- cross-posted to:
- curatedtumblr@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- curatedtumblr@sh.itjust.works
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Originally copyright was like 15 years and if the thing was really good for you then you could Apply for a second 15 year term.
30 years is a long time to get a monopoly over something. As a human being, 30 years is a significant part of your entire lifetime. From birth to 30 years you have your entire childhood, many people go to and finish college, get married, have kids, achieve a degree of professional success. Another 30 years from that moment, many people are at the end of their lives. They’re retiring, some who smoked or did other things are dying of old people diseases.
I believe strongly enough that 15 years is a reasonable copyright term that my book, the graysonian ethic, which I published in 2021, has a note on the legal page releasing it to the public domain 15 years from the first date of publishing, and in jurisdictions where you can’t do that, it’s licensed under the creative Commons zero license
If I want to own the rights to another book, I can write another book. If I can’t make back the money that I spent writing and publishing it in 15 years, then that’s a me problem, not a society problem the police can help enforce.
The famous song Happy Birthday left copyright only a couple years ago, and not because it timed out. The song which was written in the era of my great grandparents only lost protection from the largest state in history because after a hundred years no one could keep track of who owned it anymore.
From birth to 30 years you have your entire childhood, many people go to and finish college, get married, have kids, achieve a degree of professional success. Another 30 years from that moment, many people are at the end of their lives
Oh, don’t hurt me like that, please…
Honestly, the only silver lining of Ron DeSantis’s feud with Disney over anti-gay legislation is that the Republicans might end up undoing all the copyright extensions Disney lobbied for over the past few decades.
Disney is largely to blame for America’s copyright laws being so fucked.
Honestly, the less special treatment any one corporation gets, or the less special treatment corporations as a whole get, that’s a win for everyone else in society.
Most people on both sides of the aisle if you stepped away from the specific political situation would agree that companies should not be allowed to form their own municipal governments, either.
Highly agree with the first point, companies should not be able to hold exclusive rights to any product they no longer provide support for.
Abandonware and unsold products are one of the few cases in which I consider piracy ethical
Publishers and film makers too. Keep it in print or lose rights (though I’d rather have much shorter copyright periods). Changed products get their own copyright, but the old version falls out if you stop selling it.
piracy isn’t theft, but how do you feel about “stealing” from a thief? in the case of corporate software, the company already stole the surplus value created by their developers’ labor.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Critical government services running COBOL. Programs stored in magnetic tapes, entire offices dependant on one guy who’s retiring. All that code will be lost in time, like tears in rain
There is genuine money to be made in learning the “dead languages” of the IT world. If you’re the only person within 500 Miles that knows how to maintain COBOL you can basically name your price when it comes to salary.
I just wish I had the slightest interest in programing
I’ve seriously looked into picking one of these dead languages up and honestly, it’s not worth it.
Biggest issue is, you have to be experienced to some degree before you get the name your price levels. So you’ll have to take regular ol average programmer pay (at best) for a language that’s a nightmare in 2023. Your sanity is at heavy risk.
I’d honestly rather bash my head with assembly, it’s still very much in use these days in a modern way. Most programs still get compiled into it anyway (Albeit to a far more complicated instruction set than in the past) and can still land some well paid positions for not a whole lot of experience (relatively)
Yeah everytime someone says “just learn COBOL, you’ll make tons of money,” it’s like,
Bro.
There’s a reason no one wants to write new software in these languages anymore, let alone maintain a forty-year-old pile of technical debt.
Been working in COBOL for a decade and this is all true.
I’m lucky. I personally enjoy it. But i can totally see how it’s an absolute nightmare for most people.
Games publishers are in a war of attention and don’t want to compete with themselves. They won’t sell you an old game if they can get you hooked on the new version with microtransactions and DLC with no story and sub-par multiplayer.
The next point is just making the case for open source.
Some companies just make their new version compelling. You can’t get the experience of Balders Gate 3 by playing Balders Gate 1.
I think they’re all competing with themselves anyway, the biggest customer group for Whatever 5 will be players of Whatever 4. Giving away Whatever 1, 2, and 3 will increase sales of 4 and 5
IP shouldn’t exist in general.
A monopoly is thought to inspire creation, if that’s so IP is good, but should be on human timescales.
