Reply 60 of 80, by Snover
- Rank
- l33t++
Just because there is no longer a copyright on something doesn't mean the original copyright holder can't still try to package and sell it. There is no law prohibiting the sale of public domain work; you just no longer have exclusive rights to it, so you have to provide some value-added service (Xbox Live, WiiWare, Steam, whatever) to make people purchase it from you instead of getting it from somewhere else. This isn't a bad thing. It encourages new material, and it encourages reuse of existing material in novel ways.
Also, id is one of only a handful of games companies to have existed long enough to release any of their original IP under an open license. Most companies have either dissolved, putting their IP into limbo, or have been absorbed by larger entities that don't actually know what IP they own. That's the biggest problem, and one of the reasons extended copyright terms are so damaging.
Also, for what it's worth, those companies that license third party engines like Unreal Engine have little ability to do what id has done, because they can't release any of the third-party code without having the third-party (who may or may not be defunct) also agree to it. I think you are going to see that this will become a bigger issue over time as companies license and modify third-party game engines instead of building their own from scratch in-house. Also, usually, licenses are platform-specific, so companies that license a third-party component need to go back and re-license if they want to publish to a different platform.
Yes, it’s my fault.