“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.”
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They’re trashing our rights!
Hack the planet!
Trashing!
Cereal towering over everyone trying to stay inconspicuous during that scene always cracks me up.
And the fashion, oh wow, such an aesthetic.
Guess I don’t understand, are they saying places Like Vintage Stock that sells old games illegal? Or are they talking about digital backups of these games. Regardless fuck them and the copyright office. This makes me want to pirate more not less.
luckily there’s more details to read when you click the link.
What???
I answered your question on another thread of the same topic, but I’ll answer it here too for anyone else who has the same question: The law is just about digital backups. Vintage stores are still legal, and if anything this would boost sales at a vintage stores. If the game you’d like to play is unavailable at a vintage store or on eBay (or wherever else) then it will be entirely inaccessible for you to play legally.
So if I’m understanding what you are saying correctly this is pro “book” burning. Only in this case it is games. If a group or entity wants to make a piece of history more scarce or wipe it from the planet because they disagree with it, buying up or destroying as many physical copies that exist would work because people legally can’t back them up or print more copies essentially?
This isn’t even targeting pirates it’s targeting legitimate users. If anything, this will create more pirates.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I know it’s a pipe dream, but really, there should be something that opens source code up. Too much company history gets lost or forgotten because people forget. Plus think about how much value you can gain as a student seeing how people accomplished things with minimal resources.
archive.org is the modern proposal of a library, and yeah, look what’s happened to them
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.
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.
It’s been demonstrated multiple times that when you make access easy and affordable people will pay for it over pirating it.
They’re right. I have been using old videos games for recreation. Too bad that they’ve decided to prevent me from paying for the privilege or at least being tracked through library usage and have instead decided it’d be better if I was just an untrackable “criminal”
Either way, I’m enjoying these old games and living my life guilt free.
You’d better not also be reading books for fun. By their logic, any recreational use of books from a library should also be considered illegal.
Only legal for educationale, reproductioning, or ownin dem libs. (sic.)
There’s no such thing as untrackable.
The feeling of being a completely honest and lawful citizen was really nice at some point, buying games in Steam, GOG or just bookstores, too bad it was mostly gaslighting and they were not going to be honest with us.
The purpose of the US government is to create as many criminals as possible to put in gulags and sell into slavery. That has ALWAYS been the history of the US. There has NEVER been any “freedom” involved. Oh, Bill of Rights, you say?..NONE of them stop what I just laid out, and those rights were reserved for a very limited group of people and you are not one of them
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 (where you live depending), 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 you to stop wasting their time than do anything about it.
I too travel the seven seas for hidden loot ⛵
Fine. I’ll start my own library. With external storage, and ROMS.
Wait I’m already doing that.
“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.
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Bet you read that in a textbook
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
I’m no lawyer, but I can’t really find a way that fair use is applicable in this case. Also point 4 is taken into consideration here. And no I obviously don’t agree that games shouldn’t be allowed in libraries. The law should be changed. I just don’t see how fair use is relevant.
See also first sale doctrine:
“Lending of physical books held by the library is permitted under the first sale doctrine. In other instances, such as making copies of articles and checking them out to students, libraries may rely on fair use to justify course reserves. A recent landmark case related to electronic reserves is Cambridge v. Patton, in which a group of publishers sued Georgia State University for their liberal e-reserves policy. The courts held GSU to be the prevailing party, finding fair use in the majority of alleged infringements”
See also Ben Franklin:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-ben-franklin-invented-library-as-we-know-it-180983983/
Interesting.
If you click the first link under :
Q. How does copyright apply to library lending? What is the “first sale doctrine” and how does it apply to libraries? Why are the rules for lending e-books different than print books? How does copyright relate to used book sales?
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#109
You get a legal text which is almost completely unreadable to me.
But the law explicitly mentions video games:
(B) This subsection does not apply to—
(i) a computer program which is embodied in a machine or product and which cannot be copied during the ordinary operation or use of the machine or product; or
(ii) a computer program embodied in or used in conjunction with a limited purpose computer that is designed for playing video games and may be designed for other purposes.
© Nothing in this subsection affects any provision of chapter 9 of this title.
Do I understand the section above that? Hell no. It’s in a foreign language to me (literally and figuratively).
I feed the entire section to chatGPT and asked it about libraries and video games. It says that video games generally aren’t allowed to be lend at libraries. It’s AI so take it with a grain of salt but to be fair LLMs are pretty good at analysing large amounts of text like this. But if you can read it, I encourage you to do that instead.
Sharing is caring
And thus. Again, piracy seems to be the moral choice
The irony!
Hey now…we all of course only have copies of our own blurays and DVDs on our home media servers.
Shithole country.
insane takeover of the public square here.
Oh yeah? ~reaches for feathered Tricorn~
You don’t say? ~shifts buckaneer coat across shoulders~
No, you don’t mean that? ~straps on pistol/saber belt~
Why would you say such a thing ya daft cunt ? ~quote by nearby African Grey Parrot~
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
stop giving money to lobbyists
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
That’s not enough, let’s outlaw lobbying.
