Copyright is a legal idea which is a form of intellectual property that a person or company can have a monopoly over information or art during a certain period of time. It is basically a capitalist way of trying to equate intangible intellectual ideas to tangible property. Copyright also prevents people who were not involved in making an intellectual work from trying to reuse it, remix it, or improve upon the work. For instance, nintendo has sued many people who made fan games of various nintendo ips and even sued people who made switch emulators. Sony has shut down fan servers of a game called concord even though they have abandoned the game. Although there are plenty of video games that are not for sale anymore, major game companies have taken down sites that share these games with other people.
How bad is the scope of copyright?
Copyright lasts way too long for one. Copyright lasts for the author's lifetime plus 70 years after death. It is effectively indefinite. There is also the issue of how it is harder to seperate art and the person who created the art. What someone creates is tied to their identity. It is also mostly a global thing now despite being an anglo concept with how it is required for countries to have some form of copyright laws or else they may get fines from countries like the US or global organizations. Copyright can be used as a form of censorship like with how a creator of a movie can shut down any publications who critized the movie that they made. There is also the legal concept called moral rights that give copyright to any piece of work that would be considered an intellectual work. It makes malware like drm illegal to circumvent.
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