This stuff always depresses me when I hear about it - I definitely feel we need stronger laws to aid people in reviving abandonware.
I'd love to know more about Warner's reasoning for not going forward with a deal - it's essentially free money
While I'm sympathetic to the basic emotion, it's hard to see what it would mean within a legal framework. Effectively, you'd be saying that if someone isn't exercising their rights under copyright with sufficient vigor by making something available for sale, they'd lose those rights. That's not inconsistent with the supposed function of copyright. However, in practice, orphan works legislation tends to be most opposed, not by large corporations, but by organizations representing creators like photographers who worry that such laws would be used to strip rights if paperwork wasn't all in order.
Effectively, you'd be saying that if someone isn't exercising their rights under copyright with sufficient vigor by making something available for sale, they'd lose those rights.
Couldn't there instead be some kind of default and compulsory licensing terms for abandoned works, rather than the original rightsholder losing them? So, in this case, for example, the game could be republished, and Warner/Fox/Activision could split a standard 5-10% share of the profits if they prove their rights (having forfeited an opportunity for a better deal by not bothering to clarify things sooner).
The issue with orphan works (which overlap with abandonware) it that it's often unclear who the rights holder or holders is and, sometimes, what other third-party IP rights are involved. For example, in the case of software, are there licensed libraries that would need to be stripped out. As companies shut down, get bought, sell assets, etc. figuring out ownership and rights can be difficult.
With orphan works specifically, the concern that I've heard expressed by some photographers is that companies will spend exactly 10 seconds trying to track down the copyright holder before deciding it's orphaned and using the work as they see fit.
With orphan works specifically, the concern that I've heard expressed by some photographers is that companies will spend exactly 10 seconds trying to track down the copyright holder before deciding it's orphaned and using the work as they see fit.
Isn't that the point of a national copyright registry? I understand that you don't have to register a copyright to be protected by it, and I also understand that it's not desirable to register every work individually, but making use of a copyright registry would alleviate this particular problem.
With orphan works specifically, the concern that I've heard expressed by some photographers is that companies will spend exactly 10 seconds trying to track down the copyright holder before deciding it's orphaned and using the work as they see fit.
I think a prerequisite to any kind of default licensing would need to be a documented good-faith effort to find the actual rightsholder. Futhermore, if they can't find them, I think they should have to put the default licensing fees into escrow, so it's not they could avoid paying anything.
In most cases, there is no "default licensing fee." Mechanicals in music are really the exception rather than the rule. (And this is probably less of an issue with music than elsewhere in any case because of the royalty clearing organizations.)
While I'm sympathetic to the basic emotion, it's hard to see what it would mean within a legal framework.
One way of doing it would be shift copyright to a short free-and-no-required-registration period, with longer protection requiring registration, declaration of stated value, and payment of an annual ad valorem tax on that value; during the extended period, any individual or group could buy the work into the public domain by payment of the declared value, which would be forwarded to the copyright owner.
Who are sitting around with nothing else to do? I imagine that they've got jobs, have to show status on those assignments, and this would get in the way.
Other well-regarded games that are difficult to play without pirating them or playing on aging equipment that will eventually stop working:
- Goldeneye on the N64 — James Bond franchise rights issues. There was a "reimagining" developed and release, but it's an entirely different game.
- Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Sega Saturn — IIRC the source code was lost, and a combination of that, Saturn emulation being tricky, the relatively small number of highly in-demand exclusive releases for the Saturn, and Sega no longer releasing their own consoles mean that official emulated Saturn support for the title is unlikely.
[EDIT] I should add that the situation of these two games in particular is made worse by the less-than-stellar state of open source emulation for those systems, especially in the case of the Saturn. I think it's fair to say that both are in a worse state than the Playstation, or even the newer Gamecube/Wii thanks to Dolphin.
I was under the impression that N64 had fantastic emulators. I remember playing several games in High School on an N64 emulator and they ran perfectly.
Support is just very spotty, and one's experience will depend on the games one tries to play, the platform the emulator's running on, game-specific config settings, plugins in use, et c. In this regard it's barely advanced from where it was years ago.
