Publishers are absolutely terrified "preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes," so the US copyright office has struck down a major effort for game preservation
Publishers are absolutely terrified "preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes," so the US copyright office has struck down a major effort for game preservation
"This fails the needs of citizens in favor of a weak sauce argument from the industry, and it's really disappointing"
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Patent law is 20 years. Copyright should be no different.
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US copyright was originally for 14 years, with the option to extend it for another 14 years. It kept getting extended over the years. I think it's life of the author plus 70 years now.
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Isn't that Disney's fault (and their government lapdogs) with their efforts to hang on to Mickey Mouse as long as they can?
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Stupid thing is, if they sold it, people would still buy it, even if it was easy to pirate.
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Video games always used to be an economic way of entertainment. With an amount equal to a restaurant dinner you could be entertained for hundreds of hours.
Nowadays, video games follow the trend of enshitification. Low quality, repeated material, bad gaming experience, data hoarding, the need to be always online even for a single player game and of course, the "you don't own, we can take it away anytime we want" mentality.
According to the court rulling, if you essentially want to play retro games, you should find a way to access the original hardware and run the software in mostly proprietary mediums like cartridges that could be damaged or corrupted. And the reason you can't do it is because you may actually have fun!
This ruling is so bongers it blows my mind.
So you should never, ever ever
- Use emulators like Retroarch
- Find the ROMs of various systems you like in various "archives" through the interwebs for research purposes ofcourse
- Use a frontend like ES-DE or launchbox to make things look beautiful.
- Scrape content through screenscraper or something similar to make your frontends even more beautiful. 5.Keep in mind that this combo ( Retroarch + frontend) works in mostly cross platform (windows, Linux, android etc.)
After all, as a researcher you have to be able to tinker a little bit.
Enjoy your research ;)
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The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of art to enrich society. Making money for copyright holders is a means to an end, not the end itself.
We need a new copyright law that shifts media to public domain if the copyright holder no longer makes it available.
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Copyright and patent law is a social contract and a very fundamental one.
United States Constitution has some pretty cool ideas in it. Freedom of speech? That the government cannot punish you for expressing an idea? That was added as an afterthought. Freedom of religion? That congress shall make no law establishing a religion, making our society secular and preventing the government from punishing those who do not conform? Afterthought. The right to a trial by jury of peers, the right to not be compelled to testify against yourself, the right to be secure in your person and property? Afterthoughts. All of that, all of the things we call the Bill Of Rights, were added on the basis of "Wait we should probably have this."
The basis of intellectual property law isn't in an amendment, it's too important. It's in the main body of the constitution. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 Intellectual property:
To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respecive Writings and Discoveries.
We The People grant creators for a time exclusive right of way over their creations to monetize and profit from them as incentive for doing the work of creation so that we may have the creations, after which the creation becomes the heritage of all mankind forever so that other creators in the future may build upon it. Americans tend to view our first amendment right to freedom of speech, broadly defined by our supreme court to include symbolic speech to include overt actions such as burning a flag, as near absolute. Even the allegedly liberal allegedly enlightened democracies in Europe will outlaw ideas; America will not. Copyright and patent law is one of the very few where we will limit speech or the press, for it is one of the few laws that came before the first amendment. You may not be free to print an idea if it currently belongs to someone else.
Without that incentive, the ability to personally profit form the works you create, you get the Soviet Union, which invented...Tetris. Whose inventor didn't earn a single kopek from his invention until he became an American citizen. Without the expiration date for copyrights or patents you get...Disney. Who gobbles up creative works without the intention of letting go with the apparent goal of monopolizing the very idea of storytelling itself, hoarding wealth in perpetuity and simply buying any competition.
For a society to properly function it is important for patents and copyrights to be temporary in nature; they must exist and yet they must within a lifetime cease to exist. Lack of either condition is an intolerable rot. Copyright terms being the lifetime of the author plus seventy years is a rot the United States probably has not survived. I think we're soon to find out.
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That is an excellent write up! Well done OP!
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Sure you can buy this - for just $1000000 you can watch this movie on Amazon.
Technically it's available.
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This is why the word "reasonable" comes up in a lot of laws. "What counts as reasonable?" You ask? This is what judges are for; to examine the circumstances and make a judgement call.
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The library shouldn’t preserve books because people might read them.
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Fuck this, fuck these guys, and fuck them to hell.
I said this many years ago and I will say it again on here to be brief: Emulation and amateur game preservation by moving them from their original media (such as floppy disks, tapes, CDs, and other physical media) onto newer stuff and be able to move it around better is an act of historical defiance.
