Feds Say You Don’t Have a Right to Check Out Retro Video Games Like Library Books

Industry groups argued that those museums didn’t have “appropriate safeguards” to prevent users from distributing the games once they had them in hand.

So libraries are also illegal? Books, DVDs, VHS, CDS, etc. You can replace games with any of those.

Industry groups argued that those museums didn’t have “appropriate safeguards” to prevent users from distributing the games once they had them in hand.

And what exactly is stopping me from scanning library books and uploading them online? Are you going to ban libraries too?

Actually, let's not give them ideas.

Physical books have no safeguards from photocopying.

I have more terrifying news about museums. We are talking pictures worth MILLIONS just waiting to be photographed.

Wait till they hear of scanners and copy machines. The books aren't safe either!

They're trashing our rights!

Hack the planet!

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.

This isn't even targeting pirates it's targeting legitimate users. If anything, this will create more pirates.

I really feel like the source code needs to be released after 25 years. We need to be able to protect older games.

archive.org is the modern proposal of a library, and yeah, look what’s happened to them

I'd say it's more intolerably long copyright terms than the DMCA specifically.

And not a fun place to stay at at all

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.

The same logic would apply to books. ::gestures at library::

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.

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.

"Sounds like the problem is federal law pushed by Congressmen paid for by corporate lobbyists, not the federal government."

The dmca is a federal law, it is the feds.

Judging by the responses in here, it sounds like gamers need to quit and find something else to do

Nor I, as a sovereign citizen in the United States.

I think Sweden has federal laws too.

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.

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.

This is the kind of fucking bullshit that creates assholes like trump and rfk jr.

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.

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

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 ⛵

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.

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:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. 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.

Hey now...we all of course only have copies of our own blurays and DVDs on our home media servers.

Pirates now the only ones preserving this culture, yeah

It aint the country doing this per se... It is the ownrr class using the state against the slaves. Again

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

I think they might need to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

That's not enough, let's outlaw lobbying.

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.

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.

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".

Libraries are physical locations staffed by arrestable people, they can enforce it.

Torrents OTOH...

Not even, like the article says, they're not even selling 90% of them, just "fuck you, you can't play this."