Reviving CD-ROM material [was: Re: Livecode and interactive video]

[Jeff Reynolds]

Richmond,

And I’ll be right there with Richard.

Just because it’s not being supported does not remove copyrights. You know that’s a stupid argument. Maybe fine with your own morals but it’s not how copyright works. As a content creator for over 4 decades of my professional life I really hate that attitude of self justification. Fine for your own use but if you want to redistribute it then get the rights. Not for profit label has nothing to do with the rights involved.

I have experience working in and with media companies and licensing others’ materials and having others licensing ours. We were told all the time by management and legal to not respond to requests to license unless management was interested in the proposal and they would handle that. I thought it pretty strange that a denial letter could cause any issues and may have just been paranoia or don’t waste your time but those were the instructions. 

Getting an odd bob out out of relicensing an old project involves figuring out who you are getting in bed with and if you even want to get into bed with them in the first place, time to come to an agreement, research out the original projects licensing (media projects are rife with licensed media that at times are not transferable or require additional permission and/or payments), create and agree on a contract, deliver the goods, then make sure everything is being done as contracted. That’s not simple and all the steps cost time and money and usually folks are not willing to pay much for the rights to cover these costs, let alone a profit.

I’ve done this process a couple of times with old projects and it was way more work than I thought it would be and that was with a very good relationship with the rights holder (I built the original product for them) and in good rights situations. One was easy and owner was happy with a handshake on the deal until I had a product to sell and then we would pen a contract. I totally trusted him he would honor the handshake (and I’m still absolutely sure he would have, very good chap), but a year and a half later he ended up having to sell the rights, so our handshake of course was no longer good. He was transparent about all this and I just did the hand shake as it would have been a good chunk of change with lawyer to pen the rights contract and I didn’t have a publisher onboard yet. So even in the best of situations things can go sideways on these kinds of things and life is not as simple as you think it is Richmond.

I was approached by an old employer about resurrecting an old commercial cdrom project. I knew the rights had changed hands a couple of times, so my first question was who has the rights now and have you secured them? His response was well it’s abandoned and one of the publishers that were distributing the product to the education market (that wanted to partner with him on this deal) thought they could do it under their publishing agreement. Again I questioned did they have a full rights deal or just a publishing contract (I knew from the original days on the project we had very specific publishing contracts with different channels like Apple, media distributor and some educational publishers and they were rabid about retaining the work’s rights). Response was they feel confident they could stretch it legally. He then tried to say well we could construe this to be in then public domain as most paid for with public/private partnership money from NSF and EPA grants. I had to laugh in his face as they had made sure that even with this public money the company had complete rights to everything. I said I’d be happy to talk to him (and spend my own time) about it once he can put through the lawyers. He did and planning abruptly stopped.

The real killer usually is that media licensed in the original work was not contracted for sub licensing, transfer, or reuse or requires new payments. Sounds like something most would plan for to allow better life for their products, but I was amazed how many times this was not done or, at times, even thought of.

Sorry I’ve been around this tree too many times.

Jeff

> On Jan 23, 2022, at 12:02 PM, use-livecode-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:
> 
> I wrote to them twice and they never bothered to reply
> 
> they did not "essentially" ignore me: they IGNORED me. This is nonsense 
> as, presumably, there is no obvious way
> they can make the odd bob out of ancient CD-ROMS; and if they had a bit 
> of nous they might realise that they could
> climb into bed with you to mutual advantage . . .
> 
> so I would merrily chant my favourite mantra:
> 
> "abandonware, abandonware"? and make sure that anything I did with media 
> ripped off from those
> 
> CDs was splattered with disclaimers and released on a not-for-profit basis.
> 
> Richard Gaskin will probably now come after me with the castrating 
> irons.?