7 ms·

The US copyright office has struck down a major effort for game preservation

146 points by bobthepanda 2y ago

throwaway48476 2y ago
ESA game companies are worried consumers are having too much fun playing old games instead of buying new slop skinner boxes.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  Yep. That’s the primary reason they don’t still sell their old games.
  - jmiskovic 2y ago
    IMO the primary reason is the difficulty of supporting older titles across various modern systems, for a too small of an audience. If older games were so popular GOG would dominate the market by now.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      Yeah you’re probably right. Nevermind.
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      Stand alone executable are very easy to support for ~20 years on the windows platform. It's only dos games that need to be packaged in VMs for modern platforms. Support only becomes a problem when there's invasive drm tied to a specific os or hardware platform or required online services that require ongoing maintenance.
    - thot_experiment 2y ago
      They don't *need* to support shit, I would pay for the rom dumps if there was a way for me to do so. Same with music, I like buying music but relatively few artists let me give them money for flacs. Also GOG does really well considering the tough competition.
    - matheusmoreira 2y ago
      There is absolutely no need for them to support any of this. They don't need to spend even one cent of their money on this stuff. The world is literally filled with people who love these games so much they learned computer hardware and programming because of it. People who love these things to the point they'll reverse engineer the consoles and make emulators to make sure they are playable again long after the hardware has crumbled to dust. People who obsess about things like cycle accuracy and undocumented hardware behavior in order to make sure even the nonsensical bugs in the system are recreated because there were games out there relying on those things to do something awesome with limited resources. People who will reverse engineer the games themselves and make open source engines for the content. These people are beyond awesome, they literally do this because they enjoy it. All these corporations have to do is get the hell out of these people's way, for they are doing god's work. That's literally all they have to do. They just gotta shut up, stop whining about their "lost sales" and let these people do what they gotta do.
      - jmiskovic 2y ago
        I would rather we just pirate the games of the bygone age and instead spend the money on contemporary indie studios. Why let the publishers profit from others' creations while taking no risks and offering no added value?
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  These companies believe that their target audience sleeps on their behavior. Here, have a list of bad companies: https://www.theesa.com/our-members/ https://www.theesa.com/our-members/ And yes, these are the typical candidates. I believe many of them are currently bleeding anyway because they long have other priorities than creating good entertainment.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Sometimes it really does become apparent that politicians and their appointees don't represent citizens.
- atemerev 2y ago
  This is why we have direct democracy in Switzerland, and I wonder why it is not used anywhere else.
  - wombatpm 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - jf22 2y ago
      Yeah the US is about 33 Switzerland's in population and probably double that in size.
      - Keyframe 2y ago
        more like 38x population and 233x area!
      - abecedarius 2y ago
        From the other end, Switzerland has roughly 30 times the pop of classical Athens which I guess was then the largest democracy. It's not super obvious their governance could not evolve to scale to U.S. size.
      - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
        Switzerland is about 16,000 sq miles. That makes it bigger than Maryland, but smaller than West Virginia. It's about half the size of South Carolina. You could fit Switzerland in Texas 16 times and still have enough room to squeeze in a Belgium.
      - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
        Does that size difference matter? I see the wisdom in having a Senate to give different geographical locations some independence and control. But maybe it is possible to have more direct democracy while also balancing that concern?
exe34 2y ago
it would be fine if they had to provide those games and platforms at a reasonable price, unless they allow the libraries to do it.
markx2 2y ago
> That ruling cites the belief of the Entertainment Software Association and other industry lobby groups that "there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes." I have an RPi which has over 10k games from my youth. I play those games, some arcade, some from early consoles when I want to play those games. Just like sometimes you want to listen to music from when you were a teen. I also have many consoles and games which I will hook up to my TV when I want to play those games - SSX Tricky anyone? I have a PC and a Steamdeck with almost 9k licenses to play games. So what do the ESA want? Kill off music older than x years? KIll off games older than x years? (MAME would like a word there) The ESA argument - as quoted above - is bullshit.
- deafpolygon 2y ago
  Did you buy all 10k of the games from your youth?
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    In installments of $.25 More to the point, everyone involved with the creation of the game is retired or dead.
    - doubled112 2y ago
      But what about the publishing company?! Think of the publishing company! /s in case.
    - deafpolygon 2y ago
      I’d be curious where you legally obtained each license for that price.
      - gopher_space 2y ago
        I modify the terms of clickwrap licenses before I agree to them, then send the changes to legal@ with a cute little JavaScript animation. Never hear back from anyone about it for some reason.
surgical_fire 2y ago
