5 ms·

Video game libraries lose legal appeal to emulate physical games online

81 points by nfriedly 2y ago

mmastrac 2y ago
The legacy video game libraries were kept alive by emulator developers and ROM collectors. Now that these emulators have re-invigorated enough interest to make some $$$, they want to kill them and reap the dough. Copyright needs to be drastically shortened.
- maxwell 2y ago
  That's what Big IP wants. If copyright is drastically shortened, Mickey Mouse can rake in new IP more quickly and further reduce royalties for creators. Instead let's support creators directly, boycott publishers, buy and produce physical media, avoid media subscriptions, and shift gaming to open source.
  - thot_experiment 2y ago
    What? That makes zero sense, how do you figure that Disney, which makes a tremendous amount of money on licensing it's IP and is always fighting to strengthen and lengthen copyright would actually be better off if we did the opposite of what they've been fighting for for the last 100 years?
    - maxwell 2y ago
      Most of their IP is itself derivative: fairy tales, mythology, classic novels, a Buston Keaton film, etc. With OG Mickey now lost to the public domain, they're shifting to trademarks [1], merchandise, media access (i.e. hastening the demise of physical media [2] to regain the cinema-style control they always favored until VHS busted open their vault and briefly enabled media ownership/collectibility/free repeat viewing), sports, and theme parks. Note that they now bring in more from sports and experiences than entertainment. [3] They'll look to commoditize copyright, so creators continue working for them for distribution instead of operating independently. If they can't automate the creators. 1. https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-courts-dog-toy-ruling-puts-parody-products-notice-2023-06-12 https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-courts-dog-toy-ruli... 2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2023/08/02/with-sales-dropping-disney-will-no-longer-sell-dvds-in-australia https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2023/08/02/with-sale... 3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/193140/revenue-of-the-walt-disney-company-by-operating-segment https://www.statista.com/statistics/193140/revenue-of-the-wa...
  - CBarkleyU 2y ago
    Besides the fact that I have yet to see any "Big IP" fight for anything but strengthening and lengthening IP rights, your premise doesn't compute: Depending on the country copyright is either by itself transferable (and by far and away is done automatically in an employer-employee relationship) or transferable via exclusive licensing rights (for example in Germany). It's bizarre to think that Disney somehow has to fight their employees for Disney IP right. It would be nice if that was the case, but it isn't.
    - WillPostForFood 2y ago
      Disney as an IP hoarder would lose, but Amazon as an IP retailer would win. If there was zero copyright, how could a independent publisher or small author compete? Amazon could just take everything ever and sell it at lowest available price.
      - ronsor 2y ago
        If there was zero copyright, why would I pay Amazon any price? And if I do pay someone, why would it be anyone other than the original author?
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- whythre 2y ago
  Or ended. The idea of owning ideas is dumb, and corporations abuse the concept more than it benefits individuals.
  - delecti 2y ago
    As a simple example, why would Amazon not immediately sell ebook versions of every book ever if copyright ended? Ditto for adding every movie and show to every streaming service, meaning there'd be no incentive to make them. Copyright is way too long, but it's not worthless.
    - malwrar 2y ago
      > As a simple example, why would Amazon not immediately sell ebook versions of every book ever if copyright ended? Why would I even use Amazon in this scenario? > there'd be no incentive to make them. People do make stuff for reasons other than money you know. We might see less shows, but certainly shows of higher quality, originality, and passion. I’ve witnessed the opposite shift myself on several occasions, when creative communities I participated in suddenly found monetization (online videos, game mods, etc). Suddenly there’s much more junk from people trying to cash in. There’s a reason artists make fun of sellouts!
      - dmonitor 2y ago
        There's a middle ground that needs to be reached. I also know too many artists in creative communities that are forced into menial labor because they can't monetize their work enough to pay the bills.
      - delecti 2y ago
        > Why would I even use Amazon in this scenario? The point isn't "Amazon", it's "insert ebook distribution platform". If you prefer you can just as easily mentally substitute Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Apple Books, Pirate Bay, or "ebooks123 (dot) biz". And sure, there'd be writing, but not "authors". There'd be movies, but nothing with an appreciable budget. Plenty of big budget movies suck, but that doesn't mean I'd rather they not exist as a category.
- internet101010 2y ago
  Yeah the entire PS4 emulation effort is being driven solely by Sony's refusal to release Bloodborne on PC or make it playable at 60 fps on PS5. And they have succeeded. Just about everything is perfect now. So naturally when Sony does decide to do what they should have done years ago they will probably pull a Nintendo and sue ShadPS4 into the ground, followed by using an emulator in a museum to showcase old games.
aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
This is not a popular opinion: way too many games journalists have lost all notion of objectivity because they want to change copyright policy, and I am sick to death of intentionally misleading articles like this. Here is just one snippet: > In an odd footnote, the Register also notes that emulation of classic game consoles, while not infringing in its own right, has been "historically associated with piracy," thus "rais[ing] a potential concern" for any emulated remote access to library game catalogs. That footnote paradoxically cites Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) founder and director Frank Cifaldi's 2016 Game Developers Conference talk on the demonization of emulation and its importance to video game preservation. > "The moment I became the Joker is when someone in charge of copyright law watched my GDC talk about how it's wrong to associate emulation with piracy and their takeaway was 'emulation is associated with piracy,'" Cifaldi quipped in a social media post. The minor issue is that you shouldn’t focus on errors in footnotes for 300-page documents (Orland makes no attempt at an honest summary of the judges’ reasoning). But the critical flaw in this snippet that Cifaldi is himself acting in bad faith, because he mischaracterized his own talk: > Because [we demonized emulation] I think two things happened. One is that old games became the domain of the pirates, so people started thinking of games the same way we were thinking of MP3s in the Napster days, where it’s just like “music’s free now, who cares?” And we also I think by not getting ahead of it and getting games back in print through emulation, I think for a lot of games it’s too late now, and the legal rights are just never going to get cleared up for a lot of games. [errors are mine, this is from YouTube] Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a powerful means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of game developers. The reason the US Copyright office cited this talk was to point this out, that the publishers’ concerns were shared by a prominent games preservation activist. Faced with this information, the activist simply lied about his own words, and the journalist did zero investigative work on his own, shamelessly smearing an honest judge who wrote an honest footnote. Good arguments don’t need to be supported by easily falsifiable lies. Games journalists need to do their f*ckin’ jobs.
- senko 2y ago
  Tell me you're an IP lawyer without telling me you're an IP lawyer: > Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a powerful means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of game developers. That's some serious mental gymnastics, man.
OgsyedIE 2y ago
Is there a cut-off to this or is it completely inclusive of stuff like Spacewar, Pong, Colossal Cave Adventure and pedit5?
- dmoy 2y ago
  It's copyright, so... 95 years or whatever. So you could probably recreate the original monopoly in 2030?
ajsnigrutin 2y ago
Copyright laws really really need a reform. If a thing (game, software,...) is not "easily available" to buy locally, by the first party, in any usable form, companies should have no claims on damages, because piracy is a victimless crime. Is ExampleGame(TM) on sale anywhere, on any platform? No? How can (eg) nintendo lose money then if i pirate it? Where's the harm in piracy then?
- realusername 2y ago
  I'd go further than that, there's no valid reason to monetize 40 year old games where most of the devs are retired or dead. The law still pretends that there's a transfer of value there when there's obviously not, the society has moved on.
  - Sophira 2y ago
    For that argument to work, wouldn't you need to have the assumption that people don't value the old games? Because people clearly do value being able to play these old games. Otherwise, emulation wouldn't even be so popular in the first place. Remember, capitalism is all finding the maximum amount people would pay in order to be able to do something they value doing, and then charging them that. Or to put it another way, it doesn't matter whether Nintendo thinks it has any value, just that you do. And the way Western governments are set up kind of facilitates that. (I'm not a fan of capitalism. Can you tell?)
- autoexec 2y ago
  > Where's the harm in piracy then? Nintendo and other video game companies don't want to have to compete with their past products. They want you to pay full price for their new games right now because it makes their sales figures look impressive. Older games too often lack the microtransactions, paid DLC, ads, and data collection that can enable companies to continuously extract money from their customers. There are enough old games in existence today that a person could spend their entire life playing quality video games, be fully entertained, and never once touch a recently created title. It's harder to keep coming up with new games that people will feel is more worthy of their time than older games. It's easy to just make sure that gamers can't access those great older games so that they're forced to put up with whatever expensive consumer-hostile garbage is on offer right now. Companies currently have the freedom to keep burying their old games making them unavailable unless/until they choose to overcharge consumers and force them to pay again and again for ports and shitty/censored remakes of the same games they paid for before. They'll fight to keep that freedom.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
phinnino1 2y ago
[dead]

