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

  • 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.