Abandonware
The GameSpot feature on Abandonware is well-done and raises great questions about copyright.
Video games are more likely than other creative works, like books, music, or movies, to go out-of-print, I would guess. Publishers have a stronger sense that games go obsolete, and certainly the sales of a game decline substantially within just a few years.
One of the results of this is that it can be difficult to obtain games from only a few years ago. Another is that it can become impossible to find certain games from a relatively long time ago (which could mean "ten years" in video game history). Since digital copying is pretty cheap, and most games continue to have some devoted fans, copyright must have something to do with the scarcity of many out-of-print works. And here much of the disappointment is that this scarcity is artificial.
The publishers quoted in the article are completely correct that copyright doesn't lapse when works go out of print. I've suggested before that maybe it should, or at least maybe there should be a compulsory license for out-of-print works, so that you could legally reproduce an out-of-print work without asking permission, provided that you paid a fixed statutory royalty to the copyright holder for each copy you made. (Some copying is already fair use and already does not require permission or a royalty; this should be repeated frequently, to counter blatant lies like the legend I saw on some VHS tapes recently: "Any unauthorized use or duplication is a violation of copyright.")
So I'm talking in particular about cases in which you would be forbidden by copyright law to make a copy. Under a compulsory license scheme, you could make that copy and then pay a certain number of dollars to the copyright holder, and not be committing copyright infringement.
I mentioned this on a mailing list and got a reply arguing that copyright should not lapse when works go out of print, for various reasons, including the likelihood (at least with books -- it's not as common with video game software) that works will be reprinted (yielding new royalty payments) or that derivative works such as movies will be made (also yielding new royalty payments).
The reply argued that
if an old book has gone out of print and gets a movie made from it, the author may make more money from book sales associated with a reprint for the movie than she did from the first run of sales.Thus authors would be justifiably upset at any rule cancelling their copyright after a work goes out of print.
It went on to propose (as I understood it) that copyrights should have to be renewed periodically, which was true in the old days. This has the effect of providing a clearer indication of when copyrights expire, as well as who, if anyone, is actually interested in continuing to enforce the copyright. (Today, completely forgotten copyrights are still valid, in principle.)
I continue to be bothered by the idea of things going out of print on account of copyright; maybe I'm spoiled by the low cost of digital copying.
