First post, by Kerr Avon
Are there any video games whose copyright has expired, so anyone can legally copy them? I don't mean games released as freeware, nor commercial games whose authors have later re-released as freeware, but commercial games whose copyright has expired due to the passage of time?
I really doubt it, as games haven't been around long enough for that as far as I know. Well, maybe the very old games, such as Bertie the Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain, a noughts and crosses (tic tac toe) game from 1950, might be out of copyright now (or maybe not, given how, thanks (allegedly) to Disney, copyright might soon be raised to be more than a century) but I wouldn't count that personally as it's not just software but also comes with built in hardware. I mean games that are just supplied as software (albeit on a cartridge, or CD rom, or cassette, etc) and are used on a standalone machine. I'd say that video games that were written for university/work mainframes would qualify by my criteria, since the game itself was made to run on the hardware, rather than the hardware being built around the game.
And if no game has yet had it's copyright expired, then when will this happen (assuming the copyright length isn't extended again)?
On a tangent, what's the copyright situation with films (movies)? What's the latest year a film can, by this time (2018) be considered out of copyright? 1928? 1938? Are all the silent films now out of copyright?