> The specific quote is that “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.” > This explains why people like Jim Ryan hate retro games. They think these older games would cannibalize sales from newer releases. I play retro games. Mostly on Retroarch. I play those games because I genuinely think they are better and more enjoyable than the vast majority of crap released nowadays. If they managed (they can't) to wrestle my retro game collection from me, they wouldn't get me to play whatever crap EA, Ubisoft or Blizzard puts out nowadays. They would just get me to stop playing videogames.
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  Fair case for advocating piracy. I don't think the copyright office is doing its job in service for society. I wouldn't even call it piracy if you had a licence. It is just normal usage.
- zeta0134 2y ago
  The amazing part is that my cartridges still work perfectly well in my original consoles, decades later. There's no server, no login, no account, no downloading, no ads, no microtransactions... I just turn the console on, grab the controller, and I'm in game in seconds.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    How do you handle the NTSC video output? Or are your consoles new enough to output composite video or VGA?
    - jdmoreira 2y ago
      framemeister, ossc and rgb mods
    - bitzun 2y ago
      Do TVs not have composite input anymore? I haven’t bought a new one in forever.
rolph 2y ago
the entirety of all roms and emulators are probably in the hands of those who actually want to play them, this only prevents research archives from being operated. i find it interesting that OG retro games actually are considered threatening to modern AAA games.
- prophesi 2y ago
  Yep. The games are already being archived. It's kind of silly to strike down an official archival at this point, and only brings risk to consumers that seek out illegally distributed ROMs on malware-infested sites. And shout out to Red Viper on the 3DS for letting me experience the Virtual Boy without needing to deal with a second hand market that gets more expensive as the years go by.
  - zb3 2y ago
    The web platform can help mitigate this risk - while native emulators might be malicious or attacked by malicious roms, emulators written to run on the web platform are practically safe. Plus you get the bonus ability to run on iOS :)
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  Why would it be anything other than expected that the top 10 or so percent of the whole history of games would compete favorably against any other subset of games, like whatever happens to be releasing this week?
jmward01 2y ago
Patent, trademark, copyright, etc are all supposed to benefit society as a whole. The point isn't that corporations get to lock things away forever. The goal is to incentivize innovation, both technological and cultural. The more companies make the argument that 'thing x from a long time ago is crucial to us now' the more I think that our current IP laws are actually slowing down innovation instead of incentivizing it. Maybe we need a new system that starts costing money after a point to maintain IP rights. That system would recognize the value taken by private companies holding on to old IP to the detriment of society and force them to come up with new things to justify their existence instead of living off of that one thing they did right 100 years ago.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  Ip rights should just end after a relatively quick slice of time. You made your money off it, now it’s time to pass it on to the public. A payment model just ensures the only entities who can hold ip long term are corporations.
  - jeffreyrogers 2y ago
    That's how it was originally but over time the terms have been extended (largely due to advocacy from organizations that own large catalogs of copyrighted material). It's now tied to the life of the creator rather than the time since creation or publication.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      Yep. It needs to be restored or even shortened beyond the original window.
    - RajT88 2y ago
      IIRC, early copyright (say, during Mozart's time) required royalties to only be paid out for the first performance of a work. And that is why some of these composers were so prolific - to keep up their payday, they had to crank out music instead of collecting on royalties of performances they were directly involved with. Unthinkable today, really.
jf22 2y ago
The quiet part out loud cliche is overused and not relevant in this case. It was never quiet the industry wanted to preserve profits and they said it out loud multiple times.
- Spivak 2y ago
  I think it fits this case. It's an open secret that despite constant public statements from games publishers about their old IP still having value that it's actually a scheme to push consumers on the new content treadmill. Now we have someone confirming in court that it's exactly that. Which is a terrible misuse of copyright that goes against even its most publisher-friendly interpretation. Meta: I don't think the phrase is actually overused, I think it's used so much due to so many companies all discovering at once that they don't have to spend time crafting a plausible cover narrative, and that nothing will happen if they just say they're being shitty and there's nothing you can do about it.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    Obviously there is something you can do about it though: casually ignore copyright law because the government is acting illegitimately, just like people do with drugs. If you're interested in, say, ROMs, it doesn't take much work to find a community (say, a subreddit) that's interested in that topic and will tell you where to find what you want. Or if you're too lazy for that, you can search for retro games on amazon and find consoles with 10s of thousands of them preloaded. The quiet part that citizens can say out loud is that for individuals, copyright basically runs on the honor system. If you don't think the situation is fair, you can just ignore those restrictions.
- dang 2y ago
  (This was merged from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42259040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42259040 where that phrase was in the title)
jeffreyrogers 2y ago
