Is it just me or does dick4579 seem not to know what he is talking about?

YAY! Someone else that understands how reverse engineering works. :D

You don't need the original code to recreate a program. And in fact, if you some how end up with identical code, as long as you RE'd it properly, and can show that you did so, you'd be safe from litigation.

It's true, 3D Realms sells their entire back catalog using DOSBox as a wrapper and they sell their titles directly through their website. ID Software did it before them on Steam.

A utilitarian framework, or perhaps more accurately a pragmatic framework, is the only reasonable position from which to evaluate any laws. This is because for any law to be functionally workable you need a very large portion of the general populace to buy into the idea of the law, and thus they must be able to understand why buying into the law is in their overall best interests. Enforcement of laws is only feasible if only a very, very small percentage of the overall population is breaking those laws. As soon as you have even 10-20% of the population not buying into a law trying to enforce that law becomes an exercise in futility, and heavy-handed tactics only end up creating greater and greater backlash. Thus my view that any meaningful attempt to combat piracy must begin with reigning in copyright laws to far for reasonable levels so that they again become something that the public can respect and see the benefit of. Once this is accomplished then pirates become only a small portion of the population with little public support, making enforcement efforts far easier and less costly.

Also, you seem to misunderstand what I meant by the public domain, so allow me to clarify. The public domain refers to works that have fallen out of copyright, and thus are available for anyone to freely copy, sell, give away, modify, or use in any way they desire without having to pay anyone a dime. Works falling to the public domain was the benefit that society was supposed to get in exchange for giving limited copyright protection to creators, and in order to create a reasonable copyright that the public can buy into one's goal needs to be the maximization of the public domain. This means finding a good balance on the length and extent of copyright protection. Too little and there's not enough incentive for people to create new works, thus there's not many works to fall into the public domain. Too much and works don't fall into the public domain on a timescale the public sees as reasonable, and thus the public no longer sees the benefit of copyright and we end up with the situation we currently have.

This is the tragedy of the commons I mentioned earlier. The situation in China is not sustainable if applied to the entire world, but it does show the benefit of what is effectively a large and robust public domain. A properly balanced copyright law would seek to provide enough of an incentive to spur the creation of new works, yet expire and dump works into the public domain fast enough to reproduce as many of the benefits as possible that we see in countries that effectively have a robust public domain.

I'm actually striving for the least amount of piracy reasonably possible. However, I'm looking to achieve this by reducing copyright duration and protection to create as large a public domain as possible while still providing incentive for the creation of new works (so there's a continuous supply of works to fall into the public domain).

Music sampling and parodies are examples of fair use, not the public domain. Additionally, works in the public domain and works available from pirate sources are similar in that they are freely available to anyone who wants them, to use however they want. The key difference is that in one case the work is still under copyright and thus these things are being done in contravention of the law, while in the other case the work has fallen out of copyright, so all these things are perfectly legal. Again, my goal is to provide the benefit of a robust public domain to society, while keeping enough (and just enough) copyright protection to provide an incentive for creating new works, and in doing this make the benefits of copyright readily apparent to the general populace. Once this is done and there is large public buy-in to the idea of copyright you'll see the extent of piracy decrease significantly, making action against the few remaining bad actors far easier.

I'll close out with a warning given over a hundred and fifty years ago prior to one of the copyright extensions that brought us towards where we are today:

"At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living." - Thomas Macaulay, 1841

I think we've strayed too far out of the original issue, and much of your reasoning is sound, but doesn't apply-I actually agree with most of your points in a broad sense. I'm only really trying to frame these arguments in the light of video game pirating, plain and simple. Torrenting a game, playing it, and never paying. Not very old games, not game companies no longer in business, nothing to confuse the issue. In that simple definition, it's reasonable for an individual to expect society to protect their IP, and to pursue legal action if their games are pirated. Currently, society does not do enough to deter piracy.

When I asked you what value piracy of games contributed to society, you dodged the issue by bringing up the public domain. They are two different ideas, and I should have corrected you then. Pirated games have not fallen out of copyright, and to the extent that they do enter the public domain, they do not offer a meaningful benefit to society-honestly, how does some guy in his basement downloading a game without paying for it benefit society in an important way?

Are people really pirating games because of a lack of confidence in the copyright laws? Imagine if someone could only hold the rights to a game of a ludicrously low six months (which is still typically where a game makes most of its sales). Would we really see a decrease in piracy? Nope. The game would still be massively pirated on day one (and often even before release). People are pirating because they are getting things for free and they can get away with it, plain and simple, and there's no reasonable timescale to account for this without adequate enforcement.

When popular games can be expected to be pirated millions of times, it seems that your standard of 'just enough' protection is not being met-we're a far cry from the relatively benign days of copying a game from a friend.

There are exceptions-I don't think there's a problem with a pirated game that's very old and out of print-the artist doesn't benefit from paying some guy 50 bucks over ebay for a game. But, as I've already explained, these exceptions fall outside of how piracy is normally understood.

"Thus my view that any meaningful attempt to combat piracy must begin with reigning in copyright laws to far for reasonable levels so that they again become something that the public can respect and see the benefit of. "

Didn't I already mention this in my last post? We agree here, but you've only mentioned limiting the length of time of copyright laws-I don't think that deters piracy, as I've explained. Still, the current time frame for most copyright laws is definitely way too long.

Yes, copyright laws should be restrained in scope, so long as they are meaningfully enforced. I think broadening the terms of fair use is a better way to achieve what you're aiming for. Again, for example, I cited certain fan made mods whose distributions are technically blocked by IP laws. These and many more are examples where there's a real benefit from easing copyright laws a bit.

Your quote, by the way, is a little alarmist. We live in an era where technology has made works are easier and cheaper than ever to distribute. The public domain is more enriched than it has ever been, and virtually no work is too exclusive or pricey. Piracy, narrowly defined as I have, is made much more easy because of this same technology. Only in an age where a printing press, ink, and paper were expensive commodities did Macaulay's reasoning make sense, and even to that extent, he's seems to be talking about the reprinting of dead authors' works-as I've established, this fall outside the confines of a discussion on modern video game piracy.