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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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Steam Hardware
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A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
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You have a great idea, you put 5 years into perfecting it and making it the best possible Thing™. You use all the money you have, sell everything you can to get enough funding to start production of your great Thing™.
After 2 month of you selling your Thing™ I see that it is a great product and using my vast fortune I immediately start mass producing it and promote My Thing® to everyone. Due to economy of scale I can produce My Thing© for a quarter of your cost and sell it for half of your price. Everybody buys my cheaper copy and you go bankrupt without having anything to your name, because you invested it all and didn't pay back your loans yet.
Does that sound fair to you? No? Then you better believe copyright is a boon ( if its not corrupted to hell and back).
That's the key. It's the whole current state of "mine for my entire lifespan, plus decades after to make sure my descendents reap the rewards of my work for generations to come" that is so wrong with copyright.
Original copyright law in the US was 14 years, with an option to renew it up to 28. That at least makes sense to me.
So, Valve releases Portal in 2007, great. They release Portal 2 in 2011, also great. And then they do almost nothing with it. It's been 15 years since Portal 2.
If they were making a Portal 3? Fine, just say so. Renew it and the IP for Portal 1 remains yours until 2038. Don't want to do Portal anymore? Well, Portal 1 and its characters should have gone public domain in 2021, then.
This is the typical defence for copyright. It's also innacurate to the point of being intellectually dishonest. It ignores the reality of capitalism where legal protections only exist for people and corporations that have the money/power to get what they want.
Your Thing™ example would be cloned and sold on Amazon by a broad range of fly-by-night companies, and that's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, Amazon will clone it themselves, obfuscate your product in its search results, and sell your product under their brand, sometimes even for more than you're selling it.
If your Thing™ isnt a physical product but rather something creative, then 99 times out of 100, there are only really two paths available to you:
In the lucky case you sell your copyright to a third party that exploits it (and you), offering you a pittance while simultaneously tying your hands, preventing you from creating derivative works or even just giving it away... for the res t of your life, and that of your kids'. In the unlucky case, you can't afford to promote your product, so you toil for years with little to no reward for your work. Then AI techbros scrape your art and sell it back to you exclusively for their profit.
Copyright has some great marketing, but it offers you little while the rich claim ownership over your art, and our society.