You see, throughout history, especially in the past 150 years or so, almost all early iterations of recorded media are just gone. Whether it is cylinder recordings from the late 19th century that preserved human voices, to the first music records, to the first silent film, and even the early talkies. 90% of all silent movies from all over the world are lost. What we have available is only a small sample of what existed. Even 75% of all early sound film from the first half of the 1930s are gone. For non-Western countries the number can be higher. The first ever South Asian language sound film is lost, and practically all films made in Indonesia from 1945 and back are also gone. Have you ever noticed how in terms of music, almost all the Christmas jingles are from the late 40s to 50s? There were a lot made before then, and it isn't just because the newer stuff is more relatable... a lot of the older stuff just doesn't exist anymore.
For TV, the majority of the first broadcasts were never recorded. Even as late as the 1960s some TV stars from Canada will never have their work shown because they were broadcast live and never recorded.
The list goes on and on... except for video games.
For video games that rule was broken. We have early computer adventure games from the 1970s that we can still play, ditto for console games and arcade games. The original Pong and Computer Space are still playable by anyone. The Atari 2600's original game library is almost 100% preserved, with even the destruction of E.T. the video game en masse anyone can play it (I have it on emulation, because every single Atari game ever made so small that they take no space).
All legal attacks on emulation have failed ever since the 90s. Look up the history of MAME to see how hard amateurs have fought to allow us to revisit the classics and allow people for generations to come to see what things were like before they were born.
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Greedy fucks
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Oh no! Recreation!
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It feels like companies are worried about people not wanting to play new stuff if they have decades of old stuff available. Just like movies right guys?
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Watching a movie from 1979
Uhh yea.... right.
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You're not allowed to have fun without paying for the privilege.
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More like you're not allowed to have fun, even if you pay for it.
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Classic USA
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Thread closed
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I feel like locating any kind of a not for profit foundation in the US is not going to end well.
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Steal everything that isn't nailed down while you've still got a chance.
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At least Jesus is safe from burglary then.
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Imagine if you weren't allowed to watch your favorite movies from the 80's or earlier unless you managed to have a still working VCR and VHS copy from your childhood. No Goonies, no Godfather, no Star Wars original trilogy. They decided to wipe these films from the face of the earth so that you could no longer enjoy them and had to go buy their new movies, exclusively, if you wanted entertainment from a film. That's what games publishers are trying to do, so they don't have to compete for you attention with older classics.
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Sort of like how they erased all the evidence of "Sinbad's Shazaam" and then gaslit everyone that remembered it?
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Oh c'mon don't screw with my head like that. I specifically remember seeing the "Shaq Genie movie"... Wait that was Kazaam! Dang it!
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It's just bonkers to me because they do everything for profit anyway; what the fuck profit do they get from not selling shit anymore? I said this not long ago about Nintendo, but other companies are guilty of it too. Spending money attempting to stop piracy, instead of making money by just giving customers what they fucking want. What crazy company secrets are they hiding that not continuing to sell a product is better than selling it?
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Not in any way defending Nintendo - seriously, fuck them, I will pirate their entire catalogue and not feel one iota of guilt.
But, what mix of those 87% of games no longer commercially available fall into one of these three categories:
- yearly releases of game franchises (e.g. FIFA/NFL/NHL/NBA ‘94, ‘95, ‘96 etc.)
- unofficial releases (e.g. bootleg Christian NES carts)
- impossible to re-release 1:1 due to music licensing issues (anything with EA TRAX, Vice City/San Andreas etc.)
So I guess what I’m asking is, what percentage of those games aren’t economically viable to resell, or are stuck in licence limbo?
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It's like a toxic romantic partner: if I can't make a lot of money doing this one thing, then no one can.
Come to think of it, a lot of late stage capitalism behavior is like a toxic partner.
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Did you just link tvtropes with no warning?
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You can still watch those old films, as long as you are paying a subscription to a streaming service so the studio can keep making money off of them.
That's what video game publishers want too. Nintendo doesn't want to wipe SMB3 off the face of the earth. They just want to make sure the only way you can access it is to pay for Nintendo Switch Online.
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Except that that is largely not even true.
87% of games made before 2010 are completely commercially unavailable.
They do not even want to be in control of retro games to be able to sell them indefinitely.
With the exception of certain, wildly popular games they know they can still charge a high price for, they do not want the vast majority of retro games to be legally available at all.
Further, with books, film, other kinds of art... a legal carve out exception does exist for the purposes of academic study and research.
