While in the past doing a reprint of a book, movie or game was expensive and wasn’t worth if something wasn’t popular, now selling something on a digital store has only a small initial cost (writing descriptions and graphics) and after that there’s nothing more. So why publishers are giving up on free money?

I thought to those delisting reasons:

  1. Artificial scarcity. The publisher wants to artificially drive more sales by saying that’s a limited time sale. For example that collection that included sm64. super Mario Galaxy and super Mario sunshine on switch. The greedy publisher essentially said “you only have 6 months to get this game, act now” and people immediately acted like "wow, better pay $60 for this collection of 3 old games, otherwise they’ll be gone forever!” otherwise they would have been like “uhm, i liked super Mario sunshine but $60 for a 20 years old game? I’ll think about that”

  2. Rights issues. For books the translation rights are often granted for a limited time; same for music in games; or if it’s using a certain third party intellectual property. Publisher might decide that the cost for renewing the license is too high compared to projected sales, while the copyright owner instead still wants an unrealistic amount of money in a lump sum instead of just royalties. Example is Capcom DuckTales remastered, delisted because Disney is Disney.

  3. Not worth their time. Those sales need to be reported to governments to pay taxes and for a few sales, small publishers might prefer to close business rather to pay all the accounting overhead. Who’s going to buy Microsoft Encarta 99?

  4. Controversial content: there are many instances of something that was funny decades ago but now is unacceptable. Publisher doesn’t want to be associated with that anymore

  5. Compatibility issues. That game relied on a specific Windows XP quirk, assumed to always run as admin, writing their saves on system32, and doesn’t work on anything newer. The code has been lost and they fired all the devs two weeks after the launch, so they’re unable to patch it.

In all those cases (maybe except 5), the publisher and the copyright owners decided together to give up their product, so it should be legally allowed to pirate those products.

If I want to read a book that has been pulled from digital stores and is out of print, the only way to do is:

  1. Piracy (publisher gets $0 from me)
  2. Library (publisher gets $0 from me)
  3. Buying it from an ebay scalper that has a “near mint” edition for $100 (publisher gets $0 from me)

And say that I really want to play super Mario sunshine. Now the only way is to buy it used, even if they ported it to their latest game console and it would literally cost them nothing to continue selling it. But if I buy it used, Nintendo gets the exact same amount of money that they would if I downloaded it with an “illegal” torrent.

In short: they don’t want the money for their IP? Then people that want to enjoy that IP should be legally allowed to get it for free

  • hitmyspot@aussie.zoneEnglish
    121·
    4 days ago

    I’m sure we could legislate in such a way that says if it’s purposely priced artificially high to prevent sales, then the same IP abandonment applies.

    • MudMan@fedia.io
      103·
      4 days ago

      No you couldn’t, unless you enact government controlled prices for all media.

      Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.

      • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
        7·
        4 days ago

        we do this for standards and patents: for a patent to form part of a standard, it must be granted on fair and reasonable, non-discriminatory grounds

        it’s different in that the party is entering into that agreement voluntarily, however we use language like “fair and reasonable” already

        • MudMan@fedia.io
          6·
          4 days ago

          And you can, in fact, regulate market prices.

          But that doesn’t make it feasible or convenient. Is a 250 USD collector’s edition from Limited Run on a game that originally cost 15 bucks “fair and reasonable”? I mean, they sell. People buy them. People buy them even when the cheaper option is still available.

          Digital goods have wildly diverging prices. Laws take intent into account all the time, but how do you take intent into account on something that is agreed upon via supply and demand if your goal is to guarantee supply?

          People are being too simplistic here and assuming that things are either copyrighted or on the public domain, which is already not how this works. You don’t need to set a killswitch for public domain transition based on whether something is being monetized, just a fair scenario for unmonetized redistribution. If you make it so people sharing and privately copying things at their own cost is fine but selling is reserved for the copyright holder it doesn’t matter how the holder prices things. Plus that’s in practice already how we all operate anyway.

          • FrederikNJS@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            It seems to me that any legislation could easily carve out an exemption for any special editions, only applying to the “regular” version.

            • MudMan@fedia.io
              11·
              3 days ago

              No it couldn’t “easily” do that because legislation can’t predict every single time a product is going to be brought to market and make exceptions for every time a sales person comes up with a way to license or sell a thing.

