cosas ilegales

Muchach@s,
por favor háganse unos 5 minutos y lean esta info que encontré... es muy muy muy muy interesante y creo que todos estarán de acuerdo con lo que dice este chico:


Copyright - legal, moral, and financial

Zak McKracken, and all related images and stories are the property of LucasArts (though some rights may be owned by Fujitsu). I use a lot of copyright images, and I encourage people to not only buy Zak 1, but to download the unauthorized fan sequels as well. I also encourage interest in the FM Towns 256 color version of Zak, which for the ordinary person is only available in unauthorized versions.

Let me start by saying I want LucasArts to let us buy all this stuff, and for LucasArts to make (or at least approve) sequels! That is my dream. But if that does not happen, are we supposed to forget about the old games? Or should we seek them out by other ways? Should we post the copyrighted images on the web to encourage interest? Should we make our own sequels? In short, should we risk the wrath of the lawyers? I answer yes, and I have four reasons: legal, moral, financial, and quality related.

Remember, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders was released in 1988, for the C64, DOS, FM-Towns, and similar obsolete formats. It has not been supported since. It is not Monkey Island, it does not have sequels or a big following. Last time I checked you simply could not buy it from LucaArts, in any way, no matter how much you wanted to. Anecdotal evidence, and the decision to cancel all adventure games, suggests that LucasArts has zero interest in these old games, except as titles to be listed in the occasional history. If that does not count as abandoned, I don't know what does.

Legal issues:

This is a topic that is close to my heart. I love these old games, and the current copyright laws, if followed strictly, will destroy them. It's like the famous burning of the library at Alexandria.

In the games industry, a game is expected to recoup its cost within a couple of years. If it becomes a classic, it might spawn profitable sequels. Or old games can be repackaged in bargain collections for a few years. But five to ten years after a franchise finishes, not only is it forgotten, but the technology has changed so much that it generally becomes unplayable.

In this light, the original American copyright laws were very good. Up until 1919, a creation could be copyrighted for 14 years, and this could be extended once if the author was still alive. This allowed the creator to profit from his work, then it allowed the work to benefit the largest possible group of people. It was a good law.

However, corporations saw the possibility for greater profits, and they lobbied hard for the copyright period to be extended. Today, copyright lasts for seventy five years after the death of the creator, or even longer if the company (like Disney) can afford good lawyers. This is great for the corporation, but did nothing to encourage the creation of new works - indeed, reissuing old stuff is an incentive to not create new stuff.

So the law says, in effect, "the company has all power and you have none."

What is a law abiding person to do? While we are being law abiding, let us also remember that when you buy software you generally buy the licence, not the product, and you are not allowed to make copies of the product (except sometimes one copy for archiving). When the company goes bust, or you lose the paper licence, or the cheap floppy disk gets damaged, what does the law abiding game player do? You cannot get a replacement, you probably do not have copies, and without the license you cannot sell the product (assuming the licence is even transferable). So what do you do? You wait for the death of the copyright holder. Then you wait for another seventy five years, or longer.

A typical 1980s adventure game was made by a 20-something, probably born around 1960. If they live to be 80, then another 75 years takes us to the year 2115. So our perfectly law abiding game player waits until 2115 and his patience is rewarded. Except that he will almost certainly be dead by then. And he will find that there are no copies of the game (since it was abandoned 130 years earlier, and law abiding owners would not copy or distribute it). And the hardware to read it was already obsolete a hundred years earlier. And everyone connected with it is long dead too.

Thanks to the strict policy of keeping the letter of the law, the games have been lost forever, a few years after being created. If this is what we want, why not apply the same principle to all creative works - destroy them all after five years or so? We may as well burn all the libraries while we are at it.

The copyright, if taken to extremes, can do vast damage. So what is the alternative? Let us look at the big picture, then look in more detail at moral and financial issues surrounding old computer games.

The big moral issues

Sorry to keep going on about copyright laws, but this is a serious business. Extreme obedience to copyright law will result in the destruction of the thing that was meant to be preserved.

There is nothing moral in following bad laws to the 'n'th degree. Americans in particular should know this: their nation was built on rebellion to the laws of the time (British law). And America today refuses to accept international law (the International Criminal Court). Those who claim they are being more moral by taking their obedience to extremes would do well to look at the big picture.

Like most liberal minded people, I recognise that we should generally follow laws even if we don't like them. But there comes a point where the potential loss to society is so great, and the theoretical loss to the copyright holder is nonexistent, that the morality must come before law.

How do we decide where to draw the line? Strict adherence to bad copyright laws will destroy irreplaceable works and impoverish our lives. However, ignoring copyright laws will do the same thing, by removing any financial incentive to create new works. So, what do we do?

One option is to devote large amounts of time to lobbying the government. But faced with the power of big business, and so many other worthy causes (making a living; solving world poverty, etc.) is this really the best use of a person's time?

The other solution is the one that most people choose - you just make the best moral decision you can. My own view is that we always follow laws until it becomes obvious that they are doing harm. In the case of intellectual property, when there is a reasonable chance that the owner will promote the brand, we should leave it well alone. But when the owner seems to have genuinely abandoned it (for an extended period - in this case, sixteen years), the fans need to take action to ensure that the material is not lost for the present and future generations.