It's a system for which it is unsurprising to encounter difficulties emulating a given game, even if it's worked for you in the past.
Ah, fair, I haven't kept up with how it has progressed (although I did see that Project64's installer is now malware-ridden, that's sad) over the years and I haven't played an N64 emulated game in a long time. I do remember a long time ago that Dolphin wasn't that great and had spotty game support, so they must have really worked hard on it over the years.
I had completely forgotten about this game and now that I read this I really would love to play it again.
It is baffling how something like this could happen, media companies sit on so many properties like this that they will never exploit. I know that in some cases not using the property is some sort of strategy but in cases like this they are leaving money on the table. Might be peanuts to them but it seems like an opportunity for some in-house streamlining to fully exercise dead properties.
Might be peanuts to them but it seems like an opportunity for some in-house streamlining to fully exercise dead properties.
That's the thing. It is peanuts. And it's peanuts that would probably be distracting from their primary focus.
Someone at $LARGE_COMPUTER_COMPANY once basically told me that, for them, if something wasn't going to be a billion dollar business, it wasn't interesting. Sure, something smaller might nominally have a positive ROI, but if you factor in the distraction/opportunity cost/etc., they just couldn't afford to deal with yet another $50 million revenue opportunity.
...they just couldn't afford to deal with yet another $50 million revenue opportunity.
I wonder if Facebook was just a "$50 million revenue opportunity" and that's why Google didn't enter the space until it was too late. Maybe if Square and Westwood would have looked at a few more $50 million revenue opportunities they'd still exist.
Actually, Google launched Orkut at about the same time as Facebook launched.
Your basic point is fair enough but companies do need to focus and the larger they are the less they can afford to be distracted by small projects/products that have little hope of breaking out into something substantial. In this respect, they're something like VCs.
Don't know about Facebook in particular, and oh man is Google not cut out to do a good social site. But this kind of thing happens all the time, yeah.
It's explicitly called out in a lot of business books -- as a small business you often have a lot of cover to undercut the incumbent, because they're just not interested in a niche that may be huge from your point of view.
I played No One Lives Forever 1+2 and its spinoff (Contract Jack) again in 2014. They are still superb games and run fine in Win7 x64 1080p.
Sadly, such long (40+ hours) single player first person shooter games that offered a innovative gameplay, very good story and humour are a thing of the past.
New games that focus on gameplay and learn why Deus Ex 1 and No One Lives Forever 1 were such outstanding games, would be great. But such games can only be created when creative game designers are let alone with enough cash, and no business people in sight.
Both were refreshing yes. I am seeing forward to the upcoming Dishonored 2. But DX3 cannot be compared with DX1 on any level. The development of DX4 appearently took the wrong turn and additionally has been pushed back for almost another year.
I rarely ever finished games, but No One Lives Forever 1 & 2 were an exception. Never did play (or even heard of) Contract Jack though. Sadly, RSI will prevent me from giving that one a go.
If no-one can establish ownership and they have the source code and assets, why not just release it? I'm sure if there were vested interests would lawyer up and make themselves known pretty quickly. Clearly in this case it's easier to ask for forgiveness rather than for permission
But by then they would've spent the money needed to update the game to a releasable game state plus any legal costs triggered by other parties "lawyering up," perhaps only to have the rug pulled out from under them.
That's why you set up a separate entity to limit your liability first. Since the aim is to revive a game for its own sake rather than exploit it commercially, it doesn't matter if the entity in question goes bust.
That's why you set up a separate entity to limit your liability first.
That may limit their liability, but it won't prevent them from losing their investment.
Since the aim is to revive a game for its own sake rather than exploit it commercially
I think that's incorrect. I do not get the impression that
Night Dive Studios exists as some kind of game preservation charity. It seems like a business that occupies a small niche around reviving old games to exploit them commercially.
Activision and Fox aren't currently bothered enough to dig the contract out of whatever box it's in. But if there were a guaranteed damages payment in it they'd probably put a bit more effort in.
