“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.
This isn’t even targeting pirates it’s targeting legitimate users. If anything, this will create more pirates.
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.
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?
luckily there’s more details to read when you click the link.
What???
I’m glad I keep backup copies of anything that might be important later on, like the 40 gig MAME Rom library.
Shithole country.
It aint the country doing this per se… It is the ownrr class using the state against the slaves. Again
Unfortunately, this is exactly what is turning (and has been turning) the US into a shithole country.
“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 publishers” were absolute with no exemptions.
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how do the rights of the copyright holders interact with CCTV?
Bet you read that in a textbook
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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/
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Industry groups argued that those museums didn’t have “appropriate safeguards” to prevent users from distributing the games once they had them in hand.
Good grief. Some of these games have been on the Internet longer than I have been alive. They are 100-fucking-percent already available on ROM sites. You’re just shitting on people’s enjoyment for the sake of shitting.
“The game industry’s absolutist position… forces researchers to explore extra-legal methods to access the vast majority of out-of-print video games that are otherwise unavailable,” the VGHF wrote.
The spice must flow, and I can assure you that it already does.
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.
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.
They would love to ban libraries.
If they didn’t already exist, it’s doubtful they would have been legal to make.
Isnt that what the InternetArchive did, disabled controlled lending during covid and got sued?
Wait till they hear of scanners and copy machines. The books aren’t safe either!
Even worse. I’ve checked out digital eBooks and digital audiobooks from my local library. And I listened to those audiobooks for FUN. The AUDACITY!
Audacity is what I used to record those audiobooks so I could listen at my own pace, btw.
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.
We used to rent these games from Blockbuster Video! On DVD when we had DVD burners and little to no drm! How did it suddenly not become acceptable?
Physical rentals are still legal. This is only about the legality of online rom downloads.
I’m speaking mainly of the distrust against the public having access for fear that we’d abuse it and not give them a cut. We can’t have access to these things now, but we used to. Regardless of form, regardless of piracy.
It’s more of a move to restrict ownership when you make a purchase, that has a farther reach than just games. I could see this being applied to cars, houses, etc. In that you only rent a license, and don’t actually own anything. I see this as just a first step, and the logic they use to justify it doesn’t make sense.
Lobbying. The greedy fucks will lobby until they get their way
They’ve been actively fighting libraries over the years, with renewed fervor in the last decade. As numerous others have pointed out before–including the article I linked–if libraries hadn’t already been such a long-standing concept for centuries, they would 100% not be allowed to come into existence nowadays. Hyper greed has poisoned every facet of modern society.
hyper greed
You misspelled neoliberal capitalism
Libraries are clearly communist… or anarchist… either way, I hate it!
you can’t stop the signal, mal
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
The DMCA is a curse.
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.
And not a fun place to stay at at all
It’s fun to violate the D-M-C-A 🎵
Yo ho ho and fuck the police
In this case it’s the corporate lawyers and lawmakers setting these precedents, not the police.
I too travel the seven seas for hidden loot ⛵
Federal law does not apply to me as a Swede in Sweden.
Nor I, as a sovereign citizen in the United States.
I do not wish to enjoinder with your Game Launcher and anonymous telephony
The concept of the sovereign citizen makes sense. You never consented to the laws you’re being held to. You’re forced into this system with no other options. Of course only people who have committed crimes and lost their drivers license and etc. try to evoke their weird ideas in court. But how is that any different than the laws and standards they’re being held to? Laws are written by politicians, some of the dumbest people in our society, heavily influenced by the wealthy. Laws are enforced only at the lowest levels, against people just struggling to survive to “protect the social order” it might as well be the Indian caste system. Laws are wildly unfair and applied excessively to the average person.
I’m sympathetic if you’re living off the grid and don’t use public infrastructure. But the “sovereign citizens” that we usually hear about have already implicitly accepted the social contract and are now trying to weasel out of the consequences. The license plates that say “private; no license required” are just utter balogna.
That said, I’m completely in support of nonviolent resistance against unjust laws. But most sovereign citizens, in my estimation, are not protesting in support of any higher cause.
I’m not downloading it, the bits are travelling to my hard drive.
May I could check out a paper copy of those bits, would that be okay? Then it’s not a digital copy
First time I see something like this net upvoted. Mood improved.
I think Sweden has federal laws too.
Do we have a shitamericanssay community already?
I’m not American. I’m European and in my country we have federal laws and federal police.
Oh well. Shiteuropeanssay was fun too.
Sweden is not a federation, why would we have federal laws?
I meant as in country laws instead of local laws from municipalities and regions.
We have federal laws and local laws where I live, but I don’t live in a federation either.
There are no “local laws” in Sweden that differ between parts of the country, only laws that apply to the entire country.
According to the English version of the Swedish government’s website, Sweden does have local laws though? It says there are 23 regions, with 290 municipalities, that are allowed, and have laws, that pertain only to that district/municipality. That the central Swedish government regulates their governance to make sure it adheres to constitution’s, and central government law also regulates these areas.
Reading more, there are police local to these regions and local municipalities too. With central government investigative authorities. So, what’s the deal with what you are saying, vs what the Swedish government claims
Maybe something with translation IDK. Municipalities can have different regulations, and breaking them can carry a penalty. But these are not laws.
The “central investigative authorities” are the same police institution as regional police, they’re just a different department so to speak.
Interesting. What about federal police?
It’s just police, there’s not really any policing entity above just regular police.
So every police officer can go and answer every call?
Over here we have police zones, and police officers patrol their own zone and handle the issues of their own zone (as long as no outside backup is required). Then we have the federal police that handle national issues and stuff like murders.
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OK, I’ll download them then.
Alright. Now enforce it. Good luck with that.
Libraries are physical locations staffed by arrestable people, they can enforce it.
Torrents OTOH…
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”.
The irony!
Hey now…we all of course only have copies of our own blurays and DVDs on our home media servers.
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.
archive.org is the modern proposal of a library, and yeah, look what’s happened to them
