Opinion: if something is delisted from digital stores, then it should be legally allowed to be pirated

While in the past doing a reprint of a book, movie or game was expensive and wasn't worth if something wasn't popular, now selling something on a digital store has only a small initial cost (writing descriptions and graphics) and after that there's nothing more. So why publishers are giving up on free money?

I thought to those delisting reasons:

Artificial scarcity. The publisher wants to artificially drive more sales by saying that's a limited time sale. For example that collection that included sm64. super Mario Galaxy and super Mario sunshine on switch. The greedy publisher essentially said "you only have 6 months to get this game, act now" and people immediately acted like "wow, better pay $60 for this collection of 3 old games, otherwise they'll be gone forever!” otherwise they would have been like "uhm, i liked super Mario sunshine but $60 for a 20 years old game? I'll think about that"
Rights issues. For books the translation rights are often granted for a limited time; same for music in games; or if it's using a certain third party intellectual property. Publisher might decide that the cost for renewing the license is too high compared to projected sales, while the copyright owner instead still wants an unrealistic amount of money in a lump sum instead of just royalties. Example is Capcom DuckTales remastered, delisted because Disney is Disney.
Not worth their time. Those sales need to be reported to governments to pay taxes and for a few sales, small publishers might prefer to close business rather to pay all the accounting overhead. Who's going to buy Microsoft Encarta 99?
Controversial content: there are many instances of something that was funny decades ago but now is unacceptable. Publisher doesn't want to be associated with that anymore
Compatibility issues. That game relied on a specific Windows XP quirk, assumed to always run as admin, writing their saves on system32, and doesn't work on anything newer. The code has been lost and they fired all the devs two weeks after the launch, so they're unable to patch it.

In all those cases (maybe except 5), the publisher and the copyright owners decided together to give up their product, so it should be legally allowed to pirate those products.

If I want to read a book that has been pulled from digital stores and is out of print, the only way to do is:

Piracy (publisher gets $0 from me)
Library (publisher gets $0 from me)
Buying it from an ebay scalper that has a "near mint" edition for $100 (publisher gets $0 from me)

And say that I really want to play super Mario sunshine. Now the only way is to buy it used, even if they ported it to their latest game console and it would literally cost them nothing to continue selling it. But if I buy it used, Nintendo gets the exact same amount of money that they would if I downloaded it with an "illegal" torrent.

In short: they don't want the money for their IP? Then people that want to enjoy that IP should be legally allowed to get it for free

54 comments

How about:

If a item isn't available for sale, the copyright is abandoned and now public domain.

84
- The items would just be kept on sale at hugely inflated prices
  
  26
  
  Would still be better than today in my opinion
  
  16
  
  I'm sure we could legislate in such a way that says if it's purposely priced artificially high to prevent sales, then the same IP abandonment applies.
  
  11
  
  have you ever tried to buy out of print media online?
  
  2
- I like the alternative better of "support or opensource it" as it can be expanded to nearly any product. You stop selling your game and thus don't provide support to those that bought it? Better opensource that shit bud. You made some dropship product that sold 100k units but stop supporting it a year later because $reasons? Tough shit, opensource it bucko!
  
  Things like Amazon's Astro business robots being bricked after a year would be much less interesting to companies. There are probably also a whole lot of devices out there that aren't supported anymore and just junk, but could be serviced if they were opensource.
  
  Anti Commercial-AI license
  
  18
  
  I really like the idea, Im currently struggling with the implementation. There are so many issues to cover:
  
  who enforces the law? It needs to be worldwide (at least for some products)
  
  how are mergers handled?
  
  what to do if the company goes bancrupt or is closed otherwises? Who will outsource the code where? And who will be accountable
  
  does that also count for private people? (e.g.: if I take a picture, I own the copyright for it, do I lose my copyright if I don't sell the picture? Or does it only count if I sold it once? What if I sold it exclusively to someone?)
  
  probably more
  
  There are so many loopholes which corps will use to get out of it :-(
  
  8
- I don't think you need to put something in the public domain immediately. And obviously that would immediately destroy any protections for physical media (in that the moment a physical book is published and sold through it immediately becomes "not available for sale").
  