I think this is the correct thing to do as far as copyright law goes, but it seems to me that copyright terms are far too long to fulfill their original purpose: incentivize the distribution of creative works. Originally copyright was for relatively short terms (20 years IIRC). It is now life of the author + 70 years or 95 years from publication if the copyright holder is a corporation. Some organizations advocate for perpetual copyright terms as well. Given the extremely long terms now available there is little incentive to quickly extract value from the copyrighted work. Patents exist for the same reason and have been similarly coopted by their holders. Edit: if copyright terms were shorter publishers would be incentivized to keep their games in print and to update them for newer media/platforms.
- wvenable 2y ago
  There are so many ways that copyright duration could be adjusted to dramatically reduce the duration for out-of-print not-for-sale works while simultaneously allowing Disney to keep Mickey Mouse. The fact that it's a single fixed duration that continues to be extended for just a minuscule fraction of works is ultimately the issue.
  - jeffreyrogers 2y ago
    Mickey Mouse is in the public domain now (the original one at least), but I agree with your argument.
    - wvenable 2y ago
      I'm totally okay with Mickey Mouse being copyrighted again if we could find a system that allowed for abandoned works to be out of copyright. It would be a huge boon to human culture.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    Why do we want disney to keep mickey though? Just make it a flat 10-15 years and never extend it.
- 2y ago
bitwize 2y ago
What exactly about "exclusive right to copy or distribute" do these people not understand? If you don't like the current state of copyright, write your Congressman.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  Congress punted this issue to the librarian of congress like how they punt most issues these days.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  People worked to try and get an alteration made to the law; they “wrote to their congressmen” already. This was functionally the result of that process. As an aside, what game company do you work for?
- standardUser 2y ago
  I suppose that begs the question, what part of "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" do you and the US Copyright Office not understand?
- nemomarx 2y ago
  what do I do when my congressman doesn't care, and I can't find q candidate to vote for who promises to change it? it's not like we have a lot of agency in elections
  - bitwize 2y ago
    Then you need to politically organize and get the votes together to vote in people who will effect the desired changes to the law. Till that happens, tough. The law is the law.
- samatman 2y ago
  An existing research exemption for copying materials has existed for many decades. Libraries have copiers. That they ruled that this specific case is not covered by that exemption is unfortunate, and the argument is not the slam dunk you appear to think it is.
deadbabe 2y ago
The next step will be to bombard indie game developers making modern “retro” style games with patent infringement for the most trivial and basic game concepts, so that no one could ever hope to truly make a game.
delecti 2y ago
The context of the quote pretty significantly changes the meaning though. It's an argument for why the rules shouldn't be loosened for the preservation foundation. > Still, the US copyright office has said no. "The Register concludes that proponents did not show that removing the single-user limitation for preserved computer programs or permitting off-premises access to video games are likely to be noninfringing," according to the final ruling. "She also notes the greater risk of market harm with removing the video game exemption’s premises limitation, given the market for legacy video games." That quote (from the GamesRadar article) to me, makes it clear that the "[...] preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes" quote is being used as a gotcha. It's not that they don't want you to play old games, it's that they don't want copyright restrictions to be loosened. It's a very similar situation to the recent Internet Archive book. Current copyright law doesn't let you loan out format-shifted works. Copyright length is too long, but within the copyright framework, the restrictions seem sensible to me.
aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
Gamers are once again let down by the shameless ignorance and dishonesty of games journalists: > More importantly, this also ignores the fact that libraries already lend out digital versions of more traditional media like books and movies to everyday people for what can only be described as recreational purposes. What this ignores is that libraries are not allowed to digitize in-copyright print books (or physical films) and then distribute these digital copies. This is what the Internet Archive got in trouble for. Emulating old games is not that different. Maybe the laws should be changed. But pretending that there's one set of rules for books and then a higher scrutiny for games is utterly backwards. Game publishers want the protections afforded to books and movies; it is archivists and emulators who want a double standard because of the unique technical challenges around old games. I am sympathetic to this position[1]. But I am not sympathetic to what has felt like 20 years of smarmy, dishonest games journalism around copyright. Too many journalists are completely in the tank for emulation, and they intentionally mislead readers with useless articles like this. It drives me crazy. [1] Although note the dishonest conflation of "games publishers" and "game copyright holders." Game journalists simply ignore that small indie devs also want copyright protection, focusing on Nintendo and Playstation for naked political reasons.
- cma 2y ago
