I'm reading between the lines here, but I think the ESA's motivation is roughly (if privately):
"If people can play hundreds of old games for free, it will be harder to force them to pay for newer games! They'll get used to 'free' as a price point, and they'll have lots of free games to keep them amused!"
No, I didn't read the 30 page document the ESA wrote. I just know how people in power think: They want to keep as much control as possible, to buttress their position, even to the point of doing seemingly insane and harmful things that might, conceivably harm their position.
The hacker argument is particularly pathetic, but you're right: The 30+ pages wasn't motivated by that tiny excerpt. The 30+ pages was motivated out of desperation, since they're looking at declining sales numbers in the traditional gaming space. [1]
Yours SomeCallMeTim seems likely to be the correct interpretation of ESA's position.
What I'd like to note - as I've often done before - is that copyright is a deal with the demos whereby the copyright holder gets "limited time" [not so limited nowadays] protection in exchange for their works entering the public domain. Without the work entering the public domain the deal is very poor on the side of the people, you'd want to offer only a few years of copyright for such a poor deal.
By applying DRM or locking down games and not allowing modifications and disassembly for interop/continuation purposes the companies are not honouring their part of the copyright deal, they're making the copyright effectively void. The demos should consider such works to be no longer under copyright, the company broke the "contract".
I'd be amazed if those applying the law ever took such a democratic view in practice rather than creating a construction of the purpose of the law based primarily on the interests of those in control of media conglomerates.
It's worth noting that the obvious conclusion from your comment is that the core problem is with the length of copyright, rather than the restrictions within the law - if copyright were bloody finite, then people would eventually be able to play stuff anyway.
>if copyright were bloody finite, then people would eventually be able to play stuff anyway. //
Only if their system for locking up the content is deficient. Lets assume that it can't be cracked - the work won't enter the public domain, it shouldn't be allowed copyright protection.
It's not just about the term, though practically with a short term (7 years I call short) the effect might be largely the same - but the law shouldn't be designed around public benefit only being accessible if someone can crack DRM/encryption or reverse engineer a server or some such.
"If people can play hundreds of old games for free, it will be harder to force them to pay for newer games! They'll get used to 'free' as a price point, and they'll have lots of free games to keep them amused!"
No, I didn't read the 30 page document the ESA wrote. I just know how people in power think: They want to keep as much control as possible, to buttress their position, even to the point of doing seemingly insane and harmful things that might, conceivably harm their position.
The hacker argument is particularly pathetic, but you're right: The 30+ pages wasn't motivated by that tiny excerpt. The 30+ pages was motivated out of desperation, since they're looking at declining sales numbers in the traditional gaming space. [1]
[1] http://gamerant.com/npd-gaming-decline/ http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/03/22/174940...