  But you can make exceptions for free distribution that work both online and physically. Libraries existed long before the Internet did. You can enable private distribution of free copies without fully removing the right of the copyright holder to own an exclusive right to sell an item, which is fundamentally different than something being in the public domain.
  
  I'm fine with you being able to sell a copy of the Iliad but not one of Metal Gear Solid 4. That's not to say putting a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4 up for download should be illegal.
  
  4
  
  that the moment a physical book is published and sold through it immediately becomes "not available for sale"
  
  Because that specific book now has a new owner who can keep it or sell it as they see fit. Like people still do with physical games.
  
  If you mean that a book becomes generally unavailable when it's between printings, though, you're wrong.
  
  Publishers overlap print runs and begin selling the first paperbacks before they've sold out the initial hard cover prints PRECISELY to avoid the situation you seem to think happens with every single book.
  
  5
- Careful what you wish for- with cheaper storagesolutions and advance in ai someday it might come true. How about a limit ln copyright for say at most 20 years like for medicine ip? It is sick medias copyrights can be held in practical perpetuity.
  
  2
A few weeks ago there was this article posted here about why some game companies are trying so hard to kill their old video games and give 0 shits about preservation (as in delisting them from stores, not selling them anymore, etc.).

One of the answers given by the publishers in the article basically boils down to "old, preserved games would compete with the newer ones and eat into their sales", which does say quite a lot - they don't care about losing sales of older video games, all that matters is the sales of the newer ones, preservation be damned.

42
- Alongside this comment was an equally damning comment: "if your past games are competing with your new games then your new games aren't worth buying in the first place."
  
  20
- It also somewhat says they know the new games are nowhere near as good as the good ol' ones, which is one of the big reasons to pirate older stuff.
  
  7
Additional opinion: piracy is always morally good if the reason for your piracy is inability to buy something. That includes when the item is delisted, as in the OP, but also when you can't afford it.

[I agree with the OP by the way. Specificities should be ironed out, but in spirit it would be a good law.]

33
If it's not for sale any more it I don't even consider it piracy. It's abandonware and thus free for all.

24
Let's be real, this should extend even beyond piracy.

History is full of examples of companies buying patents for good innovations and intentionally burying them because they compete with or are too similar to the company's offerings.

Think about that - literal pieces of human innovation, steps in the ever-evolving game of technological development.... just buried for no reason other than because some company thought they'd make more money without it and had the capital to force the situation.

It's gross.

We as a people should absolutely reject the idea that which has been brought into our world through the creativity of humanity should be able to erased by the greed of monsters.

Free knowledge, free humanity.

18
- Think about that - literal pieces of human innovation, steps in the ever-evolving game of technological development… just buried for no reason other than because some company thought they’d make more money without it and had the capital to force the situation
  
  in defense, if the patent was better, it would've been used, otherwise it's going to be about the same as the existing patent.
  
  Really the only crime here is removing innovation from the open market. And bringing it into the closed market, Which is, less than ideal.
  
  1
If I can't buy it, and own it, for a reasonable price - Piracy is acceptable. Copyright holders are required to sell/license their product in an accessible and reasonable manner in order to assert their copyright over consumers.

If I can't legally obtain a copy for a period of time longer than a year - Piracy is acceptable. Withholding copyrighted products to make them artificially scarce or to manipulate sales of other products is the same as the previous scenario; it is a failing to sell your product in an accessible manner.

If the only manner of sale is 'a streaming license of the content' - Piracy is acceptable. If I cannot go to any retailer and buy a physical copy legitimately, expect users to ignore unreasonable terms of sale to access their content in a format of their choosing. This physically sold copy may be reasonably more expensive than the digital license edition; but not over significantly in excess of the cost of box/media/cover art. Make a profit; not a mint.

If the only version of physical media is over-encumbered with Rights Management or other digital restrictions - Piracy is acceptable. Sold physical copies must be playable on any compatible device as determined by the media format with minimal exceptions. We shouldn't need to connect our BluRay players to the internet every month to pull fresh certs down and lose the ability to play new BluRays when the player runs out of cert storage or becomes unsupported.

