Feds Say You Don’t Have a Right to Check Out Retro Video Games Like Library Books

iN8sWoRLd@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 836 points – Feds Say You Don’t Have a Right to Check Out Retro Video Games Like Library Books
gizmodo.com

"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."

146

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.

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.

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!

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.

We can't have access to these things now, but we used to.

??? There was no change. It was always illegal. This was a petition to change it to be legal and the petition was denied.

Despite it being illegal, Internet Archive has hosted and I hope will continue to host rom collections like tiny best set go.

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?

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.

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.

That's cool. Won't really stop any of the shit that's been happening though.

Good luck corpos, for every pirate you take away ten more will take their place.

hack the planet

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?

The IP owner can print more, but if the owner is gone or legally unclear, then yes. Although I don't think this was the real intention, because greed looks like a simpler reason and fits

This isn't even targeting pirates it's targeting legitimate users. If anything, this will create more pirates.

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.

Yeah, I know it’s a pipe dream, but really, there should be something that opens source code up. Too much company history gets lost or forgotten because people forget. Plus think about how much value you can gain as a student seeing how people accomplished things with minimal resources.

archive.org is the modern proposal of a library, and yeah, look what’s happened to them

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.

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.

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.

It's been demonstrated multiple times that when you make access easy and affordable people will pay for it over pirating it.

The same logic would apply to books. ::gestures at library::

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Libraries rent out ebooks too

Libraries loan out ebooks and other media.

 

/pet peeve.

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.

It's such bullshit it makes me want to start selling those knockoff consoles just purely out of spite.

People will just continue pirating those games then.

The most popular games will likely continue to get pirated, all this will do is guarantee that some small vintage games are lost to time.

It sounds like the problem is not with the feds but with the DMCA. It needs to be overturned.

Judging by the responses in here, it sounds like gamers need to quit and find something else to do

Feds are wrong, or would be if copyright continued to serve its original purpose (according to the Constitution of the United States) to create a robust public domain.

All media should be accessible through public libraries, and arguments by federal courts presumes that the public does not have vested interest in content. It presumes the government isn't there to serve the public, which raises questions as to why we have government in the first place.

So weird because as a kid, I would rent these video games day 1 from the local library… free of charge.

What is the issue now that they are retro. Shame.

Thankful to have all mine.. back… up… and running.

Correctamundo! Intellectual property law is yet another thing that needs reform. I don't even like the term "intellectual property". It's a modern invention. For thousands of years everybody just repeated what they saw other people do, in a process called "the spread of civilization." It worked great until inventions like the printing press created opportunities for business people who didn't create anything to get rich by getting exclusive rights to other people's ideas. But even then, copyright was always something you held not something you "owned". The modern IP industry has done a very effective job at converting everybody to think of rights as property and infringement as theft. We need to return to the original concept that creators, who used to be freely imitated, can temporarily have exclusive rights to what they create because the public lets them. There's nothing evil about this, it's just a return to sanity.

This is the kind of fucking bullshit that creates assholes like trump and rfk jr.

IMHO, RFK jr is pro environment and anti big phama. He changes his policies based on fashion more than money. He is populist, not corporatist.

Both the Republican and Democrat parties are corporatist because of lobbying. Nothing to do with Trump. If we voted Hillary and Kamala then the same court outcome would occur.

Federal law does not apply to me as a Swede in Sweden.

Nor I, as a sovereign citizen in the United States.

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

I do not wish to enjoinder with your Game Launcher and anonymous telephony

First time I see something like this net upvoted. Mood improved.

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 think Sweden has federal laws 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.

The police is called "polismyndigheten" which is a governmental organisation where all police staff (both civilians and no civilians) are employed (with some exceptions like the "security police" which is a fully separate organisation).

And no, a police from the Stockholm police won't patrol in a city on the other side of the country. There are police districts and such but it's still the same organisation. You could probably get transferred to the other side of the country, but that would obviously be a bad idea unless the employee is moving anyways. I suspect the union might have something to say if they decide to transfer people wherever for no reason.

Except in informal settings the police is only called the police. For example police cars only say "Police" and never "Stockholm police" or similar.

But there are obviously some specialised divisions/groups within the organisation that are only present in one place (probably Stockholm). A very small police station in a small town could very well be investigating murder but I suspect they will likely want help from some other station or specialist division if the case is complex.

Have they removed the county mark on the side?

It was a while since I saw a police car, but I remember seeing "Stockholms Län" on the side

I haven't seen one in a while either, but looking at images it does indeed appear that there are no region markings on the cars.

I had a look on the instragrsm account blåljusbilder, and you are right, there isn't any markings for regions/counties on the cars, it might have been a period when they tried it but realized it wouldn't work for some reason

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.

Yeah I'm not into that kind of Shitredditorssay bullshittery.

They’re right. I have been using old videos games for recreation. Too bad that they’ve decided to prevent me from paying for the privilege or at least being tracked through library usage and have instead decided it’d be better if I was just an untrackable “criminal”

Either way, I’m enjoying these old games and living my life guilt free.

You'd better not also be reading books for fun. By their logic, any recreational use of books from a library should also be considered illegal.

There's no such thing as untrackable.

The feeling of being a completely honest and lawful citizen was really nice at some point, buying games in Steam, GOG or just bookstores, too bad it was mostly gaslighting and they were not going to be honest with us.