81 points by nfriedly 2y ago

The legacy video game libraries were kept alive by emulator developers and ROM collectors. Now that these emulators have re-invigorated enough interest to make some $$$, they want to kill them and reap the dough. Copyright needs to be drastically shortened.

maxwell 2y ago
That's what Big IP wants. If copyright is drastically shortened, Mickey Mouse can rake in new IP more quickly and further reduce royalties for creators. Instead let's support creators directly, boycott publishers, buy and produce physical media, avoid media subscriptions, and shift gaming to open source.
- thot_experiment 2y ago
  What? That makes zero sense, how do you figure that Disney, which makes a tremendous amount of money on licensing it's IP and is always fighting to strengthen and lengthen copyright would actually be better off if we did the opposite of what they've been fighting for for the last 100 years?
  - maxwell 2y ago
    Most of their IP is itself derivative: fairy tales, mythology, classic novels, a Buston Keaton film, etc. With OG Mickey now lost to the public domain, they're shifting to trademarks [1], merchandise, media access (i.e. hastening the demise of physical media [2] to regain the cinema-style control they always favored until VHS busted open their vault and briefly enabled media ownership/collectibility/free repeat viewing), sports, and theme parks. Note that they now bring in more from sports and experiences than entertainment. [3] They'll look to commoditize copyright, so creators continue working for them for distribution instead of operating independently. If they can't automate the creators. 1. https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-courts-dog-toy-ruling-puts-parody-products-notice-2023-06-12 https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-courts-dog-toy-ruli... 2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2023/08/02/with-sales-dropping-disney-will-no-longer-sell-dvds-in-australia https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2023/08/02/with-sale... 3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/193140/revenue-of-the-walt-disney-company-by-operating-segment https://www.statista.com/statistics/193140/revenue-of-the-wa...
- CBarkleyU 2y ago
  Besides the fact that I have yet to see any "Big IP" fight for anything but strengthening and lengthening IP rights, your premise doesn't compute: Depending on the country copyright is either by itself transferable (and by far and away is done automatically in an employer-employee relationship) or transferable via exclusive licensing rights (for example in Germany). It's bizarre to think that Disney somehow has to fight their employees for Disney IP right. It would be nice if that was the case, but it isn't.
  - WillPostForFood 2y ago
    Disney as an IP hoarder would lose, but Amazon as an IP retailer would win. If there was zero copyright, how could a independent publisher or small author compete? Amazon could just take everything ever and sell it at lowest available price.
    - ronsor 2y ago
      If there was zero copyright, why would I pay Amazon any price? And if I do pay someone, why would it be anyone other than the original author?
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
whythre 2y ago
Or ended. The idea of owning ideas is dumb, and corporations abuse the concept more than it benefits individuals.
- delecti 2y ago
  As a simple example, why would Amazon not immediately sell ebook versions of every book ever if copyright ended? Ditto for adding every movie and show to every streaming service, meaning there'd be no incentive to make them. Copyright is way too long, but it's not worthless.
  - malwrar 2y ago
    > As a simple example, why would Amazon not immediately sell ebook versions of every book ever if copyright ended? Why would I even use Amazon in this scenario? > there'd be no incentive to make them. People do make stuff for reasons other than money you know. We might see less shows, but certainly shows of higher quality, originality, and passion. I’ve witnessed the opposite shift myself on several occasions, when creative communities I participated in suddenly found monetization (online videos, game mods, etc). Suddenly there’s much more junk from people trying to cash in. There’s a reason artists make fun of sellouts!
    - dmonitor 2y ago
      There's a middle ground that needs to be reached. I also know too many artists in creative communities that are forced into menial labor because they can't monetize their work enough to pay the bills.
    - delecti 2y ago
      > Why would I even use Amazon in this scenario? The point isn't "Amazon", it's "insert ebook distribution platform". If you prefer you can just as easily mentally substitute Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Apple Books, Pirate Bay, or "ebooks123 (dot) biz". And sure, there'd be writing, but not "authors". There'd be movies, but nothing with an appreciable budget. Plenty of big budget movies suck, but that doesn't mean I'd rather they not exist as a category.
internet101010 2y ago
Yeah the entire PS4 emulation effort is being driven solely by Sony's refusal to release Bloodborne on PC or make it playable at 60 fps on PS5. And they have succeeded. Just about everything is perfect now. So naturally when Sony does decide to do what they should have done years ago they will probably pull a Nintendo and sue ShadPS4 into the ground, followed by using an emulator in a museum to showcase old games.