16
I have a better idea. Define piracy as profiting off of the creative work of another without compensation. Piracy for personal use is theft only in the amount it was offered for sale. For torrenting it could be argued you have stolen 1 copy plus your seed ratio. However, lots of content isn’t even available for legal purchase, only subscription for viewing. Owning a copy of this content is not piracy because it did not interfere with the sale of the item (since it’s not offered for sale). Therefore, an act of media preservation is theft by this definition, but the amount or value of that theft is $0, because it’s not currently offered for sale.

12
- personally i like to think of piracy as dissemination of illegal copies for personal gain.
  
  1
My Hypothetical Policy would be:

If a thing doesn't show up in a store for a time totaling 5 years, it should be able to be freely copied without repercussion.

So if you publish a thing, you need to keep selling it. Once you pause the sales, timer starts to tick, until you resume sales (in good faith, no intentionally limiting quantities of items), whenever you pause sales again, timer begins to tick again, once the 5 year timer is up, no more protections.

And theres also the normal copyright expiration to factor in as well. (Which I think should be somewhere around 10-20 years after initial publication, no extensions)

I think this is quite a fair policy.

Edit: Also, they can't set the price to more than 150% of the average pricing of the item. (Almost forgot this loophole of intentionally "selling" the item at high prices but not actually wanting to continue selling)

10
- Lots of impractical wishful thinking in this one. Laws don't work very well when you have to add "but you need to be nice about it".
  
  This is a very hard problem to solve for that reason, but in fairness, it's not like the current implementation tries very hard or is working very well. It's just that finding a working solution would be hard even if that wasn't the case.
  
  4
  
  I don't think that a random person on Lemmy is going to be able to write a law that has zero issues. They're just suggesting an example and government should build on that and make it complete.
  
  4
Yet another opinion. Everything published goes into public domain, copyright only gives commercial (and public?) distribution rights

9
So how is stopkillinggames.com doing?

9
- We still need massive support for the EU initiative.
  
  6
  
  Yes we do
  
  3
Remember that in the US (whose laws have been extended by trade agreement through most of the world), intellectual property laws are To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts according to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (or the Copyright Clause of the Constitution of the United States

(Europe has older stuff based on guild secrets and has had literal wars waged over things like cloth buttons vs. brass buttons)

Since we have a long list of instances now in which Science and useful Arts have been inhibited or simply robbed from their developers (case in point Charles Goodyear) within the current system, we might get better art and science without any IP law at all rather than trying to reform the system we have, which is used entirely to control and inhibit progress.

And the efforts by software publishers to inhibit the archival of old games, and the effort of book publishers to eliminate libraries are only the latest examples of how IP is only an instrument of oppression in the 21st century, and has been pretty much since Disney.

When you pirate, you're not stealing from the developers or authors or creators. You're stealing from the shareholders, and they are already fat and marbled.

So fuck intellectual property rights.

8
It's hard to get this right, but I do think the system needs fundamental reform.

I think the principle that only the copyright holder is able to profit from the media for a period of time is pretty sound, although there are also questions about creatives having no say in the copyright of the things they create if they are working for a corporation, which I also think need adjustment.

The real issue is what happens to other types of distribution. In practice, private non-profit use of media is already commonplace and bans aren't particularly enforceable. And then there is the derivative use, that is inconsistently supported and held to weird, arbitrary standards created ad-hoc for a handful of big platforms.

By the letter of the law, Google is by far the biggest pirate on the planet, it's just so big that unwritten rules have been created about it and now effectively the global copyright law has more to do with Google's detection algorithms than any kind of enforcement. We clearly need a better alternative.

5
legally allowed

pirated

😑

3
ok whatever you think.

1
I think having a sense of entitlement to any IP is wrong by default. That's not to say that there's no merit in conservation efforts, but just have the balls to say you want something for no other reason than you wanting it and stop pretending there's some form of universal right at play. Be honest about when your selfishness makes you want to bend the law. The value of laws is subjective and so is morality. Period.

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