Honestly it sounds like Fox offered a pretty reasonable deal: "They [said they] might or might not have physical records to support their position, and the location of those records was not determined. So if we wanted to do a deal that paid them enough as a kind of guarantee, they would look into their records to see if they had anything. And if it turned out they didn't have ownership, they would refund that up-front guarantee. We chose not to pursue this option [and] they said, basically, 'Fine, whatever.'" I'm curious why they (Night Dive) didn't want to take that.
My first guess is that the up-front money was more than Night Dive felt sure they could make on it. Or more than they could afford to part with right now.
The author of this article apparently feels the need to state every important point twice.
Last week, Night Dive founder Stephen Kick and director of
business development Larry Kuperman emailed me to let me
know that while they had indeed planned to re-release No
One Lives Forever and its sequel, they'd hit a wall and
been forced to give up. ... Night Dive is currently
abandoning its efforts to revive No One Lives Forever.
I don't see why this is a problem. I am reminded of a comment that a friend once made to the following effect: information theory tells us that redundancy is the only way to guarantee transmission of information across over a noisy channel.
I think he said that this came from the preface of a mathematics textbook, where the author used this to criticise what he therefore viewed as the unhelpful parsimony of many textbooks, but I think that the point holds in general.
Of course, the style in which repetition is done may still be criticised for poor aesthetics, but I don't see an aesthetic problem here either.
Indeed, stating everything twice is a basic concept in education.
At least twice. "Twice" is the absolute minimum, and there are better or worse ways to do it, but anything you only say once is only useful for a reference text.
Repetition is also heavily employed in marketing. Why does the same brand run the same commercials over and over, every commercial break, sometimes for years at a time? Why do you see billboards, signage, and corporate sponsorships whose only goal is to get you to see a specific logo repeatedly? Radio commercials will often repeat the same line 4-5 times in a row, literally. Why do politicians post signs showing just their names and the position they're running for in every conceivable nook and cranny? It's obviously not about convincing you that they're most the qualified candidate, as the sign makes no argument.
Repetition certainly seems like an extremely effective method for drilling something into someone's subconscious, even if that person is making overt assertions that the brand's pervasiveness annoys them. I would guess that people have a natural bias toward things they recognize, so even if one thinks he/she is annoyed, they're still more likely to patronize the most familiar identity. I'd be interested in reading a more thorough treatment of this topic.
What if the developers... forget to password-protect the server that hosts the source code, installers, etc. Can the law touch cases of... negligence like this?
Yes. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement. The penalties for willful infringement are higher, but for unwitting infringement they are not zero, and IIRC for infringement for profit there's a high statutory minimum fine.
So release the game, get sued tell the court the plaintiff has no standing unless they can prove they own the game. Then once the courts have ruled who "owns" it, settle with them by paying a licensing fee.
If the company has to go through the pain of tracking down that contract after initially refusing to, I'd expect that they wouldn't settle, both to send a message and to try to squeeze out as much money as they can in damages.
Possibly, in reading the article it seemed that Activision, 20th Century, and Warner could not agree on who owned the rights. As it mentioned that is unresolvable directly (none of the three are publishing a new version or re-using the content). So the only way to resolve the ownership question is to draw a lawsuit, where either the courts will find that it has been abandoned (win) or they argue amongst themselves and come up with one person who is the owner.
I'm not a lawyer but if there is a writ you could file to have the courts declare it abandoned, that would work too, perhaps @rayiner will step in on that question.
As far as I know, copyright doesn't expire even if the work is "abandoned" or even "orphaned" (like when a company folds without transferring it). There were two bills to change this, but neither went through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works_in_the_United_Sta...
That review (and Erik's review of the game on Gamespot) were my favorite reviews, mainly because Monolith seemed to be their go-to whipping boy of game companies :) So, it felt redeeming :)
Only in a minimal consultative capacity. As I recall, the code was a fork of NOLF, but I don't remember at what point in development. Obviously, things had to change up big time, especially vis-a-vis wall-walking etc.
