution for torrenting needle drops of old Beatles records, torrenting rips of old Beatles CDs from the 1990s, and making a streaming service of such recordings (the old ones, not the remasters) without needing permission of the heirs.
I loved NOLF and NOLF2. I was actually thinking about pulling them off the shelf and loading them up again the other day. I had no idea that the rights around them was such a mess.
That Bobby Banilla story is nuts. So instead of paying $5.9m in 2000, the Mets decided to defer the payments for 11 years! And also to stretch them out over 25 years! Didn't the Mets realise that just paying the full amount (with interest) 2 or 3 years later cost them a lot less. On the other hand, $1.1m is probably peanuts in terms of Mets expenses these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Bonilla
On the other hand there are claims this allowed the Mets to free up cash flow in the short term and also allowed them a draft pick in the next season.
https://ftw.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2015/07/01/new-yor...
NOLF2 is one of best and interesting FPS I played. I wish they remastered it.
So say someone decides to produce a remaster of NOLF. Does Activision have to produce this piece of paper once they sue to establish standing? If Activision's version of this piece of paper was chewed up by rats in the 90s, does their ownership stake vanish in a puff as well?
If the potential victory from a lawsuit is $20K and Activision estimates it will cost them $50K to find this piece of paper, is the company relatively safe from a lawsuit?
They would need to prove that they have the rights to it to win court, yes. The chances of Activision actually pulling the trigger and suing if you made a remastered version are definitely less than 50-50. They'd have to actually have owned the rights in the first place, they still have the documentation to prove it, and that they'd find a suit a profitable idea? Let's say it's a 1/3 chance. That means if you publish it, you'd have a 2/3 chance of not getting sued by Activision, that can have a positive E(V) if you just go ahead and YOLO it.
But the killer is that WB and Fox (now Disney) also are sitting out there as maybe rights-holders. Let's say that each of them also has a 1/3 chance of suing and that they are all independent. Now you have a 8/27th chance of not getting sued- less than 1/3. So the expected value has to be twice as large as with a normal, single company situation to justify the increased risk of lawsuit from one of three companies. And so no one pencils out the choice as a good one, compared to the opportunity cost of working on some other game with a clearer rights situation.
It is reasonably sure that each party has a 90% chance of suing if they have rights. There is a 90% chance someone will send you a cease and desist just because all 3 are the type that will do it if they think they have rights. There is a reasonable chance more than 1 will send a cease and desist (some weaselly "we are still checking rights but if we have them your notice starts now - just enough to avoid fraud if it turns out they don't have rights)
OK, but according to ChatGPT (so correct me if the AI is wrong), if you ignore the cease and desist, then the process goes into default judgement where the claimants now need to prove standing to collect judgement. You now know with 100% certainty that they need to hire someone to dig through a file vault at Iron Mountain to collect judgment and they're not going to bother doing that so the default judgement means nothing and you can go about your merry way ignoring their cease and desist.
I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that is wrong. Still consult a lawyer if you need real legal advice.
If you ignore the cease and desist their next step is to sue you in court where the lawyers fight it out. They can sue immediately, without a cease and desist at if they want. However the reason to do a cease and desist is it costs a lawyer just a few minutes to write one up, while court often costs millions of dollars - thus if you just stop doing something after the cheap letter it is typically best for them to ignore the what they could have got by taking you to court right away. They can bring a cease and desist to court and show that they gave you time to stop which looks good to the judge and can influence how much the judge awards if they win (if they lose the cease and desists is at best meaningless).
A default judgement is when they sue and nobody shows up in court. Because you don't defend yourself the courts just assume you are guilty (assuming the case isn't completely absurd). Sometimes you can get a default judgement when it is obvious someone is doing something bad but not who, and then if you later identify who you can collect immediately - but that person you accuse can fight the default judgement in a lot of ways.
They also will send a cease and desist when they know there is no chance in hell of winning a court case, but people might stop anyway because they are afraid of getting sued.
Ignoring such letters will result in absolutely nothing. The trick is to know which is which, and that is why you ask an attorney.
