| sc94597 said: In this case (AAA games) the people who write the code and produce the assets don't "own it." Capital investors do. IP is mostly a legal convention for the convenience and perpetuation of the current economic system and not something indisputably morally good. I personally think it is okay or even good that people decompile game code or any code really when the alternative is that capitalists control and gatekeep the access thereof. Again, legally it is a different matter, but most so-called moral justifications for IP rights are post-hoc justifications after the fact of its existence and not something upon which these laws were constructed from first principles. IP exists because it benefits the dominant political-economy. Everything else is to rationalize that. |
Originally copyright and IP were 'invented' to wrangle control from the publishers who enjoyed a permanent monopoly before 1695. (Stationer's monopoly) The statute of Ann (1710) put the legal right in the hands of the author. The "work made for hire" doctrine screwed it all up thanks to the supreme court of the US in 1903 resulting in the copyright act of 1909 and further rights given to employers with the copyright act of 1976 making a distinction between employees and contractors.
It was a good idea at the beginning, but corrupted by capitalism.
It's still useful to protect small indies though. When I started as a software developer we were just a small company and getting out hard work freely distributed added to us having to close our second office. Then we started encrypting our data and adding copy protection. Later we got burned again by patent litigation and then had to file our own patents to avoid getting sued as the only defense there was counter offense ending in a stale mate...
But yep, patents nowadays are mostly to further enrich corporations. The worst is in the medical field. Politics tried to wrestle control from publishers, yet corporations started lobbying and using the political system to further enrich themselves.
Anyway, originally copyright was only supposed to last 14 years. Emulating and modding 14+ year old games, perfectly fine with me, 2012 and before, Abandonware as far as I'm concerned, should enter the public domain after 14 years.
https://cspd.law.duke.edu/publicdomainday/shrinking/
Yet emulating/modding/decompiling/copying anything newer, that really should be up to the creator of the work, not just because we can.