Think corporate guys. Set up and LLC, use it to launch the game, if it gets sued you tow it out to sea and sink it. The multiple publishers involved can't decide who owns it and won't release the rights? Just means that the cost of transferring title and wrapping up all the legal/contractual issues is more than they want to throw away on a scrap of publicity. Give them a target with a dollar sign hanging from it and they'll either work out who owns it or present a united front to demand a share of any revenue.
Corporations feed on money. If you want something from them, you use it as a lure, like bringing a deer to a salt lick.
The trouble with this is your avenues for distribution will be limited. Any venue like Steam or GOG will refuse to sell anything like this where the ownership is ambiguous. Obviously, you can sell the stuff directly and you might do well, but it does limit the audience.
This is a cute fantasy but it's wrong on multiple fronts. First, incorporation does not protect directors from tort liability. If you can't invoke respondeat superior, it's somewhat likely that you'll be personally liable for any tort claims. Your LLC won't shield you, and you'll be liable for infringement damages.
Second, corporations have teams of lawyers whose whole job is to find marginal infringements of their IP and pursue said infringers. It doesn't matter that it's going to cost the company more money than it's worth in your particular instance. What matters is that the company establishes a reputation for mercilessly pursuing infringers, because such a reputation deters further infringement, and because it precludes the possibility of someone claiming that the work was abandoned or no longer of interest (which doesn't negate copyright infringement claims, but could limit damages; it potentially could negate trademark claims).
Do not fool yourself into believing that your small-time operation won't raise the attention of big corporate lawyers. For the extra cherry on top, note that if you do raise the notice of big corporate lawyers, you'll be forced to comply no matter how wrong they are, since they'll pursue every strategy to make the legal fight as long and expensive as humanly possible and you'll eventually have to settle unless you already have $5 million+ sitting around with your lawyers' name on it.
Uzi Nissan, rightful owner of nissan.com, spent 9 years and approximately 3 million dollars defending against Nissan's attempt to wrest his domain from him, and they're still trying to get at him by filing frivolous trademarks. [0]
That is the MO of big corporate law. They absolutely can and will use their larger position to bully you, and you don't really have the option to take the dispute to court if you aren't pulling in tens of millions in annual revenue.
The Walt Disney Company famously sent a C&D to a day care in Florida [1] for having unlicensed representations of their characters painted on the walls.
He addressed this at the end of the posted timeline. He was awarded $58k in legal fees, which he calls "less than 2%" of the total cost of the defense (this is where the $3 million cost estimate is calculated from, which is aligned with the expense of similar cases that I'm familiar with).
I agree with everything you said (and have made the same sort of point on many threads about the strategic imperative for corporations to pick such facially unfair fights). But what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander - it's not that hard to obscure the beneficial ownership of a company, and setting up an SPV whose only purpose is to be towed out to sea and sunk (so to speak) is a well-established corporate strategy. Yes, it's a risky strategy, but only by employing such strategies can people respond to the inequitable business practices of large corporations.
This story, in a nutshell, shows why it's ludicrous to have a 70-year copyright term. There are large swaths of our culture that are going to be locked away for decades precisely because everybody, corporations and individuals alike, are bad at keeping records for longer than a decade or so.
If we'd had a more reasonable copyright system, No One Lives Forever would have been public domain by now, and anyone would have been free to update it, re-release it, use its assets for other projects, etc. Instead, it's (figuratively) locked away in a warehouse somewhere, like the Holy Grail at the end of Indiana Jones.
This stuff always depresses me when I hear about it - I definitely feel we need stronger laws to aid people in reviving abandonware. I'd love to know more about Warner's reasoning for not going forward with a deal - it's essentially free money
While I'm sympathetic to the basic emotion, it's hard to see what it would mean within a legal framework. Effectively, you'd be saying that if someone isn't exercising their rights under copyright with sufficient vigor by making something available for sale, they'd lose those rights. That's not inconsistent with the supposed function of copyright. However, in practice, orphan works legislation tends to be most opposed, not by large corporations, but by organizations representing creators like photographers who worry that such laws would be used to strip rights if paperwork wasn't all in order.
As for why? Nothing's free for a company to do.
