Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I mean, yes, but it is how IP works.

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.



The person you are responding to is pretty clearly of the opinion that "30 years is too long a term for copyright" not "they just hate Nintendo".


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 And so they just remain unpublished.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.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: