Games and copyright "seats"
Why do companies sit on their games and do nothing with them? One would think that if someone held an intellectual property, their desire would be to continue working with it instead of watching it die and then sitting on it. If the world and laws regarding how ownership worked weren't quite so broken, doing nothing with something would mean that no money was made using it. However, the current system in place for copyrights means that most companies can sit on an intellectual property indefinitely, so long as the proper measures are taken to defend it from others using it, and payments are made to renew the copyright whenever the time to do so rolls around.
This sort of thing has happened numerous times now with particular IP's sitting by with nothing being done for them for years. When was the last F-Zero game? Is Dead Space ever going to be released and allowed to work again? Will the real owner of No One Live's Forever please stand up? The list goes on and on, and it's just bothersome to see that so many of these IP's are sitting there, not making anyone any profit, yet companies insist on sitting on them for their own profit, even if they are getting none.
Sometimes I wonder that companies believe that by sitting on an IP, they can prevent it from ever seeing the light of day again or something. It would certainly seem to be the case with how Konami is handling Castlevania, or the fact that Banjo-Kazooie hasn't resurfaced yet. Yooka-Laylee will easily tide me over in that regard, but the point still stands...what happened to some of these games?
Now, I don't know if the same thing has happened in movies or not...I'm certain that it might have, and it might have definitely happened in literature too, but I can't name examples off of the top of my head. That being the case, it's become a problem that is flourishing within the world of video gaming, where great ideas are left to die once a certain threshold is hit, it would seem. Nintendo, thankfully, hasn't been one to abandon their intellectual properties so easily, but take Electronic Arts and look at how many of the intellectual properties they bought are simply standing by, collecting dust under the waves of millions of dollars their sports games are raking in.
Unfortunately, with the way that copyright stands now, nothing is certain. Until a copyright system comes out that everyone is willing to agree on, that isn't SOPA, this simply isn't going to change. Copyright does pose a huge problem, however...what counts as "infringing" on the game company? Does producing a fan work to celebrate the success of a series count as illegal infringing? That could spell a great deal of trouble for many on the internet, who produce fan art, fanfiction and even fan games out of love for a series. So far, in the wake of recent shootdowns, it would seem that fan work is, in fact, potentially illegal. I believe I've already talked about the fan game Another Metroid 2 Remake, but I'd rather not get back into detail on that yet. It's simply unfortunate that this is where we've gone with copyright being so strict and making broad sweeping strokes to protect the copyright holder...that it's even becoming easy to abuse by those who want to take to YouTube and mark videos as "copyright" on a whim. It's happened to multiple YouTube channels now, it's happened for the strangest of reasons down to the most malicious, and it needs to come to an end.
Anyone else think that the copyright system as it stands needs to be revised? Let me know what you think!
This sort of thing has happened numerous times now with particular IP's sitting by with nothing being done for them for years. When was the last F-Zero game? Is Dead Space ever going to be released and allowed to work again? Will the real owner of No One Live's Forever please stand up? The list goes on and on, and it's just bothersome to see that so many of these IP's are sitting there, not making anyone any profit, yet companies insist on sitting on them for their own profit, even if they are getting none.
Sometimes I wonder that companies believe that by sitting on an IP, they can prevent it from ever seeing the light of day again or something. It would certainly seem to be the case with how Konami is handling Castlevania, or the fact that Banjo-Kazooie hasn't resurfaced yet. Yooka-Laylee will easily tide me over in that regard, but the point still stands...what happened to some of these games?
Now, I don't know if the same thing has happened in movies or not...I'm certain that it might have, and it might have definitely happened in literature too, but I can't name examples off of the top of my head. That being the case, it's become a problem that is flourishing within the world of video gaming, where great ideas are left to die once a certain threshold is hit, it would seem. Nintendo, thankfully, hasn't been one to abandon their intellectual properties so easily, but take Electronic Arts and look at how many of the intellectual properties they bought are simply standing by, collecting dust under the waves of millions of dollars their sports games are raking in.
Unfortunately, with the way that copyright stands now, nothing is certain. Until a copyright system comes out that everyone is willing to agree on, that isn't SOPA, this simply isn't going to change. Copyright does pose a huge problem, however...what counts as "infringing" on the game company? Does producing a fan work to celebrate the success of a series count as illegal infringing? That could spell a great deal of trouble for many on the internet, who produce fan art, fanfiction and even fan games out of love for a series. So far, in the wake of recent shootdowns, it would seem that fan work is, in fact, potentially illegal. I believe I've already talked about the fan game Another Metroid 2 Remake, but I'd rather not get back into detail on that yet. It's simply unfortunate that this is where we've gone with copyright being so strict and making broad sweeping strokes to protect the copyright holder...that it's even becoming easy to abuse by those who want to take to YouTube and mark videos as "copyright" on a whim. It's happened to multiple YouTube channels now, it's happened for the strangest of reasons down to the most malicious, and it needs to come to an end.
Anyone else think that the copyright system as it stands needs to be revised? Let me know what you think!
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