Couldn't there instead be some kind of default and compulsory licensing terms for abandoned works, rather than the original rightsholder losing them? So, in this case, for example, the game could be republished, and Warner/Fox/Activision could split a standard 5-10% share of the profits if they prove their rights (having forfeited an opportunity for a better deal by not bothering to clarify things sooner).
The issue with orphan works (which overlap with abandonware) it that it's often unclear who the rights holder or holders is and, sometimes, what other third-party IP rights are involved. For example, in the case of software, are there licensed libraries that would need to be stripped out. As companies shut down, get bought, sell assets, etc. figuring out ownership and rights can be difficult.
With orphan works specifically, the concern that I've heard expressed by some photographers is that companies will spend exactly 10 seconds trying to track down the copyright holder before deciding it's orphaned and using the work as they see fit.
Isn't that the point of a national copyright registry? I understand that you don't have to register a copyright to be protected by it, and I also understand that it's not desirable to register every work individually, but making use of a copyright registry would alleviate this particular problem.
I think a prerequisite to any kind of default licensing would need to be a documented good-faith effort to find the actual rightsholder. Futhermore, if they can't find them, I think they should have to put the default licensing fees into escrow, so it's not they could avoid paying anything.
In most cases, there is no "default licensing fee." Mechanicals in music are really the exception rather than the rule. (And this is probably less of an issue with music than elsewhere in any case because of the royalty clearing organizations.)
One way of doing it would be shift copyright to a short free-and-no-required-registration period, with longer protection requiring registration, declaration of stated value, and payment of an annual ad valorem tax on that value; during the extended period, any individual or group could buy the work into the public domain by payment of the declared value, which would be forwarded to the copyright owner.
"it's essentially free money"
Not at all. I doubt the "free money" would be enough to pay for all the lawyer time needed to sort things out.
The lawyer time is already paid for, they are house counsels.
There's still a cost even if it's just an opportunity cost.
Who are sitting around with nothing else to do? I imagine that they've got jobs, have to show status on those assignments, and this would get in the way.
Other well-regarded games that are difficult to play without pirating them or playing on aging equipment that will eventually stop working:
- Goldeneye on the N64 — James Bond franchise rights issues. There was a "reimagining" developed and release, but it's an entirely different game.
- Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Sega Saturn — IIRC the source code was lost, and a combination of that, Saturn emulation being tricky, the relatively small number of highly in-demand exclusive releases for the Saturn, and Sega no longer releasing their own consoles mean that official emulated Saturn support for the title is unlikely.
[EDIT] I should add that the situation of these two games in particular is made worse by the less-than-stellar state of open source emulation for those systems, especially in the case of the Saturn. I think it's fair to say that both are in a worse state than the Playstation, or even the newer Gamecube/Wii thanks to Dolphin.
I was under the impression that N64 had fantastic emulators. I remember playing several games in High School on an N64 emulator and they ran perfectly.
Support is just very spotty, and one's experience will depend on the games one tries to play, the platform the emulator's running on, game-specific config settings, plugins in use, et c. In this regard it's barely advanced from where it was years ago.
It's a system for which it is unsurprising to encounter difficulties emulating a given game, even if it's worked for you in the past.
Ah, fair, I haven't kept up with how it has progressed (although I did see that Project64's installer is now malware-ridden, that's sad) over the years and I haven't played an N64 emulated game in a long time. I do remember a long time ago that Dolphin wasn't that great and had spotty game support, so they must have really worked hard on it over the years.
I'm a big fan of the update blog posts they do over at Dolphin.
Actually, GameTap had a Saturn emulator that provided Panzer Dragoon Saga to subscribers a few years ago.
I had completely forgotten about this game and now that I read this I really would love to play it again.
It is baffling how something like this could happen, media companies sit on so many properties like this that they will never exploit. I know that in some cases not using the property is some sort of strategy but in cases like this they are leaving money on the table. Might be peanuts to them but it seems like an opportunity for some in-house streamlining to fully exercise dead properties.
That's the thing. It is peanuts. And it's peanuts that would probably be distracting from their primary focus.
Someone at $LARGE_COMPUTER_COMPANY once basically told me that, for them, if something wasn't going to be a billion dollar business, it wasn't interesting. Sure, something smaller might nominally have a positive ROI, but if you factor in the distraction/opportunity cost/etc., they just couldn't afford to deal with yet another $50 million revenue opportunity.
I wonder if Facebook was just a "$50 million revenue opportunity" and that's why Google didn't enter the space until it was too late. Maybe if Square and Westwood would have looked at a few more $50 million revenue opportunities they'd still exist.
Actually, Google launched Orkut at about the same time as Facebook launched.
Your basic point is fair enough but companies do need to focus and the larger they are the less they can afford to be distracted by small projects/products that have little hope of breaking out into something substantial. In this respect, they're something like VCs.
Don't know about Facebook in particular, and oh man is Google not cut out to do a good social site. But this kind of thing happens all the time, yeah.
It's explicitly called out in a lot of business books -- as a small business you often have a lot of cover to undercut the incumbent, because they're just not interested in a niche that may be huge from your point of view.
I played No One Lives Forever 1+2 and its spinoff (Contract Jack) again in 2014. They are still superb games and run fine in Win7 x64 1080p.
Sadly, such long (40+ hours) single player first person shooter games that offered a innovative gameplay, very good story and humour are a thing of the past.
New games that focus on gameplay and learn why Deus Ex 1 and No One Lives Forever 1 were such outstanding games, would be great. But such games can only be created when creative game designers are let alone with enough cash, and no business people in sight.
Deus Ex:HR and Dishonored sort of filled that void for me :-)
Both were refreshing yes. I am seeing forward to the upcoming Dishonored 2. But DX3 cannot be compared with DX1 on any level. The development of DX4 appearently took the wrong turn and additionally has been pushed back for almost another year.
I rarely ever finished games, but No One Lives Forever 1 & 2 were an exception. Never did play (or even heard of) Contract Jack though. Sadly, RSI will prevent me from giving that one a go.
If no-one can establish ownership and they have the source code and assets, why not just release it? I'm sure if there were vested interests would lawyer up and make themselves known pretty quickly. Clearly in this case it's easier to ask for forgiveness rather than for permission
We live in a magical world where there might be no one with enough rights to release it, but many entities with enough rights to block it.
But by then they would've spent the money needed to update the game to a releasable game state plus any legal costs triggered by other parties "lawyering up," perhaps only to have the rug pulled out from under them.
That's why you set up a separate entity to limit your liability first. Since the aim is to revive a game for its own sake rather than exploit it commercially, it doesn't matter if the entity in question goes bust.
That may limit their liability, but it won't prevent them from losing their investment.
I think that's incorrect. I do not get the impression that Night Dive Studios exists as some kind of game preservation charity. It seems like a business that occupies a small niche around reviving old games to exploit them commercially.
Activision and Fox aren't currently bothered enough to dig the contract out of whatever box it's in. But if there were a guaranteed damages payment in it they'd probably put a bit more effort in.
Honestly it sounds like Fox offered a pretty reasonable deal: "They [said they] might or might not have physical records to support their position, and the location of those records was not determined. So if we wanted to do a deal that paid them enough as a kind of guarantee, they would look into their records to see if they had anything. And if it turned out they didn't have ownership, they would refund that up-front guarantee. We chose not to pursue this option [and] they said, basically, 'Fine, whatever.'" I'm curious why they (Night Dive) didn't want to take that.
My first guess is that the up-front money was more than Night Dive felt sure they could make on it. Or more than they could afford to part with right now.
The author of this article apparently feels the need to state every important point twice.
I don't see why this is a problem. I am reminded of a comment that a friend once made to the following effect: information theory tells us that redundancy is the only way to guarantee transmission of information across over a noisy channel.
I think he said that this came from the preface of a mathematics textbook, where the author used this to criticise what he therefore viewed as the unhelpful parsimony of many textbooks, but I think that the point holds in general.
Of course, the style in which repetition is done may still be criticised for poor aesthetics, but I don't see an aesthetic problem here either.