The purpose of the US government is to create as many criminals as possible to put in gulags and sell into slavery. That has ALWAYS been the history of the US. There has NEVER been any "freedom" involved. Oh, Bill of Rights, you say?...NONE of them stop what I just laid out, and those rights were reserved for a very limited group of people and you are not one of them

Yo ho ho and fuck the police

In this case it's the corporate lawyers and lawmakers setting these precedents, not the police.

To be honest, as bad as police can be (where you live depending), I'm sure if you called them and said your neighbour pirated The Simpsons Movie and some SNES games last night, they'd sooner laugh in your face and tell you to stop wasting their time than do anything about it.

I too travel the seven seas for hidden loot ⛵

“Fair Use” is a thing. Someone needs to go back to law school.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

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 copyright owners" were absolute with no exemptions.

Of course, it's in their best interests to falsely educate.

IMO when it comes to educational books that are intended to be used within an educational system like a college, first amendment shouldn't apply. The entire purpose is to educate the public your freedom of speech interferes with facts. Should it be found that your books consciously represented misinformation, the company is automatically found at fault and must recall then replace all books at their own cost and be fined tens of thousands of dollars per book that remains after five years.

Should they fail to replace 80% of all sold books within those 5 years, the entire chain of command responsible will face prison terms no lower than one year.

There were so many textbooks I had through my years of education that were blatantly wrong.

I'm also looking at those schools who want to teach creationism in place of evolution. Can't misrepresent facts when the books you can use get recalled.

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

  1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
  2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
  3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
  4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

I'm no lawyer, but I can't really find a way that fair use is applicable in this case. Also point 4 is taken into consideration here. And no I obviously don't agree that games shouldn't be allowed in libraries. The law should be changed. I just don't see how fair use is relevant.

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”

https://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/copyright/libraries#:~:text=to%20course%20reserves%3F-,A.,use%20to%20justify%20course%20reserves.

See also Ben Franklin:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-ben-franklin-invented-library-as-we-know-it-180983983/

Interesting.

If you click the first link under :

Q. How does copyright apply to library lending? What is the "first sale doctrine" and how does it apply to libraries? Why are the rules for lending e-books different than print books? How does copyright relate to used book sales?

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#109

You get a legal text which is almost completely unreadable to me.

But the law explicitly mentions video games:

(B) This subsection does not apply to—

(i) a computer program which is embodied in a machine or product and which cannot be copied during the ordinary operation or use of the machine or product; or

(ii) a computer program embodied in or used in conjunction with a limited purpose computer that is designed for playing video games and may be designed for other purposes.

(C) Nothing in this subsection affects any provision of chapter 9 of this title.

Do I understand the section above that? Hell no. It's in a foreign language to me (literally and figuratively).

I feed the entire section to chatGPT and asked it about libraries and video games. It says that video games generally aren't allowed to be lend at libraries. It's AI so take it with a grain of salt but to be fair LLMs are pretty good at analysing large amounts of text like this. But if you can read it, I encourage you to do that instead.

Fine. I'll start my own library. With external storage, and ROMS.

Wait I'm already doing that.

And thus. Again, piracy seems to be the moral choice

Pirates now the only ones preserving this culture, yeah

Land of the Free, everybody

This is my favorite phrase to point out how fucked up it is we don't get to decide these changes for ourselves. Started with 'Oversimplified' on YT pointing out that the 'land of the free' willingly gave up their rights to consuming alcohol in the prohibition

Bought judges belong against a wall, so that we can pick them last in dodgeball.

I think they might need to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

stop giving money to lobbyists

🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

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.

Does this mean my library isn't allowed to have games you can check out anymore? It's been doing that (and other things that aren't books) for at least a decade now with donated items.

This is more about the online one you can do with books and movies, they wanted to expand it to retro games and ESA fought tooth and nail to deny it.

Well, maybe we need a movement to make physical copies of these games and the consoles needed to play them available in actual public libraries, then? That doesn't seem to be affected by this ruling and there's lots of precedent for it in current practice, which includes lending of things like musical instruments and DVD players. There's a business near me that does something similar, but they restrict access by age to high schoolers and older, and you have to play the games there; you can't rent them out.

The problem with these fundamental rulings is that they're largely trying to fit square objects through round holes. When a simple ruling is made to essentially say "to current law, no", the law itself ultimately becomes meaningless, because older games couldn't be easier to pirate. Most of them are smaller than a TikTok video, and are so cheap/easy to host that you'll never stop them from being shared. Hell, emulation has come so far that you can effectively emulate these games on a browser, on multiple devices, even devices that don't natively support gaming.

The smart thing to do would be to say that maybe the legal framework that embodies retro gaming needs to be researched and heavily considered. It's a hard task that'll require many lawyers, many fights, and lots of lobbying to ensure the word of law is worth something. Sadly, it's easier to say "lol no" and to essentially just promote piracy.

I'm glad I keep backup copies of anything that might be important later on, like the 40 gig MAME Rom library.

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".

Alright. Now enforce it. Good luck with that.

Libraries are physical locations staffed by arrestable people, they can enforce it.

Torrents OTOH...

basically "dont wanna pay us? fuck off"

Not even, like the article says, they're not even selling 90% of them, just "fuck you, you can't play this."

Good thing the "Feds" have zero jurisdiction in my country then. Feck em.