Basically, accredited academic institutions have the ability to rent those out to students, people writing studies on media and cultural history.
Video games? As of this ruling, nope, they are special, studying the history of video games functionally requires breaking the law.
They just get shoved into the vault, never to be seen again, by anyone, ever.
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This is such an incredibly naive take that has already been proven wrong by multiple publishers going out of their way to do exactly what you just said. There's also a ton of abandonware which is not being sold and never will be again.
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You can still watch those old films, as long as you are paying a subscription to a streaming service…
And they feel like releasing the content you want to watch. And they don’t try to ruin the experience by remastering it. And they don’t try to ruin the experience by upscaling or recreating the film in a different style. And they don’t triple the price of content that used to cost a quarter of what it does now. And your device is compatible with their platform, service, and encoding formats. And the DRM implementation is compatible with your device, your cables, your speakers, and your ears. And you can pay to access that content in the location you happen to be living in, which is not always your choice. And you don’t have to buy a peripheral device just to access the content. And you trust them not to enshittify everything that you held dear about the original.
And and and… so the studio can keep making money off of them.
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Buystream their new movies.FTFY
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No Goonies, no Godfather, no Star Wars original trilogy
i would be okay with this. we should still preserve games of course, but i wouldn’t mind losing out on those movies
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Good for you?
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Note that this really only affects researchers/historians who were hoping to have a copyright exemption for controlled digital lending. This would let them virtually borrow a copyrighted retro game ROM file (from an archive such as the Internet Archive) and play it via emulation through the browser. I have actually played a few retro games on IA using their browser emulator and while it is playable it wouldn’t be my first choice.
For retro game enthusiasts who weren’t aware of these browser emulators not much will change. You still have the same exemptions covering abandonware for personal use and for playing multiplayer games where the publisher has shut down the servers. No, you’re not entitled to the publisher helping you run those games but you are protected if your goal is to reverse engineer the game code in order to create your own fan-made server. Several old multiplayer games have open source servers for this!
Also if you’re playing on original hardware then of course you’re still fully in the clear to buy used cartridges, make backups of them, play them all you want. Yes, some rare are super expensive but a lot of that stuff is due to people collecting sealed and graded games which really has nothing to with actually playing games. You’re not going to spend thousands on a sealed game and then crack it open to play it when you could just buy an open copy for far cheaper or even download a ROM for free.
Anyway, yes, these publishers are idiots pushing out crap games we don’t want to play. That’s fine. If their goal was to kill retro gaming to try to force us to buy new games then they’re still a thousand miles away from that!
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Not The Onion version: "'People might actually have fun': Publishers squash video game preservation movement"
If folks today learned that games existed which could be played offline, had no dlc, no microtransactions, no skinner boxes. And those games were actually fun, clearly the whole industry would collapse lol.
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Meg: Well I'm gunna...
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Americans are so obsessed with money, they forgot about actually living.
My dudes. Money is just a means to an end. It is not the end goal. Wake the fuck up.
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I mean, it's not just Americans, it's the whole world. EA, Nintendo, Sony, Riot, Nexon, Tencent, and basically every other major gaming corporation are part of the ESA, who lobbied to kill this exemption. If left to their own devices, corporations will never do anything that could hurt their bottom line.
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I started you a slow clap. Neither one of my dogs joined in, but I just wanted you to know I tried.
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Guess I better make a copy of the shit ton of emulated games on the thumbdrive that I have. How stupid.
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This has been an issue since copyright came into being. Money is at odds with the preservation of art so shareholders are incentivized to limit access to older titles and keep control in case it turns out they can sell them for profit.
Keep circulating the tapes, as they say
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TFW when your entire 1000+ game library of roms fits in a tiny corner of storage on my phone
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Yeah corporations are terrified of you having fun without paying money to them.
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Which is why I bought a
16 bit[8 bit] Nintendo system a year ago with Super Mario / Duck Hunt and Tetris .... I also bought a little 14" CRT TV that I can plug in to play everything like I did when I was ten years old.I spent hours and hours having fun with it back then ... I'm having hours and hours of fun with it now.
Correction: I have an 8bit not a 16bit game system
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FYI, duck hunt was an NES game, which was an 8 bit console, the SNES was Nintendo's 16 bit generation
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Shhh they're too busy playing Sonic right now
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When the programmers of these old titles are saying they’d rather have people keep playing them even if they’re only available on archive site, I say screw the publishers.
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Media needs to be future-proofed or else we risk repeating the around 75% of original silent-era films have perished and are forever lost.