what will happen to older game series without a copyright owner?
as you know, telltale and the site won't be around when the site's contract on the website domain ends(which honesty if its paid up, could be as late as next march) and anything bought before telltale started putting its games on a 3rd party program will be gone
we know that games like back to the future, the walking dead, and Minecraft etc, will probably survive by its other copyright owner
but this begs the question to where these other game franchises will go in 5-10 years,. Games like bones, puzzle agent, sam and max, and monkey island in some ways don't have copyright parents. with Disney getting rid of lucusarts and its entire game division when they bought it from george lucus, games like sam and max and the monkey series while being owned by Disney, aren't anything Disney is very interested in doing anything with, and from what i know is very unlikely that disney will renew the copyright on the franchise. While bones and puzzle agent, again I could be wrong, were new IPs and made in house
I guess what I am trying to say is are the older tittles going to be in the fair domain in the next ten years or do you think that someone might pick them up? the biggest question is after the company is gone , will any of the other copyright holders bother to keep the telttale games on psn or steam, or will they be off the stores completely?
Comments
Copyrights last a very long time. Computers aren't old enough for any programs ever written to have officially expired yet. Whoever buys the rights to the games when they're liquidated will own the copyrights and will control how available the games are.
I see, again I see alot of the walking dead, minecraft story mode and batman etc etc will be taken back to its other copyright owners, as for curse of monkey island (disney) if I am not mistaken is still with disney, but they had no interest in selling it or using it
so I think we can see in the next 20 years at least games like bones or sam and max come into the abandonware market, it is curious if telltale even still had the rights to these types of games, from what I heard from rumors, this is why they didn't make tales of monkey island season 2
either why form the abandonware wiki
"In November 2006 the Library of Congress approved an exemption to the DMCA that permits the cracking of copy protection on software no longer being sold or supported by its copyright holder so that they can be archived and preserved without fear of retribution"
but again your right when they are fully liquidated we will see, but I am betting you most will go back to the original owners, only tim shafer and ron Gilbert could possibly save bones or monkey island or even sam and max, but it probably won't happen if they have said they would love monkey island, but Disney has yet to put it on the market