Full Screen Mario: Making the Case For Shorter Copyrights 361
barlevg writes "A college student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute spent nine months meticulously remaking Super Mario Bros. based on the latest web standards. His project is open source and the code freely available through Github. The site recently gained widespread media attention, which unfortunately brought it to the attention of Nintendo, which has requested that the site be taken down. In a column on the Washington Post website, tech blogger Timothy Lee makes the case for how this is a prime example of copyrights hindering innovation and why copyright lengths should be shortened. Among his arguments: copyrights hinder innovation by game designers seeking to build upon such games, and shortening copyright would breathe new life into games who have long since passed into obsolescence."
Lot of abandonware out there as well (Score:4, Interesting)
That can even now days that may have a unknown owner makeing finding who has the rights hard.
Game design is hard (Score:5, Interesting)
Budding game designers get a chance to remake a game and release it it's a tremendous learning opportunity. It also provides them with a solid basis to launch new work.
As an Example, take the Giana sisters. Started as a Super Mario clone in the C64 era, but I don't think anyone would say this [youtube.com] has much of anything to do with Super Mario besides being a platformer.
Me? I could live with the long copyrights if we also had big social safety nets and Basic Income (google the phrase if you don't recognize it). A lot of great stuff comes out of Canada and Europe because their socialized health care gives people the freedom to take risks you can't do in the states...
I don't think so (Score:4, Interesting)
It might impair Nintendo's ability to crank out mediocre crap (I'm looking at you Super Mario 3D Land) but overall I don't think that's Nintendo's intention. Nintendo, like Sega, are craftsman that make games. They might screw up sometimes, but it's not for lack of trying, and they mostly get it right. Much as I love Indie platformers, very few come close to Nintendo levels of quality. Frogotto and Friends [desura.com] is the only one in recent memory and even it's not prefect.
Conflation (Score:5, Interesting)
Since when did copying an existing work become innovation?
Seriously, if you want to use the term innovation it should be in reference to something new.
Re:Innovation? (Score:2, Interesting)
The real question we should ask is "What is the social benefit of Nintendo keeping it's copyrights vs. the social loss of restring access to it's work ?"
Nintendo budgeted it's Mario development program so as to fully recoup it's costs in a few years of the console market and make a profit, which it did spectacularly well. So anyone looking to do the same can try, with full confidence that copyright will ensure their profitability. On the other hand, very few entities make business and creative decisions based on what will happen 70 years into the future.
Such long terms are not socially beneficial (because they don't induce more works to be created) but they are socially detrimental because they impede the free use of citizens own property, require public resources to enforce and deprive the public of a work that would have been in the public domain should copyright not existed.
So instead of an utilitarian compromise, "let's set copyrights just as long/short as necessary to maximize societal gain" we've ended up with this ludicrous "god given property right to profit indefinitely from your own ideas" which never existed throughout history and is actually harmful.
Re:Slow (Score:3, Interesting)
Emulation accuracy.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/
Re:Innovation? (Score:5, Interesting)