LogFAQs > #977067730

adjl posted...

Personally, I think copyright law should be amended to formally identify abandonware by making any media that hasn't been officially for sale for more than a couple years automatically pass into public domain. In the age of all-physical media, that would have been unthinkable, but digital distribution means the only cost to keep any given work available for sale is the storage cost (which is already being spent in the vast majority of cases because copies are being kept). That means the only reason for old media to be removed from sale is if the publisher doesn't want to sell it anymore, and if the publisher doesn't want to sell it anymore, there's no harm in pirating it. But that would require copyright law to A) Realize that it's not the 19th century anymore, and B) Care about consumers and artistic preservation more than corporate profits, and neither of those are overly likely.

Blame Disney. Before they started trying to get copyright to last forever, things used to fall into the public domain after 20 years. Now that it takes 96 years for things to fall into public domain, they finally realized "Oh wait, we want to fight for TRADEMARKS, not copyright. My bad..."