If you want to fight it in court, you go fight it in court and waste a bunch of money, but if you don't lift a finger, then it enters default judgement. But in default judgement, the plaintiff still needs to demonstrate standing. Otherwise, I could randomly sue a bunch of random people for random nonsense and bank on most of them entering into default judgement.
If I'm a patent troll spraying and praying patent violation suits, I still at the end of the process still need to prove to own the patent I claim I do.
In this case, we know there is a lower cost to producing the document that Activision will not want to bear because the total they can recover is below just the cost of producing the document that proves standing. Why would I not just let it go into default judgement, knowing it's toothless?
Sometimes company will go to court and lose just to discourage others thinking the same elsewhere.
Yes, but I don't know how more clearly to say this, it's not the court bit of it, it's forcing them to go dig into the archives. They will not do that, especially because there's also a risk of them definitively not being able to find this piece of paper and then having an even weaker claim than they had before.
How do you get to 100 percent certainty that they won't do that, or that they need to go through the file vault at all? What if someone just needs to find it in an email server or etc?
In the article: the documents in question was created before email or digital storage was used for this. It is believed that someone still has a copy in a file cabinet somewhere - but it will take a lot of manual effort to find it and nobody wants to do that if they don't have to.
> OK, but according to ChatGPT
Shut up.
If that’s the best argument you have, then you’ve got nothing.
I, like most people, don’t come here to see AI slop opinions. We can get that approximately everywhere else. We don’t need HN to be filled with AI confabulations, and if it were to happen, we would leave.
Did you not slide your eyes immediately to the right to see (so correct me if the AI is wrong)?
It doesn't need to be wrong for it to be incredibly rude to just regurgitate ChatGPT output. That's not having a discussion, that's being too lazy to participate but posting anyway.
This is not advancing a novel argument or creating of a new piece of content, this is about a factual claim about the world. How is it different from According to Google or According to Wikipedia or According to this scientific paper? It's saying this information is 3rd party sourced and I'm open to being corrected if you can point out the flaws in this way of gathering facts from the world.
Why would you set the probability at 1/3rd? It feels closer to 1/100 at most.
They've admitted the documents, if they're anywhere, are buried in a file cabinet at Iron Mountain. You can set a lower limit on the amount of labor required to produce the document. Activision is not going to go on this quest if the labor required * chance of the document existing exceeds the amount they can win in a lawsuit.
What you’re describing is a risk/reward approach to decision making. But in practice many execs do not follow this calculus.
It feels like the right thing to do is to preemptively sue all three for a declaratory judgement, similar to obtaining a "quiet title" for a piece of real estate. Then they can put up or shut up. The right thing to do if you're trying to remaster the game, that is. The right thing to do if you just want to play it is to pirate.
I'm sorry, you want to get into an IP lawsuit with the Walt Disney Company, by choice? You think that starting a fight with the most fearsome collection of IP lawyers on the planet is the right thing to do?
(Fox, one of the possible rights holders, was acquired by Disney in 2019.)
How much should the preemptive-plaintiff be willing to spend to get the declaratory judgement? And why would one expect to win? It is very clear that some combination of the three companies have the rights, and all they have to do is agree collectively to win. Each firm individually probably spends more on lawyers every month than normal people do in their lifetime. They have lawyers on staff, so their marginal cost of being hasslesome to you in court is near zero.
It's all risk-adjusted cost/benefit, and there is almost no practical benefit to taking the risk. Yes, it would be nice to clear up the legal ownership rights and to have a non-pirated version available. But as an economic matter, there is almost no value.
Yes, I get that the legal system can be horrible and adds some pretty ridiculous overhead and costs. I was just pointing out there is a path to actually clear this thing up - a process to give the possible-rightsholders notice that they have to actually respond with concrete evidence or drop the matter, rather than lazily sending "we might care" nastygrams. And doing that that would certainly be much less than being on the receiving end of a lawsuit with damages after paying for development.
> Does Activision have to produce this piece of paper once they sue to establish standing?
Yes, but see below.
> If Activision's version of this piece of paper was chewed up by rats in the 90s, does their ownership stake vanish in a puff as well?