  > Maybe the laws should be changed. But pretending that there's one set of rules for books and then a higher scrutiny for games is utterly backwards Is it pretending? There actually were different rules in this area for rentals, though it didn't necessarily translate to digital transmission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_of_America,_Inc._v._Blockbuster_Entertainment_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_of_America,_Inc._v._B.... > Soon after the settlement, the United States Congress passed the Computer Software Rentals Amendment Act prohibiting software rentals, excluding Nintendo cartridges from similar protections. Although Nintendo criticized the game rental business, they came to accept it, even working with Blockbuster to offer exclusive rental versions of their games. The first-sale doctrine was eventually subverted by end-user license agreements, which describe that the consumer is purchasing a singular, non-transferable license to the software, thus limiting the sale of used software. Computer Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990 https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/senate-bill/198 https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/senate-bill/198 > Excludes certain home video game software from the prohibition (including a computer program embodied in a machine or product which cannot be copied during the ordinary operation of such machine or product). Libraries had a specific carve out as well over software in general "Authorizes nonprofit libraries to lend computer programs if a copyright warning has been affixed to the computer program packaging" which probably wouldn't apply to digital. But, it is wrong to say there weren't different rules for software vs books vs specifically game console software. The DMCA had lots of flexibility for administrative law to make specific carve outs treating different media circumvention stuff differently for things like preservation: > Lawmakers opted to create a rulemaking mechanism through the United States Copyright Office to review the state of copyrights and fair use to make limited classes of allowance for fair use which would be considered lawful means of using circumvention technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act#Anti-circumvention_exemptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
dkuznetsov 2y ago
The problem is that the copyright period is too long, and it is not dependent on whether or not the copies are still being actively sold.
ericra 2y ago
This is not surprising, and unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to get better any time soon given our increasingly conservative (corp friendly) federal courts. It's really a shame because these corps have shown they can't be trusted to properly archive their own games, and any change of ownership or economic fortune can mean they are lost forever. From a personal level, I'll just keep doing what I've always done. Help archive the things I can. Support and buy games from smaller devs or publishers who care about their games. And if you want to play something from a shitty AAA dev, nothing is stopping you from playing it anyway for free and just giving the money to your favorite charity instead. Consumers can have a lot of power if they choose to exercise it.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > This is not surprising, and unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to get better any time soon given our increasingly conservative (corp friendly) federal courts. It's not very often that the "Both Sides" argument is valid but in this case it is: Neither major US party differs significantly in their unwavering support for corporate power and laissez faire regulatory policy. They are also largely backed by the same large corporate sponsors and do not significantly differ on their use of super PAC funding and their support of unlimited political spending from corporations.
- magic_smoke_ee 2y ago
  If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing. - Ancient proverb
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
It's funny how they keep actively pushing normal people towards, rather than away from, piracy (or copyright infringement). From a certain angle it could be seen that they're backing people into a corner from which the only escape is piracy, and once the convenience of that apple has been tasted, it's difficult to go back to the sub-standard service provision and heavy usage restrictions of the 'legitimate' world.
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  Valve isn't in this horror cabinet of an industry lobbying group because they have customer orientation. Against all odds, they pioneered online distribution. They had a secret though and that was to not being shitty to their customers. And that even though Gabe Newell and consorts got a lot of shit from parts of the gaming community at first. There is not a single example where any company replicated something like that, it always has been corporate enshittificated bloatware. With the exception of GOG for DRM-free titles. I doubt the companies listed in the article can achieve anything like that.
vjulian 2y ago
Retro games are certainly fun for many. I hope that the ruling proves irrelevant to the sharing of these games.
luxuryballs 2y ago
It’s funny because you never hear authors complaining that people might read classic literature for entertainment as if it was some kind of threat to their new book and that says a lot about the gaming industry. Shame they care more about capturing my attention by any means necessary than they do about providing the world with a new fun game. Good thing nothing like that could ever happen with the pharmaceutical industry, then I might have to go to Mexico to get OTC drugs…
bakje_cheonchi 2y ago
1201 in general is a frustrating process. Even if the DRM-protected media is being used for purposes not protected by copyright (e.g., fair use), 1201 makes it illegal to crack to the DRM unless there's been a 1201 exemption. To make this explicit: If rightsholders believe you are infringing on their copyright, they can sue you for copyright infringement no matter what. 1201 acts as another layer preventing fair use and other non-infringing works.
roastedpeacock 2y ago
Just a friendly reminder to everyone that a challenge of the DMCA has not reached the Supreme Court in over 25 years of its existence.
black_13 2y ago
[dead]
evoke4908 2y ago
Suddenly thousands of voices cried out as one. All retro gamers together said "oh, well anyway" and continued to pirate old games
bubblethink 2y ago
This is the wrong strategy. Every year some or the other group begs the copyright office for some minor exception and most of them get denied. This is the wrong game. To win at this, you need to create your own market and succeed in it. And then you can buy your own politicans. Imagine if uber had asked the taxi board for exceptions for ride sharing. Or if Tesla had waited till states allowed them to sell (they didn't; they started selling on Indian land). Begging for morsels from the government doesn't work.