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago

This is not a popular opinion: way too many games journalists have lost all notion of objectivity because they want to change copyright policy, and I am sick to death of intentionally misleading articles like this. Here is just one snippet: > In an odd footnote, the Register also notes that emulation of classic game consoles, while not infringing in its own right, has been "historically associated with piracy," thus "rais[ing] a potential concern" for any emulated remote access to library game catalogs. That footnote paradoxically cites Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) founder and director Frank Cifaldi's 2016 Game Developers Conference talk on the demonization of emulation and its importance to video game preservation. > "The moment I became the Joker is when someone in charge of copyright law watched my GDC talk about how it's wrong to associate emulation with piracy and their takeaway was 'emulation is associated with piracy,'" Cifaldi quipped in a social media post. The minor issue is that you shouldn’t focus on errors in footnotes for 300-page documents (Orland makes no attempt at an honest summary of the judges’ reasoning). But the critical flaw in this snippet that Cifaldi is himself acting in bad faith, because he mischaracterized his own talk: > Because [we demonized emulation] I think two things happened. One is that old games became the domain of the pirates, so people started thinking of games the same way we were thinking of MP3s in the Napster days, where it’s just like “music’s free now, who cares?” And we also I think by not getting ahead of it and getting games back in print through emulation, I think for a lot of games it’s too late now, and the legal rights are just never going to get cleared up for a lot of games. [errors are mine, this is from YouTube] Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a powerful means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of game developers. The reason the US Copyright office cited this talk was to point this out, that the publishers’ concerns were shared by a prominent games preservation activist. Faced with this information, the activist simply lied about his own words, and the journalist did zero investigative work on his own, shamelessly smearing an honest judge who wrote an honest footnote. Good arguments don’t need to be supported by easily falsifiable lies. Games journalists need to do their f*ckin’ jobs.

senko 2y ago
Tell me you're an IP lawyer without telling me you're an IP lawyer: > Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a powerful means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of game developers. That's some serious mental gymnastics, man.

OgsyedIE 2y ago

Is there a cut-off to this or is it completely inclusive of stuff like Spacewar, Pong, Colossal Cave Adventure and pedit5?

dmoy 2y ago
It's copyright, so... 95 years or whatever. So you could probably recreate the original monopoly in 2030?

ajsnigrutin 2y ago

Copyright laws really really need a reform. If a thing (game, software,...) is not "easily available" to buy locally, by the first party, in any usable form, companies should have no claims on damages, because piracy is a victimless crime. Is ExampleGame(TM) on sale anywhere, on any platform? No? How can (eg) nintendo lose money then if i pirate it? Where's the harm in piracy then?

realusername 2y ago
I'd go further than that, there's no valid reason to monetize 40 year old games where most of the devs are retired or dead. The law still pretends that there's a transfer of value there when there's obviously not, the society has moved on.
- Sophira 2y ago
  For that argument to work, wouldn't you need to have the assumption that people don't value the old games? Because people clearly do value being able to play these old games. Otherwise, emulation wouldn't even be so popular in the first place. Remember, capitalism is all finding the maximum amount people would pay in order to be able to do something they value doing, and then charging them that. Or to put it another way, it doesn't matter whether Nintendo thinks it has any value, just that you do. And the way Western governments are set up kind of facilitates that. (I'm not a fan of capitalism. Can you tell?)
autoexec 2y ago
> Where's the harm in piracy then? Nintendo and other video game companies don't want to have to compete with their past products. They want you to pay full price for their new games right now because it makes their sales figures look impressive. Older games too often lack the microtransactions, paid DLC, ads, and data collection that can enable companies to continuously extract money from their customers. There are enough old games in existence today that a person could spend their entire life playing quality video games, be fully entertained, and never once touch a recently created title. It's harder to keep coming up with new games that people will feel is more worthy of their time than older games. It's easy to just make sure that gamers can't access those great older games so that they're forced to put up with whatever expensive consumer-hostile garbage is on offer right now. Companies currently have the freedom to keep burying their old games making them unavailable unless/until they choose to overcharge consumers and force them to pay again and again for ports and shitty/censored remakes of the same games they paid for before. They'll fight to keep that freedom.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

phinnino1 2y ago

[dead]