No, but complex. Legally the contract is still valid, but they still need to show the court what the details are. All parties to a contracts get a copy, and so Activation can legally force other people who should have a copy of the contract to produce it, any copy is enough (or several partially rat eaten copies may be enough to reproduce what the original said). Activision has all the time they want to find copies of the contract (unlike trademark, copyright isn't use it or lose it), so you are risking the above for a long time. Sometimes enough testimony in court of we did have a contract is enough - when it is obvious there must have been a contract at one time the court will put together obvious details which might be enough to sue. In this case the 3 parties can agree that while they don't know who as rights between the 3 of them the rights must be contained and so they can agree to a 3-way split for purposes of going to court - even if it latter turns out only one party had rights, that party agreed to the split (though if you years latter can prove a 4th party has rights they can sue the other 3).
Of course if rats did eat all copies of the contract the lawyer fees to figure this out are likely more than the game is worth and so it probably isn't worthwhile to sue, so practically it may be as if they no longer have rights to the game just because they can't afford to enforce it. This is a very risky take though and so nobody should risk it.
> This is a very risky take though and so nobody should risk it.
People keep on insisting when it comes to these things that various things are risky in a rather handwavey way but they never fully come out and articulate the risks.
I asked this question to ChatGPT a bunch of ways and tried to understand what the specifics are when people say this is risky and I can't really seem to get to anything that is a nuclear level risk, just a garden variety risk that you need to manage amongst all the other garden variety risks involved in running a business (when inputted with a reasonable set of realistic assumptions, it's possible to create assumptions where this is a nuclear level risk but that doesn't seem to apply to the majority of real world cases, including this one).
You're not going to to get a good answer to this, because 1) 99% of people here aren't lawyers and 2) the ones who are lawyers or know the law have better things to do than argue with the nonsense machine, certainly not via proxy.
Willful copyright infringement means liability for statutory damages, compensatory damages, claims on all profits, and legal fees (yours and theirs).
(I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, chatgpt is a very bad lawyer).
The risks are not something we can know. They are not we put you on death row bad. The courts decide what to do. Every country has their own laws and you could be taken to court in more than one. You can get a better answer from a real lawyer not me, but that will costs money.
The worse case is if they have a registered copyright which means they get to charge triple damages. I'm not completely clear on what triple damages mean. I think that means they subtract your costs to publish the game and count only the profits, but I'm not sure. I'm also not sure if they assume your costs, or what they would have charged if they had done this (that is if you sell the game for $50 but they would charge $100) - you can bet their lawyers will argue for whatever gets them the most, and may also ask for lawyer fees.
For a small company the above will bankrupt you.
Hot take: If no one knows who has the rights to sell it, no one knows who has the rights to stop someone else from selling it. There'd be a legal battle. For a game like this, its probably not worth it. But I bet by the end of it we'd figure it out.
I only played the first one, because the second one was more finnicky and required newer hardware. But I must say, NOLF 1 is one of the best and most unique FPS games ever. It should be far, far more famous than it is.
I had to pirate Xenosaga and emualate a PS2.
The reality is that the vast majority of entertainment is ephemeral. A videogame or movie get it's 5 minutes of fame. There are a few weirdos like me who want to play a 20 year old videogame but how much money can you get out of that and is it worth the trouble?
A pertinent prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43146581
However you can actually compile from source
No One Sells Forever, eh?
But seriously, the way the copyright system prevents people from preserving and re-experiencing works as soon as the "rightful owner" stops caring about them is a travesty. I say that when an IP becomes orphaned, stops being claimed by a new rights-holder, or some time after it stops being sold/used, it should be forcibly removed from the grip of copyright and opened up for everyone to use. Otherwise, we're heading to a world where only a slim subset of well-performing properties are being offered, while the rest lie in a gigantic graveyard of things-someone-owns-but-will-never-use instead of being potentially put to use by someone who would actually care.
this is true of a lot of indy films...I remember a talk by this one director, Joe Swanberg, who mentioned a lot of his early movies are in limbo and unwatchable because no one can figure out who has the rights...
So they can't release a sequel, but they could make a new game that has suspiciously similar vibes and call it "Some people eventually dies or something".
I remember playing the demos for NOLF and NOLF2 years ago. If I had known it would be impossible to buy 25 years later, I would have bought the game!