146 points by bobthepanda 2y ago

ESA game companies are worried consumers are having too much fun playing old games instead of buying new slop skinner boxes.

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
Yep. That’s the primary reason they don’t still sell their old games.
- jmiskovic 2y ago
  IMO the primary reason is the difficulty of supporting older titles across various modern systems, for a too small of an audience. If older games were so popular GOG would dominate the market by now.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    Yeah you’re probably right. Nevermind.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    Stand alone executable are very easy to support for ~20 years on the windows platform. It's only dos games that need to be packaged in VMs for modern platforms. Support only becomes a problem when there's invasive drm tied to a specific os or hardware platform or required online services that require ongoing maintenance.
  - thot_experiment 2y ago
    They don't *need* to support shit, I would pay for the rom dumps if there was a way for me to do so. Same with music, I like buying music but relatively few artists let me give them money for flacs. Also GOG does really well considering the tough competition.
  - matheusmoreira 2y ago
    There is absolutely no need for them to support any of this. They don't need to spend even one cent of their money on this stuff. The world is literally filled with people who love these games so much they learned computer hardware and programming because of it. People who love these things to the point they'll reverse engineer the consoles and make emulators to make sure they are playable again long after the hardware has crumbled to dust. People who obsess about things like cycle accuracy and undocumented hardware behavior in order to make sure even the nonsensical bugs in the system are recreated because there were games out there relying on those things to do something awesome with limited resources. People who will reverse engineer the games themselves and make open source engines for the content. These people are beyond awesome, they literally do this because they enjoy it. All these corporations have to do is get the hell out of these people's way, for they are doing god's work. That's literally all they have to do. They just gotta shut up, stop whining about their "lost sales" and let these people do what they gotta do.
    - jmiskovic 2y ago
      I would rather we just pirate the games of the bygone age and instead spend the money on contemporary indie studios. Why let the publishers profit from others' creations while taking no risks and offering no added value?
raxxorraxor 2y ago
These companies believe that their target audience sleeps on their behavior. Here, have a list of bad companies: https://www.theesa.com/our-members/ https://www.theesa.com/our-members/ And yes, these are the typical candidates. I believe many of them are currently bleeding anyway because they long have other priorities than creating good entertainment.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Sometimes it really does become apparent that politicians and their appointees don't represent citizens.

atemerev 2y ago
This is why we have direct democracy in Switzerland, and I wonder why it is not used anywhere else.
- wombatpm 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - jf22 2y ago
    Yeah the US is about 33 Switzerland's in population and probably double that in size.
    - Keyframe 2y ago
      more like 38x population and 233x area!
    - abecedarius 2y ago
      From the other end, Switzerland has roughly 30 times the pop of classical Athens which I guess was then the largest democracy. It's not super obvious their governance could not evolve to scale to U.S. size.
    - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      Switzerland is about 16,000 sq miles. That makes it bigger than Maryland, but smaller than West Virginia. It's about half the size of South Carolina. You could fit Switzerland in Texas 16 times and still have enough room to squeeze in a Belgium.
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      Does that size difference matter? I see the wisdom in having a Senate to give different geographical locations some independence and control. But maybe it is possible to have more direct democracy while also balancing that concern?

exe34 2y ago

it would be fine if they had to provide those games and platforms at a reasonable price, unless they allow the libraries to do it.

markx2 2y ago

> That ruling cites the belief of the Entertainment Software Association and other industry lobby groups that "there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes." I have an RPi which has over 10k games from my youth. I play those games, some arcade, some from early consoles when I want to play those games. Just like sometimes you want to listen to music from when you were a teen. I also have many consoles and games which I will hook up to my TV when I want to play those games - SSX Tricky anyone? I have a PC and a Steamdeck with almost 9k licenses to play games. So what do the ESA want? Kill off music older than x years? KIll off games older than x years? (MAME would like a word there) The ESA argument - as quoted above - is bullshit.

deafpolygon 2y ago
Did you buy all 10k of the games from your youth?
- gopher_space 2y ago
  In installments of $.25 More to the point, everyone involved with the creation of the game is retired or dead.
  - doubled112 2y ago
    But what about the publishing company?! Think of the publishing company! /s in case.
  - deafpolygon 2y ago
    I’d be curious where you legally obtained each license for that price.
    - gopher_space 2y ago
      I modify the terms of clickwrap licenses before I agree to them, then send the changes to legal@ with a cute little JavaScript animation. Never hear back from anyone about it for some reason.

surgical_fire 2y ago

> The specific quote is that “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.” > This explains why people like Jim Ryan hate retro games. They think these older games would cannibalize sales from newer releases. I play retro games. Mostly on Retroarch. I play those games because I genuinely think they are better and more enjoyable than the vast majority of crap released nowadays. If they managed (they can't) to wrestle my retro game collection from me, they wouldn't get me to play whatever crap EA, Ubisoft or Blizzard puts out nowadays. They would just get me to stop playing videogames.

