The U.S. Copyright Office denied an exemption from the DMCA to allow gaming historians to access out-of-print games they can’t legally get.

“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.”

  • mPony@lemmy.worldEnglish
    771·
    2 months ago

    FTA

    Industry groups argued that those museums didn’t have “appropriate safeguards” to prevent users from distributing the games once they had them in hand. They also argued that there’s a “substantial market” for older or classic games, and a new, free library to access games would “jeopardize” this market. Perlmutter agreed with the industry groups.

    So as long as someone, somewhere, might make a penny off of them, they can’t be free. Insert your own metaphor here.

    • zarenki@lemmy.mlEnglish
      26·
      2 months ago

      This argument is even more ridiculous than it seems. During the copyright office hearing for this exemption request (back in April), the people arguing in favor of libraries talked about the measures they have in place. They don’t just let people download a ROM to use in any emulator they please. It’s not even one of those browser-based emulators where you can pull the ROM data out of your browser cache if you know how. It’s a video stream of an emulator running on a server managed by the library, with plenty enough latency to make it very clearly a worse gaming experience.

      It’s far easier to find ROMs of these games elsewhere than it is to contact a librarian and ask for access to a protected collection, so there’d be no reason to redistribute the files even if they were offered, which they aren’t.

      On top of that, this exemption request was explicitly limited to old games that have been long unavailable on the market in any form, which seems like an insane limitation to put on libraries, places that have always held collections of books both new and old.

      All of that is still not enough to sate the US Copyright Office, the ESA, AACS, or DVD CSS. Those three were the organizations that fought against this.

      • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
        92·
        2 months ago

        There is a difference there in that these are digital copies (easy to make more copies) vs physical books (hard to make more copies).

        That said, the only reason this is an issue is copyright lasts too long on relatively short lived games. If copyright on games was a more reasonable “15 years since their last major revision”, this wouldn’t be a problem.

        • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          14·
          2 months ago

          There is a difference there in that these are digital copies (easy to make more copies) vs physical books (hard to make more copies).

          Libraries rent out ebooks too, also easily stripped of DRM and copied if someone wants to so that. But that is seemingly not an issue.

          • Bazoogle@lemmy.worldEnglish
            10·
            2 months ago

            As someone who may or may not have stripped DRM from library books, they certainly never seemed to care about that. And it was never even to share, but rather to store for myself so I could read it at my own pace. And the worst part… I read it for RECREATIONAL USE

            • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              4·
              2 months ago

              it was never even to share, but rather to store for myself so I could read it at my own pace. And the worst part… I read it for RECREATIONAL USE

              You disgust me…what a sick and exploitive attitude.

          • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            2 months ago

            What he’s saying is not beyond what Congress has previously laid down though. First sale doctrine should let you do whatever you want, but they actually banned renting phonographs because they thought people were recording them on tape. We’re lucky they didn’t outlaw movie rentals too back in the day. Whole copyright regime needs to die in a fire.

          • kent_ehEnglish
            41·
            2 months ago

            Libraries rent out ebooks too

            Libraries loan out ebooks and other media.

             

            /pet peeve.

    • kent_ehEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      They also argued that there’s a “substantial market” for older or classic games, and a new, free library to access games would “jeopardize” this market. Perlmutter

      And if that market demand isn’t being catered to, or is being actively refused to be served, is there any wonder people are finding other ways to get that stuff?

      All they’re doing is hoarding this old software and preventing its use based on the speculation that they might eventually figure out a way to profit from long gone developers work.