- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
“Most of the world’s video games from close to 50 years of history are effectively, legally dead. A Video Games History Foundation study found you can’t buy nearly 90% of games from before 2010. Preservationists have been looking for ways to allow people to legally access gaming history, but the U.S. Copyright Office dealt them a heavy blow Friday. Feds declared that you or any researcher has no right to access old games under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.”
You must log in or register to comment.
FTA
Industry groups argued that those museums didn’t have “appropriate safeguards” to prevent users from distributing the games once they had them in hand. They also argued that there’s a “substantial market” for older or classic games, and a new, free library to access games would “jeopardize” this market. Perlmutter agreed with the industry groups.
So as long as someone, somewhere, might make a penny off of them, they can’t be free. Insert your own metaphor here.
It’s been demonstrated multiple times that when you make access easy and affordable people will pay for it over pirating it.
This argument is even more ridiculous than it seems. During the copyright office hearing for this exemption request (back in April), the people arguing in favor of libraries talked about the measures they have in place. They don’t just let people download a ROM to use in any emulator they please. It’s not even one of those browser-based emulators where you can pull the ROM data out of your browser cache if you know how. It’s a video stream of an emulator running on a server managed by the library, with plenty enough latency to make it very clearly a worse gaming experience.
It’s far easier to find ROMs of these games elsewhere than it is to contact a librarian and ask for access to a protected collection, so there’d be no reason to redistribute the files even if they were offered, which they aren’t.
On top of that, this exemption request was explicitly limited to old games that have been long unavailable on the market in any form, which seems like an insane limitation to put on libraries, places that have always held collections of books both new and old.
All of that is still not enough to sate the US Copyright Office, the ESA, AACS, or DVD CSS. Those three were the organizations that fought against this.
They also argued that there’s a “substantial market” for older or classic games, and a new, free library to access games would “jeopardize” this market. Perlmutter
And if that market demand isn’t being catered to, or is being actively refused to be served, is there any wonder people are finding other ways to get that stuff?
All they’re doing is hoarding this old software and preventing its use based on the speculation that they might eventually figure out a way to profit from long gone developers work.
It’s such bullshit it makes me want to start selling those knockoff consoles just purely out of spite.
The same logic would apply to books. ::gestures at library::
There is a difference there in that these are digital copies (easy to make more copies) vs physical books (hard to make more copies).
That said, the only reason this is an issue is copyright lasts too long on relatively short lived games. If copyright on games was a more reasonable “15 years since their last major revision”, this wouldn’t be a problem.
There is a difference there in that these are digital copies (easy to make more copies) vs physical books (hard to make more copies).
Libraries rent out ebooks too, also easily stripped of DRM and copied if someone wants to so that. But that is seemingly not an issue.
Libraries rent out ebooks too
Libraries loan out ebooks and other media.
/pet peeve.
What he’s saying is not beyond what Congress has previously laid down though. First sale doctrine should let you do whatever you want, but they actually banned renting phonographs because they thought people were recording them on tape. We’re lucky they didn’t outlaw movie rentals too back in the day. Whole copyright regime needs to die in a fire.
As someone who may or may not have stripped DRM from library books, they certainly never seemed to care about that. And it was never even to share, but rather to store for myself so I could read it at my own pace. And the worst part… I read it for RECREATIONAL USE
it was never even to share, but rather to store for myself so I could read it at my own pace. And the worst part… I read it for RECREATIONAL USE
You disgust me…what a sick and exploitive attitude.
You wouldn’t download a book?
I hate when they say, “You wouldn’t download a car”.
Yes, I fucking would!
Read a comment a while ago that if libraries weren’t a thing today and someone would propose them, the FBI would be on their ass and stalk after them for even suggesting such radical views. Copyright law is utterly broken and a disservice to society in it’s current form and execution. Politicians need to get their fat fingers out of the stock market by law.
I really feel like the source code needs to be released after 25 years. We need to be able to protect older games.
There’s often no in any way complete source code after 25 years.
Media degrade, get forgotten hell knows where, get occasionally destroyed.
All things that can be prevented in the future if you start today.
I’ve been saying that we need to have a law on the books to require any online components of a game be required to have the source to those features be released upon closure of the online service. I would be fine with them then being except from any security liability for anyone who gets hacked by use of that software and even retaining ownership of the IP, so no one could sell access to the service, but being able to stand up fan-run servers for old Xbox-live games or dead MMOs more easily would be really great. I’m locked out of so many PlayStation trophies simply because online servers have been down for ages now.
archive.org is the modern proposal of a library, and yeah, look what’s happened to them
good emulators out there. haven’t tried any lately
Hell yeah. Everything “retro” is easily emulated. And anything easily emulated has a ROMpack of all of the games that exist for it, you can download if you have a HDD that costs less than the cost of the original console alone.
8EA21E59467C01750D60D90F1825E6C268FDADC7
“Fair Use” is a thing. Someone needs to go back to law school.
Pearson is trying really fucking hard to write that out of the public consciousness. I took an econ 101 class about 12y ago for funsies and the section of the course on copyright insisted that “the rights of copyright owners” were absolute with no exemptions.
how do the rights of the copyright holders interact with CCTV?
deleted by creator
Bet you read that in a textbook
Shithole country.
It aint the country doing this per se… It is the ownrr class using the state against the slaves. Again
deleted by creator
Unfortunately, this is exactly what is turning (and has been turning) the US into a shithole country.
you can’t stop the signal, mal
insane takeover of the public square here.
deleted by creator
That’s not enough, let’s outlaw lobbying.
People will just continue pirating those games then.
The most popular games will likely continue to get pirated, all this will do is guarantee that some small vintage games are lost to time.
Good thing the “Feds” have zero jurisdiction in my country then. Feck em.
The DMCA is a curse.
And not a fun place to stay at at all
It’s fun to violate the D-M-C-A 🎵
I’d say it’s more intolerably long copyright terms than the DMCA specifically.
The DMCA is just the icing on top of the 95-120y “work for hire” copyright duration shit cake.
I’m glad I keep backup copies of anything that might be important later on, like the 40 gig MAME Rom library.
Yo ho ho and fuck the police
In this case it’s the corporate lawyers and lawmakers setting these precedents, not the police.
To be honest, as bad as police can be wherever you live, I’m sure if you called them and said your neighbour pirated The Simpsons Movie and some SNES games last night, they’d sooner laugh in your face and tell them to stop wasting their time than doing anything about it.
I too travel the seven seas for hidden loot ⛵
The problem with these fundamental rulings is that they’re largely trying to fit square objects through round holes. When a simple ruling is made to essentially say “to current law, no”, the law itself ultimately becomes meaningless, because older games couldn’t be easier to pirate. Most of them are smaller than a TikTok video, and are so cheap/easy to host that you’ll never stop them from being shared. Hell, emulation has come so far that you can effectively emulate these games on a browser, on multiple devices, even devices that don’t natively support gaming.
The smart thing to do would be to say that maybe the legal framework that embodies retro gaming needs to be researched and heavily considered. It’s a hard task that’ll require many lawyers, many fights, and lots of lobbying to ensure the word of law is worth something. Sadly, it’s easier to say “lol no” and to essentially just promote piracy.
How does a 1998 law have retroactive rights over previously published works?