raxxorraxor 2y ago
Fair case for advocating piracy. I don't think the copyright office is doing its job in service for society. I wouldn't even call it piracy if you had a licence. It is just normal usage.
zeta0134 2y ago
The amazing part is that my cartridges still work perfectly well in my original consoles, decades later. There's no server, no login, no account, no downloading, no ads, no microtransactions... I just turn the console on, grab the controller, and I'm in game in seconds.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  How do you handle the NTSC video output? Or are your consoles new enough to output composite video or VGA?
  - jdmoreira 2y ago
    framemeister, ossc and rgb mods
  - bitzun 2y ago
    Do TVs not have composite input anymore? I haven’t bought a new one in forever.

rolph 2y ago

the entirety of all roms and emulators are probably in the hands of those who actually want to play them, this only prevents research archives from being operated. i find it interesting that OG retro games actually are considered threatening to modern AAA games.

prophesi 2y ago
Yep. The games are already being archived. It's kind of silly to strike down an official archival at this point, and only brings risk to consumers that seek out illegally distributed ROMs on malware-infested sites. And shout out to Red Viper on the 3DS for letting me experience the Virtual Boy without needing to deal with a second hand market that gets more expensive as the years go by.
- zb3 2y ago
  The web platform can help mitigate this risk - while native emulators might be malicious or attacked by malicious roms, emulators written to run on the web platform are practically safe. Plus you get the bonus ability to run on iOS :)
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
Why would it be anything other than expected that the top 10 or so percent of the whole history of games would compete favorably against any other subset of games, like whatever happens to be releasing this week?

jmward01 2y ago

Patent, trademark, copyright, etc are all supposed to benefit society as a whole. The point isn't that corporations get to lock things away forever. The goal is to incentivize innovation, both technological and cultural. The more companies make the argument that 'thing x from a long time ago is crucial to us now' the more I think that our current IP laws are actually slowing down innovation instead of incentivizing it. Maybe we need a new system that starts costing money after a point to maintain IP rights. That system would recognize the value taken by private companies holding on to old IP to the detriment of society and force them to come up with new things to justify their existence instead of living off of that one thing they did right 100 years ago.

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
Ip rights should just end after a relatively quick slice of time. You made your money off it, now it’s time to pass it on to the public. A payment model just ensures the only entities who can hold ip long term are corporations.
- jeffreyrogers 2y ago
  That's how it was originally but over time the terms have been extended (largely due to advocacy from organizations that own large catalogs of copyrighted material). It's now tied to the life of the creator rather than the time since creation or publication.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    Yep. It needs to be restored or even shortened beyond the original window.
  - RajT88 2y ago
    IIRC, early copyright (say, during Mozart's time) required royalties to only be paid out for the first performance of a work. And that is why some of these composers were so prolific - to keep up their payday, they had to crank out music instead of collecting on royalties of performances they were directly involved with. Unthinkable today, really.

jf22 2y ago

The quiet part out loud cliche is overused and not relevant in this case. It was never quiet the industry wanted to preserve profits and they said it out loud multiple times.

Spivak 2y ago
I think it fits this case. It's an open secret that despite constant public statements from games publishers about their old IP still having value that it's actually a scheme to push consumers on the new content treadmill. Now we have someone confirming in court that it's exactly that. Which is a terrible misuse of copyright that goes against even its most publisher-friendly interpretation. Meta: I don't think the phrase is actually overused, I think it's used so much due to so many companies all discovering at once that they don't have to spend time crafting a plausible cover narrative, and that nothing will happen if they just say they're being shitty and there's nothing you can do about it.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  Obviously there is something you can do about it though: casually ignore copyright law because the government is acting illegitimately, just like people do with drugs. If you're interested in, say, ROMs, it doesn't take much work to find a community (say, a subreddit) that's interested in that topic and will tell you where to find what you want. Or if you're too lazy for that, you can search for retro games on amazon and find consoles with 10s of thousands of them preloaded. The quiet part that citizens can say out loud is that for individuals, copyright basically runs on the honor system. If you don't think the situation is fair, you can just ignore those restrictions.
dang 2y ago
(This was merged from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42259040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42259040 where that phrase was in the title)

jeffreyrogers 2y ago

I think this is the correct thing to do as far as copyright law goes, but it seems to me that copyright terms are far too long to fulfill their original purpose: incentivize the distribution of creative works. Originally copyright was for relatively short terms (20 years IIRC). It is now life of the author + 70 years or 95 years from publication if the copyright holder is a corporation. Some organizations advocate for perpetual copyright terms as well. Given the extremely long terms now available there is little incentive to quickly extract value from the copyrighted work. Patents exist for the same reason and have been similarly coopted by their holders. Edit: if copyright terms were shorter publishers would be incentivized to keep their games in print and to update them for newer media/platforms.

