r/HoMM • u/borsukrates • 1d ago

Other/Fluff Related to HoMM copyrights

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/12/termination-of-transfer/

This essay discusses how Richard Gariott (a.k.a. Lord British) got his rights to Ultima RPG series back.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/12/termination-of-transfer/

It's about the copyright concept of Termination of Transfer.

And now, Richard Garriott, AKA "Lord British," has claimed back the rights to the groundbreaking Ultima series of computer role-playing games, which he sold to Electronic Arts in 1992:

On the Techjess podcast, Garriott marveled at how easy the process was: "there’s a really weird United States copyright law that says if you are the original holder of a copyright and you assign it or sell it to any publisher or any other entity, after 35 years, you can just take it back":

EA killed off Ultima in 2000, and it has languished since, despite an ardent fandom. Garriott has vowed to reissue the old games and is mulling new ones.

(...)

One of these systemic solutions is "termination of transfer," a simple and radical idea that has a proven track-record of making creative workers richer at our bosses' expense. Simply put, "termination of transfer" is the statutory right to void any contract you've signed to transfer your copyright to someone else. In the USA, the 1976 Copyright Act introduced a 35-year termination right. 35 years after you sign any copyright contract, you can file some paperwork with the US Copyright Office and get that copyright back, no matter what your contract says.

Now, most creative works don't have a commercial life after 35 years (very few works are commercially viable even after the original US copyright term of 14 years), but for those that do, termination of transfer is a reliable way to address the extremely common situation in which a creator signs away their rights for a low price, not knowing that it will become a lasting hit. Once you've scored that hit, you can probably get a better deal from your next work, but the deal for that hit is done and can't be altered.

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u/tom-slacker 1d ago

new world Computing/3DO company is dead, bro.

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u/borsukrates 1d ago

I didn't have high hopes, but I wanted to give people something to think about when it comes to video game preservation. We have playing video games as a hobby. We could do better to prevent situations like the one with HoMM in future. We could ask politicians to change laws - initiatives like "Stop Killing Games" already happened. In the end, this specific law would require someone like the proverbial JvC to care, and we have reasons to believe he doesn't and he was completely content making simple mobile games. Basically I'm asking people who claim to like strategy games to care about strategy.

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u/Gloomy_Mess_9822 1d ago

Ubisoft is french