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
    29·
    3 hours 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
      1·
      9 minutes 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
        4·
        59 minutes 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.