wvenable 2y ago
There are so many ways that copyright duration could be adjusted to dramatically reduce the duration for out-of-print not-for-sale works while simultaneously allowing Disney to keep Mickey Mouse. The fact that it's a single fixed duration that continues to be extended for just a minuscule fraction of works is ultimately the issue.
- jeffreyrogers 2y ago
  Mickey Mouse is in the public domain now (the original one at least), but I agree with your argument.
  - wvenable 2y ago
    I'm totally okay with Mickey Mouse being copyrighted again if we could find a system that allowed for abandoned works to be out of copyright. It would be a huge boon to human culture.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  Why do we want disney to keep mickey though? Just make it a flat 10-15 years and never extend it.
2y ago

bitwize 2y ago

What exactly about "exclusive right to copy or distribute" do these people not understand? If you don't like the current state of copyright, write your Congressman.

throwaway48476 2y ago
Congress punted this issue to the librarian of congress like how they punt most issues these days.
BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
People worked to try and get an alteration made to the law; they “wrote to their congressmen” already. This was functionally the result of that process. As an aside, what game company do you work for?
standardUser 2y ago
I suppose that begs the question, what part of "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" do you and the US Copyright Office not understand?
nemomarx 2y ago
what do I do when my congressman doesn't care, and I can't find q candidate to vote for who promises to change it? it's not like we have a lot of agency in elections
- bitwize 2y ago
  Then you need to politically organize and get the votes together to vote in people who will effect the desired changes to the law. Till that happens, tough. The law is the law.
samatman 2y ago
An existing research exemption for copying materials has existed for many decades. Libraries have copiers. That they ruled that this specific case is not covered by that exemption is unfortunate, and the argument is not the slam dunk you appear to think it is.

deadbabe 2y ago

The next step will be to bombard indie game developers making modern “retro” style games with patent infringement for the most trivial and basic game concepts, so that no one could ever hope to truly make a game.

delecti 2y ago

The context of the quote pretty significantly changes the meaning though. It's an argument for why the rules shouldn't be loosened for the preservation foundation. > Still, the US copyright office has said no. "The Register concludes that proponents did not show that removing the single-user limitation for preserved computer programs or permitting off-premises access to video games are likely to be noninfringing," according to the final ruling. "She also notes the greater risk of market harm with removing the video game exemption’s premises limitation, given the market for legacy video games." That quote (from the GamesRadar article) to me, makes it clear that the "[...] preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes" quote is being used as a gotcha. It's not that they don't want you to play old games, it's that they don't want copyright restrictions to be loosened. It's a very similar situation to the recent Internet Archive book. Current copyright law doesn't let you loan out format-shifted works. Copyright length is too long, but within the copyright framework, the restrictions seem sensible to me.

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago

Gamers are once again let down by the shameless ignorance and dishonesty of games journalists: > More importantly, this also ignores the fact that libraries already lend out digital versions of more traditional media like books and movies to everyday people for what can only be described as recreational purposes. What this ignores is that libraries are not allowed to digitize in-copyright print books (or physical films) and then distribute these digital copies. This is what the Internet Archive got in trouble for. Emulating old games is not that different. Maybe the laws should be changed. But pretending that there's one set of rules for books and then a higher scrutiny for games is utterly backwards. Game publishers want the protections afforded to books and movies; it is archivists and emulators who want a double standard because of the unique technical challenges around old games. I am sympathetic to this position[1]. But I am not sympathetic to what has felt like 20 years of smarmy, dishonest games journalism around copyright. Too many journalists are completely in the tank for emulation, and they intentionally mislead readers with useless articles like this. It drives me crazy. [1] Although note the dishonest conflation of "games publishers" and "game copyright holders." Game journalists simply ignore that small indie devs also want copyright protection, focusing on Nintendo and Playstation for naked political reasons.

