Taste this IP. I think it's gone bad.

I have studied all the torts I have abide, and indeed all I think my brain will hold until my pre-exam brain-loading tomorrow, so I'm going to step back a moment and muse on something I read today.

By way of Greg Costikyan's blog, I was looking at the auction of Acclaim's IP earlier today (Acclaim, for those of you who don't know, was a publisher of video games which went into a death spiral a few years ago and filed for bankruptcy about a year ago. Hence the auction.)

A small part of me sort of wanted to bid on the rights to some old video game, just for yuks. Judging from the current bids, it looks like $5,000 is the minimum bid, which is a little rich for my blood, but if there were a really fun candidate it might be time to start scraping up a consortium.

Looking down the 200+ games on the list, though, it reminds me that the shelf life of intellectual property is not terribly long. I'm sure a lot of these games are good, but a SNES game isn't good for much these days except maybe putting up on the web. Take away the ports and licensed games, where most of the lasting IP value belongs to someone else, and the games that no one remembers, and there's not a whole lot of value worth buying.

Not that this would stop me if I had an assload of cash going unused in the back room, but I'm frivolous like that.