alt Hacker NewsThis is about as much as you can hope for tbh. More than a fair compromise.
Society has become quite 'entitled' to 'free' things. As popular as they are, torrents and free streams and emulation and clones of games in an open source lib are all stealing something. I know thats an unpopular thing to say but it a fact.
Now, those rights violations viewed in a larger context may change one's opinion on the whole, and I'm not jumping into that debate today.
Atari did a cool thing. That's rare in the corporate world today. Give praise where it's deserved.
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Are they really stealing it though? They only brought the IP 30 years later they didnt make it or put any work towards it. The openTTD community has easily done 100x the work to extend the game.
> ...all stealing something. I know thats an unpopular thing to say but it a fact.
This is an unpopular opinion because it is not, in fact, a fact.
First, I agree it's cool that Atari, with all its ability to completely screw small projects over, didn't do that in this case.
But, at the same time, I find it interesting that "emulations and clones" are considered entitlement (in a derogatory sense), but copyright protection is not. Before 1976 in the US, the _maximum_ copyright term was 56 years, and that would require filing for an extension from the default of _only 28 years_.
I think it's easy to forget that copyright as we know it is not set in stone. Historically, after 28 years, most works became public domain and that meant you could do literally whatever you want with it and it would not be legally stealing at all. I think we as a society have forgotten what it means to have a public domain.