Pressure Line wrote:wilbefast wrote: I mean what right does Atari have to sit on an IP that's got pretty much nothing to do with them?
They have
every right. How would you feel if you bought the rights to something, only to have people just take it and use it in their own stuff without your permission just because you 'aren't doing anything with it'?
whoa, how did I miss this post?
Question is, it
right for petrol companies to buy up electric car prototypes and sit on them indefinitely? I'm saying "right" here, not legal. Of course it's legal, but that doesn't mean it's ethical.
It's the very concept of buying and selling "rights" that I find strange - "buying" an idea? "I'll give you 5 bucks if I thought of it first" - but you didn't, the other guy did, and no amount of money is going to change that.
I don't think the guy who invented the wheel asked for royalties from anyone who put wheels on their barrows: what's it cost him for them to use his idea? It's that goddam Adam Smith's legacy of "selfishness drives the market": nobody thinks about the greater good any-more, it's all profit margins. We don't sell something for what it's worth to us, but what the person buying it is prepared to pay, and how is that "right"? No wonder we're all depressed insomniacs in the West.
Okay, bit of a tangent there, but you know that whole "the workers control the means of production" thing? Well why is it that the people who actually make the games don't "own" what they make?