I'm glad I keep backup copies of anything that might be important later on, like the 40 gig MAME Rom library.
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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And thus. Again, piracy seems to be the moral choice
Pirates now the only ones preserving this culture, yeah
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?
Bought judges belong against a wall, so that we can pick them last in dodgeball.
I think they might need to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Fine. I'll start my own library. With external storage, and ROMS.
Wait I'm already doing that.
Feds are wrong, or would be if copyright continued to serve its original purpose (according to the Constitution of the United States) to create a robust public domain.
All media should be accessible through public libraries, and arguments by federal courts presumes that the public does not have vested interest in content. It presumes the government isn't there to serve the public, which raises questions as to why we have government in the first place.
This is the kind of fucking bullshit that creates assholes like trump and rfk jr.
IMHO, RFK jr is pro environment and anti big phama. He changes his policies based on fashion more than money. He is populist, not corporatist.
Both the Republican and Democrat parties are corporatist because of lobbying. Nothing to do with Trump. If we voted Hillary and Kamala then the same court outcome would occur.
So weird because as a kid, I would rent these video games day 1 from the local library… free of charge.
What is the issue now that they are retro. Shame.
Thankful to have all mine.. back… up… and running.
Correctamundo! Intellectual property law is yet another thing that needs reform. I don't even like the term "intellectual property". It's a modern invention. For thousands of years everybody just repeated what they saw other people do, in a process called "the spread of civilization." It worked great until inventions like the printing press created opportunities for business people who didn't create anything to get rich by getting exclusive rights to other people's ideas. But even then, copyright was always something you held not something you "owned". The modern IP industry has done a very effective job at converting everybody to think of rights as property and infringement as theft. We need to return to the original concept that creators, who used to be freely imitated, can temporarily have exclusive rights to what they create because the public lets them. There's nothing evil about this, it's just a return to sanity.
Land of the Free, everybody
This is my favorite phrase to point out how fucked up it is we don't get to decide these changes for ourselves. Started with 'Oversimplified' on YT pointing out that the 'land of the free' willingly gave up their rights to consuming alcohol in the prohibition
OK, I'll download them then.
I could lend out my old computer with old games installed to somebody else to use, right?
What if instead i lend my hard drive, is it still the same thing? Or what if I lend out my remote access screen sharing password to my old PC. Still the same?
Maybe the legal workaround is to game the system here a bit - forget downloading executables which feels a lot like pirating and just lend access to a system that is legally running the original license.
Not a lawyer but I believe in the US this would be legal as you are granting the use of the original license and not duplicating any content for simultaneous use by others.
What I would like to see is a gentlemans agreement of sorts where companies agree not to come after people for playing pirate, emulated or archival copies of games that are decades old and not for sale in any format anymore. I guess this is somewhat encompassed in the framework of "Abandonware".
It sounds like the problem is not with the feds but with the DMCA. It needs to be overturned.
Judging by the responses in here, it sounds like gamers need to quit and find something else to do
"Sounds like the problem is federal law pushed by Congressmen paid for by corporate lobbyists, not the federal government."
Aka. regulatory capture
The dmca is a federal law, it is the feds.
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~
Does this mean my library isn't allowed to have games you can check out anymore? It's been doing that (and other things that aren't books) for at least a decade now with donated items.
This is more about the online one you can do with books and movies, they wanted to expand it to retro games and ESA fought tooth and nail to deny 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.
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
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.
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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.
archive.org is the modern proposal of a library, and yeah, look what’s happened to them
I really feel like the source code needs to be released after 25 years. We need to be able to protect older games.
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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.
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stop giving money to lobbyists
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
That's not enough, let's outlaw lobbying.
Well, maybe we need a movement to make physical copies of these games and the consoles needed to play them available in actual public libraries, then? That doesn't seem to be affected by this ruling and there's lots of precedent for it in current practice, which includes lending of things like musical instruments and DVD players. There's a business near me that does something similar, but they restrict access by age to high schoolers and older, and you have to play the games there; you can't rent them out.
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