I love this observation! I would be interested if anyone could dig up what text book that came from.
Indeed, stating everything twice is a basic concept in education.
At least twice. "Twice" is the absolute minimum, and there are better or worse ways to do it, but anything you only say once is only useful for a reference text.
Repetition is also heavily employed in marketing. Why does the same brand run the same commercials over and over, every commercial break, sometimes for years at a time? Why do you see billboards, signage, and corporate sponsorships whose only goal is to get you to see a specific logo repeatedly? Radio commercials will often repeat the same line 4-5 times in a row, literally. Why do politicians post signs showing just their names and the position they're running for in every conceivable nook and cranny? It's obviously not about convincing you that they're most the qualified candidate, as the sign makes no argument.
Repetition certainly seems like an extremely effective method for drilling something into someone's subconscious, even if that person is making overt assertions that the brand's pervasiveness annoys them. I would guess that people have a natural bias toward things they recognize, so even if one thinks he/she is annoyed, they're still more likely to patronize the most familiar identity. I'd be interested in reading a more thorough treatment of this topic.
What if the developers... forget to password-protect the server that hosts the source code, installers, etc. Can the law touch cases of... negligence like this?
Yes. Copyright still exists regardless of how the content is obtained.
I can hand you a disk full of my source code, but unless I give you permission to reproduce it it'd still be illegal to reproduce.
Otherwise all the property rights of anyone can be nullified just by one person with access to it, clearly that's impossible in our legal framework.
If you don't mind breaking the law, it's probably a bit more efficient to just torrent it.
Currently very few people are seeding or leeching NOLF, which is a bit surprising with this article.
https://kat.cr/usearch/no%20one%20lives%20forever/
Pirate Bay has 21 seeders but yeah, there's not exactly an abundance of peers there. Really glad I picked up a bargain bin copy about 10 years ago
Yes. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement. The penalties for willful infringement are higher, but for unwitting infringement they are not zero, and IIRC for infringement for profit there's a high statutory minimum fine.
In this case, they already have the source code; someone along the way just gave it to them.
The source code is on github. Has been, for years.
https://github.com/osgcc/no-one-lives-forever
No, but they can always be ...fired.
So release the game, get sued tell the court the plaintiff has no standing unless they can prove they own the game. Then once the courts have ruled who "owns" it, settle with them by paying a licensing fee.
If the company has to go through the pain of tracking down that contract after initially refusing to, I'd expect that they wouldn't settle, both to send a message and to try to squeeze out as much money as they can in damages.
Possibly, in reading the article it seemed that Activision, 20th Century, and Warner could not agree on who owned the rights. As it mentioned that is unresolvable directly (none of the three are publishing a new version or re-using the content). So the only way to resolve the ownership question is to draw a lawsuit, where either the courts will find that it has been abandoned (win) or they argue amongst themselves and come up with one person who is the owner.
I'm not a lawyer but if there is a writ you could file to have the courts declare it abandoned, that would work too, perhaps @rayiner will step in on that question.
As far as I know, copyright doesn't expire even if the work is "abandoned" or even "orphaned" (like when a company folds without transferring it). There were two bills to change this, but neither went through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works_in_the_United_Sta...
SPV baby, that's what they're for.
Who's going to front the retainer for a lawyer to represent the company in arguing that?
I coded the AI for NOLF. It's nice to see people still talking about the game ~15 years later! :) It was a blast to make.
Thanks for helping to create it. It was a blast to play. I loved the Old Man Murray review:
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/751.html
That review (and Erik's review of the game on Gamespot) were my favorite reviews, mainly because Monolith seemed to be their go-to whipping boy of game companies :) So, it felt redeeming :)
Did you work on AvP2 at all?
Still one of the best, most underrated multiplayer shooters in pretty much ever.
Only in a minimal consultative capacity. As I recall, the code was a fork of NOLF, but I don't remember at what point in development. Obviously, things had to change up big time, especially vis-a-vis wall-walking etc.