cma 2y ago
> Maybe the laws should be changed. But pretending that there's one set of rules for books and then a higher scrutiny for games is utterly backwards Is it pretending? There actually were different rules in this area for rentals, though it didn't necessarily translate to digital transmission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_of_America,_Inc._v._Blockbuster_Entertainment_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_of_America,_Inc._v._B.... > Soon after the settlement, the United States Congress passed the Computer Software Rentals Amendment Act prohibiting software rentals, excluding Nintendo cartridges from similar protections. Although Nintendo criticized the game rental business, they came to accept it, even working with Blockbuster to offer exclusive rental versions of their games. The first-sale doctrine was eventually subverted by end-user license agreements, which describe that the consumer is purchasing a singular, non-transferable license to the software, thus limiting the sale of used software. Computer Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990 https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/senate-bill/198 https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/senate-bill/198 > Excludes certain home video game software from the prohibition (including a computer program embodied in a machine or product which cannot be copied during the ordinary operation of such machine or product). Libraries had a specific carve out as well over software in general "Authorizes nonprofit libraries to lend computer programs if a copyright warning has been affixed to the computer program packaging" which probably wouldn't apply to digital. But, it is wrong to say there weren't different rules for software vs books vs specifically game console software. The DMCA had lots of flexibility for administrative law to make specific carve outs treating different media circumvention stuff differently for things like preservation: > Lawmakers opted to create a rulemaking mechanism through the United States Copyright Office to review the state of copyrights and fair use to make limited classes of allowance for fair use which would be considered lawful means of using circumvention technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act#Anti-circumvention_exemptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

dkuznetsov 2y ago

The problem is that the copyright period is too long, and it is not dependent on whether or not the copies are still being actively sold.

ericra 2y ago

This is not surprising, and unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to get better any time soon given our increasingly conservative (corp friendly) federal courts. It's really a shame because these corps have shown they can't be trusted to properly archive their own games, and any change of ownership or economic fortune can mean they are lost forever. From a personal level, I'll just keep doing what I've always done. Help archive the things I can. Support and buy games from smaller devs or publishers who care about their games. And if you want to play something from a shitty AAA dev, nothing is stopping you from playing it anyway for free and just giving the money to your favorite charity instead. Consumers can have a lot of power if they choose to exercise it.

ryandrake 2y ago
> This is not surprising, and unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to get better any time soon given our increasingly conservative (corp friendly) federal courts. It's not very often that the "Both Sides" argument is valid but in this case it is: Neither major US party differs significantly in their unwavering support for corporate power and laissez faire regulatory policy. They are also largely backed by the same large corporate sponsors and do not significantly differ on their use of super PAC funding and their support of unlimited political spending from corporations.
magic_smoke_ee 2y ago
If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing. - Ancient proverb

BLKNSLVR 2y ago

It's funny how they keep actively pushing normal people towards, rather than away from, piracy (or copyright infringement). From a certain angle it could be seen that they're backing people into a corner from which the only escape is piracy, and once the convenience of that apple has been tasted, it's difficult to go back to the sub-standard service provision and heavy usage restrictions of the 'legitimate' world.

raxxorraxor 2y ago
Valve isn't in this horror cabinet of an industry lobbying group because they have customer orientation. Against all odds, they pioneered online distribution. They had a secret though and that was to not being shitty to their customers. And that even though Gabe Newell and consorts got a lot of shit from parts of the gaming community at first. There is not a single example where any company replicated something like that, it always has been corporate enshittificated bloatware. With the exception of GOG for DRM-free titles. I doubt the companies listed in the article can achieve anything like that.

vjulian 2y ago

Retro games are certainly fun for many. I hope that the ruling proves irrelevant to the sharing of these games.

luxuryballs 2y ago

It’s funny because you never hear authors complaining that people might read classic literature for entertainment as if it was some kind of threat to their new book and that says a lot about the gaming industry. Shame they care more about capturing my attention by any means necessary than they do about providing the world with a new fun game. Good thing nothing like that could ever happen with the pharmaceutical industry, then I might have to go to Mexico to get OTC drugs…

bakje_cheonchi 2y ago

1201 in general is a frustrating process. Even if the DRM-protected media is being used for purposes not protected by copyright (e.g., fair use), 1201 makes it illegal to crack to the DRM unless there's been a 1201 exemption. To make this explicit: If rightsholders believe you are infringing on their copyright, they can sue you for copyright infringement no matter what. 1201 acts as another layer preventing fair use and other non-infringing works.

roastedpeacock 2y ago

Just a friendly reminder to everyone that a challenge of the DMCA has not reached the Supreme Court in over 25 years of its existence.

black_13 2y ago

[dead]

evoke4908 2y ago

Suddenly thousands of voices cried out as one. All retro gamers together said "oh, well anyway" and continued to pirate old games

bubblethink 2y ago

This is the wrong strategy. Every year some or the other group begs the copyright office for some minor exception and most of them get denied. This is the wrong game. To win at this, you need to create your own market and succeed in it. And then you can buy your own politicans. Imagine if uber had asked the taxi board for exceptions for ride sharing. Or if Tesla had waited till states allowed them to sell (they didn't; they started selling on Indian land). Begging for morsels from the government doesn't work.