> Who's actually being hurt here? No one is buying 20 year old consoles and games that probably aren't even sold by the original company anymore.
People are buying them, they just pay the Chinese, and not Nintendo/SONY.
"Who's actually being hurt" and " aren't even sold by the original company" is not a good argument. Nintendo clearly can sell those games for a sum anytime it wants to. They are just manufacturing a scarcity right now, or at least they are trying. They are the ones "being hurt", in the standard sense.
You can either grant IP for everyone equally, or point at some companies that they are rich and consumer hostile anyway so they don't get no IP, or abolish IP altogether.
What Nintendo is doing is no different than what everyone is doing, except that you hate them.
IMO the problem isn't that copyright lasts too long, although that matters too, but rather that you don't need to provide copyrighted material.
So basically Nintendo, and others, just hold their copyright material hostage to artificially inflate it's value. The scarcity around Nintendo games is intentional and purely artificial. This shouldn't be allowed.
If you want to maintain copyright on old ass shit, then fine, but you actually have to still sell that old ass shit. Otherwise what are you claiming copyright on? A product that doesn't exist? Why would you do that? Only for nefarious reasons.
This is actually a problem that spans far beyond the vault-like behavior that HBO and Nintendo have been exhibiting.
There's this notion of something called the copyright cliff where works that are quite old but remain under copyright are almost completely unavailable. And in the cases of books, this is not due to artificial scarcity at all, but rather that it's not economically viable to try to extract value from them. And so they just remain unpublished. Yet to get an unauthorized copy is still copyright infringement. It's good example of how copyright doesn't work very well in achieving its stated purpose.
Who is we? the combined world's governing bodies? the US corporate legal protections systems? japanese corruption?
Regardless, that is not how IP works and I do not think you think this is a proper resolution.
"just because we want it" or "it's been x years" does not pass legal scrutiny and would be dismissed in any legal venue on improper cause. You are free to not purchase the product whe navailable, where made no promises at time of orignal purchase, and are in no way harmed from the decision making of the firms.
is 30 years too long for copyrighting/trademarks? Maybe...but can't really argue that if for those 30 years they have actively defended the IP and proliferation of it from other vendors/firms. And even then.....the world is not the US.
The solution is to never purchase from the IP holder as a matte or protest. But with global scales, good luck affecting any corporations decision making.
We is, in the US, the federal government as directed by congress and the president. (In Canada where I actually live, s/congress/parliament/g and s/president/governor general (but only theoretically)/g).
> Regardless, that is not how IP works
This is exactly how IP laws work. More than that, in the US it's how they're constitutionally required to work - IP is defined as a time limited monopoly in the constitution and the federal government has no right to grant more than that. The current, "so long that it might as well be forever" copyright is spitting in the face of the US constitution.
> but can't really argue that if for those 30 years they have actively defended the IP and proliferation of it from other vendors/firms
I absolutely can. The purpose of IP is to encourage more things to eventually fall into the public domain by being published publicly. At some point, and I think 30 years is well past that point, it does more harm by preventing things from falling into the public domain than it does good by encouraging publishing.
Just because a company found a way to extract money from society, and are still doing so, doesn't mean we should allow them to do so forever.
When originally passed copyright (Statute of Anne in 1710) the term was 14 to 28 years, notably less than 30. As the world has only begun to change more rapidly since then, it's clear that it should have gotten shorter, not longer.
Not the entire library, though. Games that aren't offered in any form anywhere, and also games that weren't localized (like Mother 3) shouldn't have copyright enforceable. It's either you give up production of the game or you produce it forever, no other sane way to go about it
I hate overzealous copyright prosecution as much as anyone, but I’m very wary of a model where you have to use something you own to maintain ownership.
There are things that work that way (RF spectrum), but in general I think it would cut against the purpose of copyright. I do think there’s value in giving creators exclusive rights to their own work, and making it contingent on distribution would hurt small companies more than big.
Rent-seeking brings lots of money to lots of politicians, so they encourage it. Those same politicians also have the power to legally murder people, or lock them up for life. "Should" is irrelevant - focus on the "is".
People are buying them, they just pay the Chinese, and not Nintendo/SONY.
"Who's actually being hurt" and " aren't even sold by the original company" is not a good argument. Nintendo clearly can sell those games for a sum anytime it wants to. They are just manufacturing a scarcity right now, or at least they are trying. They are the ones "being hurt", in the standard sense.