Think corporate guys. Set up and LLC, use it to launch the game, if it gets sued you tow it out to sea and sink it. The multiple publishers involved can't decide who owns it and won't release the rights? Just means that the cost of transferring title and wrapping up all the legal/contractual issues is more than they want to throw away on a scrap of publicity. Give them a target with a dollar sign hanging from it and they'll either work out who owns it or present a united front to demand a share of any revenue.
Corporations feed on money. If you want something from them, you use it as a lure, like bringing a deer to a salt lick.
The trouble with this is your avenues for distribution will be limited. Any venue like Steam or GOG will refuse to sell anything like this where the ownership is ambiguous. Obviously, you can sell the stuff directly and you might do well, but it does limit the audience.
This is a cute fantasy but it's wrong on multiple fronts. First, incorporation does not protect directors from tort liability. If you can't invoke respondeat superior, it's somewhat likely that you'll be personally liable for any tort claims. Your LLC won't shield you, and you'll be liable for infringement damages.
Second, corporations have teams of lawyers whose whole job is to find marginal infringements of their IP and pursue said infringers. It doesn't matter that it's going to cost the company more money than it's worth in your particular instance. What matters is that the company establishes a reputation for mercilessly pursuing infringers, because such a reputation deters further infringement, and because it precludes the possibility of someone claiming that the work was abandoned or no longer of interest (which doesn't negate copyright infringement claims, but could limit damages; it potentially could negate trademark claims).
Do not fool yourself into believing that your small-time operation won't raise the attention of big corporate lawyers. For the extra cherry on top, note that if you do raise the notice of big corporate lawyers, you'll be forced to comply no matter how wrong they are, since they'll pursue every strategy to make the legal fight as long and expensive as humanly possible and you'll eventually have to settle unless you already have $5 million+ sitting around with your lawyers' name on it.
Uzi Nissan, rightful owner of nissan.com, spent 9 years and approximately 3 million dollars defending against Nissan's attempt to wrest his domain from him, and they're still trying to get at him by filing frivolous trademarks. [0]
That is the MO of big corporate law. They absolutely can and will use their larger position to bully you, and you don't really have the option to take the dispute to court if you aren't pulling in tens of millions in annual revenue.
The Walt Disney Company famously sent a C&D to a day care in Florida [1] for having unlicensed representations of their characters painted on the walls.
IANAL and everything I said is probably wrong.
[0] http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php
[1] http://www.snopes.com/disney/wdco/daycare.asp
In the case of mr Nissan, if he wins doesn't he get his legal costs back? (I know it's a huge hassle anyway, but better than nothing)
He addressed this at the end of the posted timeline. He was awarded $58k in legal fees, which he calls "less than 2%" of the total cost of the defense (this is where the $3 million cost estimate is calculated from, which is aligned with the expense of similar cases that I'm familiar with).
I agree with everything you said (and have made the same sort of point on many threads about the strategic imperative for corporations to pick such facially unfair fights). But what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander - it's not that hard to obscure the beneficial ownership of a company, and setting up an SPV whose only purpose is to be towed out to sea and sunk (so to speak) is a well-established corporate strategy. Yes, it's a risky strategy, but only by employing such strategies can people respond to the inequitable business practices of large corporations.
This story, in a nutshell, shows why it's ludicrous to have a 70-year copyright term. There are large swaths of our culture that are going to be locked away for decades precisely because everybody, corporations and individuals alike, are bad at keeping records for longer than a decade or so.
If we'd had a more reasonable copyright system, No One Lives Forever would have been public domain by now, and anyone would have been free to update it, re-release it, use its assets for other projects, etc. Instead, it's (figuratively) locked away in a warehouse somewhere, like the Holy Grail at the end of Indiana Jones.
That was the Ark of the Covenant.
The Holy Grail was lost because somebody crossed the seal which enhanced their ability to drop important artifacts.
You're right, of course. My only defense is that it's been a long time since I last watched the movies.
Wow, and I expected a story about StarCraft II. /s
Damn I was just thinking about this game 2 days ago in the car thinking they must have resolved it by now.
NOLF will probably get remade as a mod or fan game.