              Laws work best when they are general principles that can be applied to a wide swath of scenarios via interpretation. People just look at a thing they don’t like and want laws to… you know, stop that kinda thing. But that’s not how it really works, at least when it’s working well. Even the current copyright is guilty of this to some extent, having been designed to effectively ensure that only the original author can profit from selling printed copies of their books and then being beaten into a bloody pulp by the realization that the content of a creative work and its medium are different things.

              But at least the core principle behind it was workable initially, the idea of tying copyright to something being available for sale is fundamentally a nonstarter. I mean, I sure hope if I write a story and don’t make it widely available until I sell it to an editor it doesn’t mean that anybody with a copy of it could just share it or sell it themselves just because I’m not making it available. That doesn’t seem like a great idea, fundamentally.

          • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            Is a 250 USD collector’s edition from Limited Run on a game that originally cost 15 bucks “fair and reasonable”? I mean, they sell. People buy them. People buy them even when the cheaper option is still available.

            well that’s an easy one - you can have whatever price you like for a collectors edition, as long as some edition of the game continues to be offered at or around the original price (or perhaps average unit sale price) that the game was sold at

            again, we sometimes do this for housing in australia in some areas - you can build a luxury apartment block as long as you have a certain amount of affordable housing mixed with it

            People are being too simplistic here and assuming that things are either copyrighted or on the public domain

            i think perhaps you’re misreading what people are saying. copyright is an important tool to ensure people get paid for their creative works, and that investment gets put into such projects however the point of copyright is not to make people money - money is itself a tool to maximise the goods and services available. the point is to maximise the availability of goods and services.

            i think it’s pretty easy to have a law that days if the work is not available for consumption, it loses at least some of the protections of the copyright system to ensure others can make it available for consumption in some way

            based on whether something is being monetized, just a fair scenario for unmonetized redistribution. If you make it so people sharing and privately copying things at their own cost is fine but selling is reserved for the copyright holder it doesn’t matter how the holder prices things

            i think now we’re kind of agreeing - im not sure that anyone is arguing that monetisation itself is the trigger - the availability of the product to the average (or perhaps original target) group on fair terms is the trigger

            • MudMan@fedia.io
              1·
              3 days ago

              It is, very much, not “an easy one”. You’re describing a regulated market, which is what I said above. Housing is regulated aggressively almost everywhere, and the scheme you describe would require a centralized control over how much people are allowed to raise prices to match inflation for games.

              And, as mentioned many times already, it doesn’t work with microtransactions or free to play games and it incentivizes setting a very high launch price to work around the limitation of using launch pricing as a benchmark for a product’s entire lifetime.

              Also, no, I don’t think I’m misunderstanding what people are saying. It’s definitely not easy to tie “availability” to copyright protection. Which is why in the real world the way copyrights sometimes get extinguished has more to do with enforcement than availability. People ARE arguing that something being up for sale should be the trigger instead, but this is very hard to manage, very hard to trigger and doesn’t come even close to fitting all the ways things are marketed.

              I think this is a very, very hard problem to fix, but if you made me try, I’d argue that a deep reform should enable copyright exceptions regardless of whether something is up for sale. I don’t even know why people here are so fixated with that element. The exclusive right should not be about copying a thing, it should be about selling or profiting from a thing. Not copyright, but sale right.

              • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
                1·
                2 days ago

                require a centralized control over how much people are allowed to raise prices to match inflation for games.

                and? governments already track inflation. in australia, our minimum wage and unemployment benefit amount and a lot of other things are legally defined relative to CPI (the “cost of a basket of groceries”)… rental increases are capped at “reasonable” amounts given the increase of other properties in the area… these are not only doable, but already being done in different contexts

                And, as mentioned many times already, it doesn’t work with microtransactions or free to play games

                that’s true, but this is why we say “reasonably available” as the core metric rather than specifics: we define what IS reasonable, and then let the courts decide outside of that list

                incentivizes setting a very high launch price to work around the limitation of using launch pricing as a benchmark for a product’s entire lifetime.

                which is why i didn’t say launch price - i suggested something along the lines of an average… the cost of the game should be something like the median price that people paid. what most people are willing to pay is “reasonable”

