There Is No Good Reason To Just Let Unsupported Video Games Die
from the save-the-video-games dept
The Pirate Party has long played an important role in fighting the worst excesses of copyright in the EU. For example, when a major copyright update was being discussed, the Pirate Party MEP Felix Reda wrote an insightful and practical report on what needed changing. Most of his recommendations were ignored in the final EU Copyright Directive, but at least someone was fighting on behalf of hundreds of millions of EU citizens, whose views are generally ignored when it comes to copyright law. The outgoing Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer is also active in this area. He has started a new initiative that aims to tackle a widespread problem, and one that is made worse by outdated and inflexible copyright laws:
Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer has asked the European Commission for an opinion on the decision by French computer game manufacturer Ubisoft to make the popular computer game “The Crew 1” unusable from April 2024. In Breyer’s opinion, this measure could violate EU law.
The main problem is that if a company abandons a game, the latter remains covered by copyright, and is thus locked down for decades more. Even if people are willing to take over the running of a game at their own expense, it is not possible to do that without the permission of the company involved, which rarely grants it. As Breyer notes, there is a wider initiative centered around the YouTuber Ross Scott, formed to oppose the destruction of video games. There is a dedicated site, Stop Killing Games. As that explains:
An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends. The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media.
The site has an extensive FAQ that tries to answer questions about what is happening, and what can be done to stop games being shut down. Here’s the key idea:
What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way.
The other answers make clear that this is a rather complicated approach:
If a company has designed a game with no thought given towards the possibility of letting users run the game without their support, then yes, this can be a challenging goal to transition to. If a game has been designed with that as an eventual requirement, then this process can be trivial and relatively simple to implement.
The problem here is that copyright limits what people can do with the code of the game, or even how they can come up with compatible workarounds. A far better solution to the problem would be to change the law so that copyright in the game would cease when support ends. There would be no loss to the publisher or authors, since the game was going to be shut down anyway. But this would allow communities to emerge that could work together to keep games going in some form. There is no need to specify how that would be done, only that it would be legal to do so.
As the FAQ hints, this issue is part of a much larger problem:
While videogames are primarily just for entertainment and not of much consequence, the practice of a seller destroying a product someone has already paid for represents a radical assault on consumer rights and even the concept of ownership itself. If this practice is not stopped, it may be codified into law and spread to other products of more importance over time, such as agricultural equipment, educational products, medical devices, etc.
Whether or not people care about video games, they will surely care if the software in their heart monitor or insulin pump is simply abandoned by companies. All of these digital products should automatically enter the public domain once a company stops supporting them. That should include things like ebooks, music and videos: if a company no longer wishes to supply them, it should lose the right to stop others from doing so. Arguably it should also apply to physical versions such as books, images and audio when publishers and creators cannot be traced. That would solve one of the many problems with copyright’s absurdly long term: the fact that it creates “orphan works” still in copyright, but no longer available from an official supplier. The Pirate Party’s new campaign is a long way from addressing the orphan works problem, but it is a start.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published on Walled Culture.
Filed Under: abandoned video games, copyright, eu commission, fan support, orphaned works, patrick breyer, pirate party, ross scott, video games
Comments on “There Is No Good Reason To Just Let Unsupported Video Games Die”
hey, Ross made it to techdirt! he’s been really set on this for a while, glad to see his whole thing gathering some steam.
The problem is that content creators and rightsholders look on this very differently. They look at it in the same way artists look at AI or remixing – even if it doesn’t hurt the artist directly, they feel a personal attack if someone else modifies something they had no intention of developing further, and make the issue a moral one. It’s the classic fable of the dog sitting in the straw and preventing the cattle from eating it.
Re:
Content creators and rightsholders can often be very different people with very different perspectives.
Rightsholders are typically profit-driven whereas content creators are more likely to consider it a moral issue, though there are likely lots of content creators who would rather see their works enjoyed than forgotten, even if for free.
Re:
Can’t be classic as cattle do not eat straw.
Straw is bedding, hay is fodder.
Re: Re:
I hate internet pedants.
Re: Re: Re:
I hate people spreading misinformation.
If a republican had said that on twitter before musk takeover, they would have been banned for spreading misinformation. Or at least dems would have been crying for their removal. “They said words I don’t like. boo hoo! How can I ignore them? boo hoo. They should not allowed to be here spreading their lies boo hoo.”
Re: Re: Re:2
::proceeds to spread misinformation.::
Re: Re: Re:3
I was talking about in the real world, not in your alternate reality.
Re: Re: Re:4
::proceeds to offer depiction of their own alternate reality::
Re: Re: Re:5
I don’t think you know what proceeds means.
You must be toom not signed in
Re: Re: Re:6
Is it so hard to imagine that more than one person is likely to call you out for inventing an alternate reality that could have been scripted for a direct to streaming bomb of a movie written by a Newsmax correspondent with an Info Wars writer as a script doctor?
Re: Re: Re:7
Yes, as I have never been more than one man.