100 years of monopoly won’t inspire me any better than 20 years, and even most cooperate products have less time in production than that
It was so hard for me to grasp at some point over a decade earlier that in the past, in the middle ages and earlier for example, that people would publish all these educational books…and none of the info was copyrighted; literally anyone could find some book published by some random Greek or Arab person and just take all the knowledge, and release their own stuff that just freely builds on the knowledge contained within, or that inventions could be copied by anyone and no one was like ‘pay me for my brilliance’.
Absolutely. Free flow of information without pay wall allows humanity to collectively build upon itself.
Yes, but it’s important to remember that a much (most?) of that work was performed by those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of the church, or by clergy who had plenty of free time beyond their duties and no separate need to earn income for housing and food. In fact, one reason to enter the clergy was to gain access to the resources to pursue other activities.
Kinda related, in the company I used to work everything was done in SAS, an statistical analysis software (SAS duh) that fucking sucks. It’s used to be great, but once your on their environment you are trapped for fucking forever. I hated it and refuse to learned it over what was basic for my daily tasks. A couple of months I moved to another company that used to pay a consulting firm for my job, so my boss and me had to start everything fresh and the first thing we did was to study what are going to use as statistics software and I fight tooth and nails for Python and one of the points I pushed was that if in the future we decide to move out of Python we could easily can do it, while other solutions could locked up us with them.
If you rely on free packages in Python for processing, those are as likely to become obsolete as anything else (if not more likely). I also really dislike the compatibility issues with different versions of different packages, the whole environment aspect. Buying new computer with different version of windows? Who knows what will work there.
In this sense for scientific computation I prefer something like MATLAB. Code written 40 years ago, most likely would still work. New computer? No problem, no configuration, just install Matlab, and it runs! Yes, it costs money, but you get what you paid for. Mathematica is another option, but I mean ugh!
I work in an astrophysics department and this is exactly why we almost exclusively use open source software
Based
This
Stallman was right.
COBOL is still used heavily in banking, it would be the ultimate abandonware if it wasn’t still getting supported.
It’s still supported because there’s billions of dollars moved by COBOL code and IBM and others want a share of the profit of those who move billions
True, but look at the documentation for IBM platforms and compare it to legacy documentation from Microsoft. People keep using it and part of it is because it has a lower maintenance cost than the short term costs of moving on. It’s not trust that exists in a vacuum, Microsoft has tried to sell too hard being a Microsoft developer using their Microsoft tools to ever have that legacy demand, companies will just use *nix instead.
Edit: lol, I haven’t realised I’m not in a video game subforum. But my point stands and I agree that old software should be pirated or downloaded for free if the proprietor is a jackass that no longer provide support but still try to milk every cent from a dead horse.
Devil’s advocate: old games don’t have great quality of life improvements that we take for granted today and having remakes could fix the issues.
I played Civilizations 3 again and even though the graphics still hold up quite well by today’s standards, the UI doesn’t hold a candle to the later releases. Suffice to say, I won’t be playing Civ 3 again despite having grown up with the game. Old games like Civ 3 requires you to have like OCD and be extremely patient, which is something you can’t really have as an adult with less time to play videogames. There are old games that would require retouching-- without the baggage of parasitic modern trends of course like DLshit and microtransactions.
People with OCD struggle more with patience than neurotypicals. They feel an intense need to fulfil their compulsions right now, they’re bad at waiting.
Not just science, factory equipment that needs ancient computers to function too. If you’ve ever wondered why some old PC parts are surprisingly expensive on eBay…
I agree, although the number of pointless updates that would be pushed so that companies can keep the rights to their software makes me cringe
God, back when I was a kid my father used to be against me playing video games so I’d have to find some free way to game and I just lived on abandonware games. I downloaded games that were either kind of old and came out around the mid-90’s or even earlier, or had just been abandoned; that and a ton of gaming on emulators.
So many fun old games, sooooo many fun old games. Also lots and lots of ASCII rpg games, lots and lots of ASCII rpg games.
Hey, thanks for the links! These got my childhood in them!
On that Windows 95 anecdote, by the way, beyond gaming that’s also one of the advantages of wine. Pretty sure their software would run perfectly on Linux with wine.
Not usually. The main thing for lab equipment is that it is controlling hardware. So you are often using proprietary drivers for custom hardware. Wine can’t handle drivers and for security reasons can’t get low level hardware access.
On the other hand, something like ReactOS could, in theory, work if it was much more mature and had more developers behind it.
Gotta save this one