                People ARE arguing that something being up for sale should be the trigger instead

                think you’re misunderstand - it’s not “for sale”, it’s “reasonably available” to an average targeted person

                I think this is a very, very hard problem to fix, but if you made me try, I’d argue that a deep reform should enable copyright exceptions regardless of whether something is up for sale. I don’t even know why people here are so fixated with that element. The exclusive right should not be about copying a thing, it should be about selling or profiting from a thing. Not copyright, but sale right.

                sale is irrelevant to the issue though - the issue that we’re trying to solve is general availability to the majority of people the product was designed for. if you are the copyright holder, and you make your work available for consumption then nobody should be allowed to distribute your work without permission (for some reasonable time)… if you decide to stop distributing a work, there’s no public good that comes from that, and thus it should have no copyright protections because copyright protection is meant to increase the volume of creative works

                • MudMan@fedia.io
                  12·
                  2 days ago

                  Sale is the only issue because you’re talking about an exclusive right to profit for something. You can already copy a thing at any point for free. That technology is trivial, we just don’t allow it as a general rule. You’re fantasizing about creating an exception based on a thing not being widely available to purchase. If the thing is free, then there is no exception because… well, the thing is free. It’s a valid distinction in that yeah, it’d allow people to retain some control over free licenses, but it still wouldn’t fix what happens to things that haven’t been commercialized yet or that aren’t commercialized constantly.

                  TV shows that were aired once and aren’t available for purchase, private art that is not made freely available, one-off concerts or events, tools created for private use… there are so many things that would be severed from protections if that was the line.

                  And just to frame what you’re arguing regarding price control: the outlandish scenario people are trying to prevent with the price control here is one where, to prevent losing copyright under the weird “access” rule, someone keeps a game up for sale somewhwere at an inflated price because they don’t want to sell it otherwise. That is not why meida goes out of print or gets delisted, for one thing, and price control wouldn’t impact it much, for another. I mean, Starfox 64 was 80 USD in 1997, so you could sell it for like 200 bucks now, which doesn’t seem like it fixes the entirely imaginary problem that idea was trying to solve.

                  Meanwhile, what happens to all the games that depend on a server or that lose compatibility with modern platforms? Are you mandating people to sell iOS games that no longer work on modern phones? Movies in discontinued formats? Is Disney obligated to keep selling the VHS version of The Little Mermaid or to publish a new version of that cut? What about Star Wars, where the movie is actually different? What happens in scenarios like Apple removing the old 1080p cut of Alien and replacing it with a 4K that has different color grading that annoys purists? Are those the same thing or different? Can you take GTA San Andreas down if you sell the remaster?

                  This is not “easy”, and it doesn’t work the way people here seem to think it works. You’re just working backwards from a specific example that annoys you and not considering the wider context.

      • illi@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        I’m not aware of an instance when media like movies or games would grow in price in time (except for on second hand market due to scarcity). So could be worded so the price might not be higher than on the time of the release or something

        • MudMan@fedia.io
          2·
          4 days ago

          If this thread is proving something is that policymaking is very difficult.

          That doesn’t work either, things don’t have a single price point in modern media, and it’d be easy to just do what some games are already doing where you give people early access for extra money and save yourself from being price locked later.

          Plus, how do you price out subscriptions and free to play games with MTX? Not every individual piece of media has a price, but a lot of dead media comes from broadcast, subscriptions and other nonstandard arrangements.

          You guys are too fixated in the scenario where publishers hike prices to retain copyright without actually distributing the content. It’s not as big of a loophole as you think and the idea of tying copyright to a thing being actively sold has bigger problems than that.

      • hitmyspot@aussie.zoneEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        No, as we already have a market price for new games. We also have differing prices for differing versions already.

        If you’re selling an older less popular or less critically acclaimed game for higher than what newer games with reasonable sales are selling at, then you’re clearly manipulating the market.

        We don’t have to micromanage the market. We can set in place mechanisms to make sure it’s efficient and is a true market.

        • MudMan@fedia.io
          4·
          4 days ago

          Do we? Could have fooled me. The games I played this week ranged from free to 90 bucks, including 5, 15, 20 and 39. And I used the 250 limited edition example because I had the Virtua Fighter collector’s edition they announced on the TGAs in a cart before I thought better of it.

          So I have no idea what the “market price for new games” is supposed to be.