Re:
Nah, the problem is that the rightholders and the creative people are different. A corporation would rather burn something to the ground rather than have someone experience a thing without paying them. Creative people would rather people enjoy their work after their studio has been killed.
The problem, as ever, is that the money doesn’t value art, and they’d rather kill anything that doesn’t profit them.
Re: Re:
Not in every case.
If a company fails to produce a good anymore, there should be a way for them to be dispossessed of the good, rather than sitting on it for decades doing nothing. Piracy seeks to solve the problem by having thieves risking jail time to save bits and pieces of information to save culture, but that can only go so far
Rich people might want to make more money off the imaginary property one day. Why do you hate Jesus?
The only reason companies don’t use IPs they have ownership of is so that no one else can use them and make a better profit than them.
This is an interesting turn of events actually. In the US, it would be about copyright exemptions/fair use and free speech. But this all takes place in France, where they’re concerned about losing their culture. So Ubisoft, a private entity, saying “you don’t get to experience this part of your culture anymore, France” is actually a pretty big thing.
While France may have difficulty championing this in the rest of the EU, the fact that it’s happened with a company based in France gives them a bit more leverage.
I hope the Pirate Party recognizes the leverage they have in this situation.
Re:
Does the Pirate Party have the presence in France to make a significant difference, though?
Not to mention that France is the birthplace of HADOPI, one of the most famous copyright enforcement initiatives that cost a lot, did absolute jack shit, and still somehow refuses to die an ignominious death for all the nothing it accomplished. Pirate Party’s up against some pretty unfavorable odds if you ask me.
A small piece of good news: Redfall is getting one final update before Arkane Austin is gone forever, and it will include an offline mode
Re:
That is good news. It wasn’t a great game, but no need to punish the people who did actually pay for it…
the copyright work disappearance is designed feature of copyright law
These ideas from the article would be just ok, but sadly the article is just fighting existing copyright law. It is explicit in copyright law that they expect old works to disappear from the world approximately the same pace than new works are being created.
How it happens in copyright law is via exclusive contracts. Young people making their first commercial products will need to take exclusive license contract from publisher, and once contract is signed, the author is prevented from further licensing the material. Thus giving the publisher who found the author with finished copyrighted work a small bonus of being the only company that can publish the work. This exclusive keyword in the contract says that author cannot sell the product to his friends and try to market the product via other publishers, thus limiting the scope and spread of the work in the world.
Once you realize that the contract that publisher is signing, contains a clause allowing them to stop producing copies of the product, it means at some point the company can cut the author’s lifeline and stop paying for creation of the product. These practices are all designed to limit how far/deep towards to world the product is allowed to spread.
Pirates just can’t take no for an answer. When copyright law explicitly says that a work must disappear from the world, pirates are still trying to swap floppies to get more users use the product. Since author is no longer getting any money after his lifeline was cut, and pirates are not handing any money to the author either, (since the author cannot provide those important licenses because of his publisher contract), there is noone else left in the world using the product than some pirates. This is then the right time to bring another copyright law’s tool into use: sue the users for copyright infringement.
Re:
Nobody uses the Sybian system anymore, and yet here you are trying to turn it into Meshpage.
Your fevered dreams of a world where everyone is convicted of copyright infringement and sentenced to worship you for all eternity will never come to fruition. Which is why you’re stuck begging the government of Finland for money while screaming at the rest of the working world.
Re: Re:
This world is already here. (Amiga Addict magazine, 27, page 44)
Too bad these beggars have no money, so guess I’m not the only person bleeding for cash equivalents.
Re: Re:
Rest of the working world? Seems to me this guy just sits on his ass, screaming at his government for money for software that nobody wants rather than actually working.
Re: Re: Re:
I can do multitasking. The 1980s technology in operating systems. You can actually scream at government and working at the same time.
Also, both meshpage and my actual work has been improved in their respective version control systems.
Re:
This is a weird hallucination and copyright fever dream. Copyright was by law meant to expire much earlier such that the works were to enter the public domain rather than leave public access. And copyright was originally so short that it would enter the public domain typically within the lifetimes of the authors. That was the deal between the author and society.
Re: Re:
How many years have we enjoyed longer copyright term? It’s called mickey mouse copyright expiration pattern for a reason.
Mickey mouse is already discontinued.
But trying to get back old times is not going to work. When copyright owners have enjoyed wonders of copyright for their whole life, going to something that was already rejected as irrelevant doesn’t seem too good plan. We could as well go back with our time machine to the times of horse and carriage.
I don’t really understand your opposition to the current copyright laws. You’re advocating a world where rules are not being followed and criminals are running the show. Software development especially is all about strict following of arbitrary rules that have no reason to exist. Logical consistency by following arbitrary rules to their eventual conclusion is the lifeline of many books. Giving users new innovative ideas of what the world could be, if we just adopted these new rules, is the topic of large chunk of copyrighted works on the planet.
Given the importance of the rules in creating copyrighted works, why would users of copyrighted works want less rules to follow? Only criminals want less rules.