|
If (like me) you're a Canadian, you may have heard about the government copyright consultation that's going on right now. The short story is that this is the government's second crack at modernizing copyright for the internet era, after the dismal failure that was Bill C-61.
 As a game developer, changes to the Copyright Act affect my livelihood, which not surprisingly got me thinking about the current and future state of copyright.
Probably the hottest issue as it relates to games is the whole DRM/TPM/anti-circumvention mess. Lobbyists from the music, movie, and games industries argue that DRM is required for us to conduct business. They trot out sketchy numbers on "piracy" and talk about how DRM can be used to implement parental controls and facilitate demo distribution (neither of which actually require DRM).
What they gloss over is that DRM currently prevents customers from doing legitimate things like making back-up copies of their purchased games. When activation servers go off-line, DRM can even prevent original copies from working.
Why do customers tolerate this? Well, for one thing, many players don't realize they need back-ups. Until you've seen a few hard drives crash or tried to get an old game cart to boot, it's easy to believe that technology will work forever like it does today. The other reason is they have no choice. You can't buy a console without these restrictions built-in. PC games are a little better (also check out GOG), but steadily getting worse.
Unfortunately, the only way this is going to change is with outside intervention. Hopefully, Canada's new Copyright Act will:
- Define fair-uses of digital content, such as making personal back-up copies and being able to use content at any time without requiring remote activation.
- Protect users' ability to exercise fair-use of content, for example by giving fair-use rights precedence over contract terms.
- Continue to allow people to develop and use circumvention devices when necessary to exercise fair-use rights.
Wait! I'm a game developer - doesn't this mean I'm going to go broke due to rampant piracy?!
I don't think so.
What I've just described still makes unauthorized copying and distribution illegal. What has changed is that content providers don't get to make up and enforce the rules themselves using DRM (we have a legal system for that), and legitimate customers are granted some protection from buying digital content they can't make fair-use of.
I believe there is more benefit to be had from treating players with respect and giving them a product that they can rely on indefinitely, than there is from implementing the onerous restriction systems we see creeping into games today.
Copyright is still good for business-to-business dealings, such as keeping developers and publishers from ripping each other off. But copyright should not be a big stick to threaten our customers with, nor should it be used to erode the basic qualities of digital content behind euphemisms about emerging business models.
Most players don't want to rip-off game developers. The least we can do is extend them the same courtesy.
|
I'd like to comment on one point you make:
"Until you've seen a few hard drives crash or tried to get an old game cart to boot, it's easy to believe that technology will work forever like it does today."
When you take this from the perspective of artificial limits placed by DRM, I agree with you. But, on its own, I'm not so sure. It doesn't feel like so long ago that I would buy music on an audio casette tape or a movie on a VHS casette, and the tape would get worn down or caught in the player and tangled up and destroyed, and my thought wasn't "oh no, I wish I had a backup" but "oh no, it broke, I have to buy a new one."
It was almost like, back then, I wasn't buying the information - the songs or movies themselves - but I was buying the medium that carried the information. The information always seemed free: I could listen to music on the radio, or watch a commercial-ridden movie on TV; what I was paying for was a device, namely a storage container for that information, that would allow me to access the information whenever it pleased me.
This all changed very suddenly with the digitization of information. The medium was no longer necessary. It was almost as if we had developed the capacity to perfectly memorize something, so once I heard a song once on the radio I could "re-hear" it at will from memory. DRM is to digital media as a sort of Harrison Bergeron setup the copyright industry would impose should such perfect memory ever evolve. It seems tragic that we would allow corporations to viciously handicap our greatest strengths as a society.
Your analogy to the tape cassette is not quite the same as the current trend in the gaming industry. For example, you can play your tape cassette in any tape player, but many video games a restricted to a PC once installed. I'm also not buying a video game for the CD it comes on, but the information on that disc. I should be able to access that information regardless of the reader I'm using.
Also, knowing that my tape cassette will probably wear out, I usually made a copy right after I bought it, so that when it did wear out I still had the information on the cassette stored somewhere else. Doing this with a video game is considered a violation of the anti circumvention methods deployed on the disc.
The problem with copyright is the unwillingness of developers of content to realize the market their producing content in. What they need to do is accept the fact that in the digital age its futile to expect everyone to abide by the honour system and refrain from making copies, when it's so easy to do so. They need to adapt their business model to capitalize on the much wider audience they can reach using the internet and monetize the online service and not the game. WoW has this half right, by charging monthly subscription to their servers, but they could reach a much larger audience if the game was relatively cheap $5-10 per copy or even free. This would make their monthly income that much higher, and in the end increase profit.
Instead, producers of content seek to legislate a rigid system that promotes their old and outdated business model, and cost taxpayers millions of dollars to prosecute those who would dare to contradict them.
I agree with Neil's approach here, and I respect his point of view. If content developers adopt a business model that's respectful of their target market, that market will end up a lot larger. In that scenario, the %10 or so who steal or copy the content won't compare with the 50% increase in sales of a quality product.
I agree very much with your opinion of where copyright needs to go except you left out the public domain and the length of terms of copyrights. In the US at least it's absurd. Some stuff from the 1920s are still under copyright protection! How does a copyright on something in the 1920s promote creativity and the furthering of arts!?! No one in their right mind thinks that it takes 95 years for a creative work to turn a profit.
(I also think 95 years is a bit too long of a time to keep a copyright.)
I sent a similar submission already, pointing out that the two things I was looking for (as an individual and as a game developer) is a) A truly balanced and "fair" fair-dealing allowance, that covers backups and other personal uses, and b) avoiding DMCA-style anti-circumvention rules. Users must be able to circumvent stupid DRMs to get to their legal uses of items they buy.
Now let's see if little Canadian developers like us can make a difference against the multi-national media lobbies looking to give Canada another DMCA.
-- George Geczy / BattleGoat Studios www.battlegoat.com
Even worse it's life + 70 now =/ 95 years is some of the older works that are getting close to entering public domain under older laws.
Of course people CAN keep profitting off something but SHOULD they? Why should Disney still be able to keep a tight control over something they creating so long ago. Mickey Mouse is pretty much a cultural icon now and vast majority of people alive now probably grew up in a world with mickey. Yet he's still 'owned' still locked down by a corporation. (On a side note is the best part of Disney's story is that most of its own works are 'copies/derivatives' of previous works like Cinderella and Steamboat Willy). Just think, if we had the copyright law we have today back then a lot of our cherished childhood movies might have never been made.