I also remember reading articles in Game Developer magazine about how sophisticated the AI in NOLF2 was. Wish I could find that article
It seems like one could negotiate a price for "possible rights," no? I.e. I pay you $X and you relinquish any rights you may or may not have to me.
Everybody is waiting for HL3. I want NOLF3
I'm torn about whether I'd want a direct continuation. It has similarities to the changing tone of the spy shows/movies and their satires that inspired it in that things change over time, and the reception to the feminism angle would be different now. A sequel would likely mean moving the time period on again which has additional challenges.
I could definitely see starting over with a reboot, which would also give the studio involved a chance to dodge all the rights issues by doing a 'spiritual successor' and renaming everything. 25 years later you're likely trying to attract newcomers much more than you are fans of the old games that want specifically more NOLF. I'd also be interested in a cold war era spy thriller that played it straight, real spy history has a lot to pull from that could be weaved into an intriguing story to play through, and NOLF did touch on some of the issues around spying like taking advantage of people.
This. This was such a charming game series.
It's very interesting how people think about copyright for this case (loosey goosey, yolo), as compared with copyright when discussing AI.
What is the downside to limiting all movie and software copyrights to 10 years?
Source code and materials etc can remain trade secrets if desired?
And all IP with a movie as well - including characters. This would stop a studio from forever milking the same piece of IP forever.
One downside is it would motivate companies to get intellectual property registered under a trademark with indefinite protection rather than copyright. Even with our current lifetime + 70 year protection we have companies like Disney getting characters registered as a trademark.
No, the opposite. To be protected by copyright, sources must be uploaded to a Library of Software.
Downside: Movies will be made to not last; Software will be made to be incompatible with everything on a 10-year timeframe; and the country who enabled this open mindset will displease its copyright owners who will move to the other countries.
off topic: My goodness, anyone feel the UI/UX of the website to be really refreshing? I've lately been digging compact/industrialized looking UI vs 'touch'/comfort view that take up way too much real estate.
Reposting my proposals regarding copyright:
Any content, once published/distributed/broadcast in the US, that is not made readily available to the public going forward loses copyright protection. This includes revisions.
* A film, TV show, sound recording, book, or any other copyrighted content must, once made available for public purchase, always remain available. If the only streaming service willing to pay to stream your movie has the smallest market share, too bad; the market has spoken on the value of your content. An ebook can fulfill this purpose for a print book; streaming can fulfill this purpose for a theatrical or physical-media film. But it must be available to maintain copyright.
* Compulsory licensing should apply; if Netflix wants to pay the same amount of money as the above-mentioned small market-share streaming service for the film, Netflix must be allowed to do so. The film's rights owner can demand more, raising the price for all, but if every outlet refuses, the film immediately goes into public domain. This process is reversible, but it would set a ceiling to prevent the owner from setting a ridiculously high price to prevent its availability.
* If a Blu-ray of a film or TV show has excised or modified scenes for whatever reason, and the original isn't also made available (whether on a different "theatrical cut" release, or as a different cut on the same disc), the entire original version immediately goes into public domain.
* If NBC posts Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube that have removed "problematic" scenes[1] without explaining the differences—a diff file, basically—the entire original skit loses copyright protection.
Separate issue, but also very worthwhile:
* Streaming services must make all data regarding their content available in some standardized format. Consumers should be able to use one application to access all content they have access to. The creator of SmartTube (a very nice YouTube-compatible player) should be able to add the appropriate API support to search for and play Netflix/Prime Video/Disney+/Paramount+ content.
The above applies to software, too. Legalize abandonware!
[1] Something I understand already happens
No One Lives Forever is a game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Operative:_No_One_Lives_Fo...
Usual insanely wordy paragraphs and endless linked text hiding everything on TechDirt.
Fuck “buying it legitimately” anyway when it's old enough that it would be Public Domain under a sane copyright regime.
Relevant: NOLF Revival Edition (same as mentioned in the article and quoted article, but actual link):
- https://archive.org/details/no-one-lives-forever-trilogy
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43146581
Totally agree, buying makes sense if it helps the creator(s), if it is not possible or it is tainted, I'd say go to the high seas and enjoy.