Artificial scarcity is a scourge but I think for some works, say where you only want them to be available in a specific time and place, then perhaps as the author of that work you have a right to enforce that, at least to the extent that others shouldn’t be able to say record a live performance and then sell it with some kind of rights later.

All that is to say I think it’s slightly more complex than what can be contained in a single HN comment but agree with you in principle.

This sounds like a feature rather than a bug to me, to be honest. If there's an official recording of said live public performance that is available, then copyright holds and third parties wouldn't be able to record and redistribute. OTOH if there is no official recording available, then I would argue that it is in the public interest to allow third party recordings to legally circulate, since otherwise that particular performance would just be lost altogether.

If artists truly want their performance to be "in the moment" with no way for anyone else to see it, they can arrange for private performances where the audience can be bound by a contract above and beyond basic copyright; but I don't think we should be optimizing for this case.

I don’t disagree.

I am attempting to say a person shouldn’t be able to record someone else’s performance and distribute it for profit or post it on a streaming service and profit from the ads.

Because taxes are how we typically set incentives and the government is well-configured to use them. This is common in other contexts: for example, in many cities leaving your property vacant will trigger additional taxes because they don’t want empty buildings impacting the surrounding neighborhoods.

> If I can’t purchase and enjoy a copyrighted work legally, the copyright is unenforceable.

That’s not true in the United States, and if it were you’d still have the problem this thread is discussing where you need the servers (or DRM systems, etc.), which is why I’d like to change the incentives so it’s cheaper to release things you no longer intend to use even if they weren’t directly distributed to users.

The indie carve out reflects that there is some real cost here (packaging things up, vetting the rights for a release, etc.) If you have an old game which never went big, you don’t want a solo developer getting hit with a bill they can’t afford because they didn’t back up everything well or life happened and some planned work took longer than they thought it would. Again, remember this proposal is for a legal mechanism to compel action and you want to think about how it could impact people with the least resources.

OP is saying that this is how things should be, not how things are.

The government is well-configured to use copyright as a stick, too. Literally the only reason why copyright - an artificially imposed monopoly - works at all is because the government enforces it, and so it gets to set the terms for eligibility. The legal mechanism here would be a new law, same as your tax proposal, so I fail to see the difference.

As far as needing servers to continue running - the community is generally quite capable of doing that so long as there are no legal roadblocks to it like DMCA and CFAA. It is likely to provide a better experience too, compared to what would essentially be compelled support from the original developer, which is virtually guaranteed to be the least they can get away with to legally dodge the tax - e.g. spinning up one underpowered server that can only serve very few users at a time.

It is also unclear how such compelled services would interact with game updates. Is the server required to support all past versions of the game going all the way back to the original release? For competitive multiplayer games especially this may not feasible for good reasons. OTOH if you only require that they support the most recent update, this opens the possibility of the developer simply shipping an "update" that disables as many features as they can get away with once the game is on life support - e.g. removing multiplayer entirely if possible, or at least making it as crippled as they can get away with; and then providing support only for that crippled version.

I suppose it's so IP holders will have to have an office and revenue in the market it intends to exercise rights, than just outsourcing it to a lawyer and having 12 copies/year at $1k each compliance sales?

Japanese IP holders exercising IP rights solely in moral grounds in markets they have no intention or ability to enter had been a source of frustration to some. Requiring substantial economical involvement sure is one way to force it.

So if you can’t find a distributor for your copyrighted work or you’re not capable of distributing it yourself, you lose the copyright? You’re compelled to sell your work? Sounds pretty backwards to me.