How to stop piracy:

This page is not about piracy - I am not suggesting that anyone copies games that are available - or likely to become available soon - form a legitimate source. However, it is a related issue.

Piracy (the illegal copying of games, etc.) is a serious issue when it prevents games creators from profiting from their efforts. For example, a couple of years before making Zak, LucasFilms games lost a fortune when 'Escape From Fractalus' was pirated. If that had happened with the other early games, the company would probably have never made Zak. So how do you beat the pirates? Only by making ordinary people avoid pirated goods and alerting the authorities when they spot pirates. This will only happen when people respect the rules. Ridiculous copyright rules (as outlined above) bring all copyright laws into disrepute.

The moral issue of rewarding games creators:

Intellectual copyright laws are designed to reward the producers of the materials in question. The producers of Zak McKracken are the creative talents, and the company that organized them. The company is just as important as the individual writers and artists, but its needs are more purely financial and will be addressed in a different section.

What motivates the creative types? Partly the money, but this stops coming in once a game is forgotten. Various interviews show that they are also motivated by knowing that their art is appreciated. Fan projects accomplish this.

If the copyright laws help to consign games to oblivion, it discourages the creation of new games. Sites that extend the life of a game encourage the creation of new games. By breaking the letter of the law they follow the spirit of the law.

Note: This of course only applies to games that are abandoned. Some other games that are nearly as old (such as the Secret of Monkey Island) have not been forgotten. Lucasarts has produced sequels and still sells compilations of the old games from time to time, so we cannot argue that it has been abandoned. Even if Lucasarts abandoned Monkey Island for ten years, its profile is so high that it would not be easily forgotten, and even after ten years Lucasarts might decide to create a Monkey Island 5. But afer sixteen years and no official sequels, when the company no longer sells the title even in classic compilations, Zak shows every sign of being abandoned forever.

But what of the company? What if it decided to bring back an old title - perhaps as a mobile phone game? This brings us to the next point, the financial argument:

Financial issues:

Can LucasArts make more money from Zak with, or without, fan sites? At the moment the argument is moot, because Zak has been abandoned. But Zak is a great game, and it is possible that some future manager may decide to release it as (for sake of argument) something like a mobile phone game (where its small hardware requirements would make it perfect). How do fan projects help?

Clearly, if all fan projects are of high quality, they can only raise the value of the brand. But what if they are not so good? Regarding Zak, there are two issues here. First, Zak is so old that only the very dedicated, older fans bother with it. Older, highly dedicated fans, do not produce rubbish. Take the three fan projects for example. The already-completed one looks just as good as the original Zak, and the other two look even better. But in other ways they may not be as good. Does it matter if they are merely 'good' and not 'great'?

The highest quality is not always necessary in non-core products. Look at the recent movies that made money from old brands: Spiderman, Charlie's Angels, and all the other TV and comicbook spin offs. In every case, the current materials are nothing special. The Spiderman comic is nothing special, and the Charley's Angels TV series is sometimes cringe-making today's standards. But what matters is that people still talk about them. The market looks back fondly. That is what matters.

In the absence of significant publicity from the brand owner, fan tributes keep the brand alive. They ensure that a hard working bunch of unpaid advertisers is promoting the brand, day and night. These unpaid promoters have high credibility precisely because they are independent. Thus, they have a real financial value to company.

Quality issues

When a brand is not being actively promoted by the company, good quality (or even reasonable quality) fan products are the best way to maximise the quality of that brand, and hence its value to the company.

If the company completely abandons a product, the fans may or may not give it a saleable image. If the company forbids fans from developing the image, it wastes a valuable resource (unpaid fans providing both material and word of mouth publicity). Worse, it offends that resource (the hard-core fans), and guarantees that the product is forgotten, which is the worst possible image for the product!

A company should not be afraid of imperfect spin-offs as a way to maintain interest in the core product. Consider Disney movies. Disney is known to be extremely jealous of its intellectual properties. It would not risk diluting them. And yet, every day on the Disney channel, it produces inferior imitations, short, lower budget cartoon versions of its classics! You can watch Timon & Pumbaa, Tarzan, Lilo & Snitch, or any of its properties in watered down forms. And does it harm the brand? No! It reminds the kids of the core product. Fan projects need not compete with the core product, they can be complementary, and divert attention back to the core product.

But the sixty four thousand dollar question is, how does a company ensure that fan projects are reasonable? The easy way is to monitor them in a positive way - one that rewards as well as punishes. Establish a rating system that draws the attention to the good stuff. The fans will support the 'cease and desist' letters for some projects if (a) they can see an impartial reason for them, and (b) that other projects get 'keep up the good work' letters. The fans want to support the brand. They want the brand to make money. So if you don't want to invest in the brand, just leave them alone. If you do want to invest in the brand, but not in a big way, then work with them.

Conclusion: protecting brand ownership

In summary, the big issue is that a games company wants to protect its property, just in case at some future time it wants to exploit that property. The holder of any intellectual property must enforce his rights or risk losing them forever. If they let fans do just anything, then a future lawsuit could use this as proof that they do not deserve the copyright. However, if the company keeps an eye on the fan scene (such as with the rating system I suggest), it is preserving its control, whilst getting free publicity. Everyone wins.