[HN] Study: 87% of classic video games are not legally available
gamehistory.org
cross-posted from: https://radiation.party/post/41704
[ comments | sourced from HackerNews ]
cross-posted from: https://radiation.party/post/41704
[ comments | sourced from HackerNews ]
This is why I say, with not a single drop of irony, that piracy is a public service.
Piracy isn't piracy when it's no longer sold.
Copyright laws desperately need to be updated to account for scenarios like these. Although, to many people piracy is undesirable, I take no issue with anyone using this method to acquire content that is otherwise unavailable.
Yep. A lot of streaming services recently have been taking shows and films off the service and burry them as a tax write off. In my world if they write it off they should have to put it in public domain. If they can still sue people who copy it then it obviously has value to the rights owner still.
The regulatory and legal system is mostly reactionary. Eventually someone will be sued or sue one of the services about it and it will be settled and become precedent. Which way is hard to say, but I can definitely see your argument being persuasive.
The problem is essentially how do you define ownership? Is there a right to not make something the copyright holder owns publicly available?
I think in the cases of abandonware or more recently the moves by media companies to delist certain media for tax benefits, there's a good argument to be made over forfeiting the copyright, so it's now public domain and fair game. But I also think for something like the Star Wars Holiday Special, where the creator/copyright holder (not sure about that status post-Disney acquisition) genuinely hates it and does not want it available to the public, the owner should be allowed to restrict access to it.
Personally I disagree on that too. If something has been made public once it should stay public, unless it contains actively harmful information or something.
How do you get tax benefits for that? Sounds pretty shady.
100%
Unfortunately I'm not expecting those laws to ever change for the better.
and they won't as long as lobbying is legal and legislators are all in the pockets of big companies
The only times I allow it myself are in this case (zero legal availability) and for unofficial/fan translations of games not available in your home region/language. Nobody would be getting your money anyway, no theft of compensation/profits there. If any games do become available, though, then we should support them. The more we put our money where our mouth is for a return to market for these games, the more incentive there is for companies to bring more of them back.
I'm also ok with pirating anything that now sells for more than original retail value due to scarcity. Looking at you, $1k SNES cartridges...
I personally put that in the "company can't make profit from me purchasing it" category and consider that pirating or purchasing a used copy is ethically the same.
This may be hot take, but I think games are art and are part of our cultural legacy, and making steps that stops us from enjoying us from that legacy should be considered a crime, especially when they put at risk art disappearing forever.
I would start with simple rules:
As a result, I would expect all companies to either invest in backward compatibility on unprecedented level, or more likely start porting their games to PC (because they will keep being produced), even if that meant selling copies to be used with emulators. When there is money on the table, or perspective of losing money, corporations are really quick to find solutions.
Emulators are not illegal, where did you get that from?
There are legal problems when creating emulators, sure people work hard to avoid them, but I don't think they should have to do that in those cases, so I specifically wrote "all emulators" should be legal. For example, Dolphin to work requires cryptographic keys that technically belong to Nintendo, so they may be sued for providing them. Some emulators require you to find bios on your own because they can't legally provide them, and their emulator doesn't work without it.
If you bundle cryptographic keys, bios or other copyrighted content then yes obviously it's illegal.
It's not illegal to implement an emulator.
This isn't necessarily always true. PCSX2, the main PS2 emulator, for example needs a BIOS file that can only be obtained from an actual PS2 (or "illegally"). I'm not sure why that emulator requires it when others don't. The closest thing to an explanation I could find online just said "legal issues", but didn't go into details. That makes me suspect that there was pushback from Sony about the emulator. So if such emulation laws were to be written they absolutely should protect in stone the right to create and use emulators. If a company can find a loophole to block you, they will.
I don't think that makes sense, or at least it doesn't properly qualify the problem. BIOS is a set of baked-in software routines that mediate certain operations between software and hardware. In theory it could be reverse-enginereed and thus emulated just like the rest of the hardware is. In fact, many of the more simple systems (like 8 or 16-bit consoles) have their BIOS emulated. But for more advanced or poorer documented systems, there are, in my view, two problems with that:
On older systems yeah, but on newer systems that rely on cryptographic keys and DRM - and circumventing DRM can still be a crime - it's not so cut and dry. You can't "emulate" away the encryption
That makes sense! I appreciate the thorough reply! I've always wondered why PCSX2 was different than other emulators on that front.
I believe a lot of emulators also include a reverse engineered custom BIO that works in most cases, but you can of course supply the official one if you "have" it.
It's required because a lot of the functionality of the PS2 is in the embedded software, the BIOS.
The problem is not the emulator itself, it's the BIOS which is copyrighted. The emulator is not illegal, but bundling the BIOS with it would be.
We need a use-it-or-lose-it clause for all copyrights. If the rights holder is not making a good faith effort to sell copies, they should forfeit their copyright entirely and the work in question goes straight to the public domain. 5 years is generous, I'd make the grace period 6 months.
This is how you get Fantastic Four (1994)
I'd take it a step further and say we need a good default license that kicks in after a certain amount of time has passed until the end of the copyright (at which point no license at all is required).
The price of the license will just be based on a formula that takes revenue and portion of the end product that uses the copyright material into account. So someone issuing their own print of a book that came out would pay more than someone who publishes a fan fic sequel and just uses the characters.
And trademarks still strictly enforced, since copying that is trying to pass yourself off as another producer, or fraud. Trademarks are how the original author and the good derivative works will be differentiated from the shitty ones.
Emulators are not illegal. ROMs are illegal if you didn’t rip it yourself. If you did rip it yourself it’s a gray area. See https://youtu.be/yj9Gk84jRiE
I think that these rules are unnecessarily over-complicating the problem. IMO, the best solution would be to amend copyright legislation to include a similar clause to the one found in the 'fair dealing' exemption of many Commonwealth countries - i.e "Can the work or adaptation be obtained within a reasonable time at an ordinary commercial price?" If not, copying the game is not an infringing act.
This strikes me as weird and unnecessarily convoluted. IMO the best solution would be to limit corporate held copyrights to 10 years after first publication or 15 years after creation, whichever is sooner, and limit individually held copyrights to the life of the creator. After that's up, the work becomes public domain, and people can freely post it without repercussions, meaning the masses will handle archival and distribution essentially without prompting. Simple, with very few loopholes as far as I can see.
Or limit copyright terms to ~20 years and repeal Section 1201 (together with 512 for good measure). That would cover far more than just old games.
We're already there. Backwards compatibility is the highest it's ever been. With the rise of digital stores, popular retro games are on every platform that publishers think they can make money on. Re-releases of popular classics seem to happen all the time.
However, the sad reality is vast majority of those 87% wouldn't be profitable to release. They are the games that sold poorly on release or have been out of the spotlight for so long that most people have forgotten they even exist. There needs to be work porting the release to new platforms, there are licenses to pay for music and licensed characters. I have no idea if residuals are a thing for video games but if they exist they cost money too. If a game hasn't been re-released at this point, it's not becuase there is some backwards compatibility issue; it's because the bean counters have decided the cost of porting outweighs any sales it may generate. There is no "money left on the table" for them as it would cost more to port than they believe the game's re-release would ever make. Those games will never be legally re-released and should fall into some sort of public domain.
How can I reconcile it with, say, as a private entity, I have the right to withhold sharing my ideas or creations for whatever reason?
You have the right to withhold sharing your creations. If you never release anything at all then the above would not apply. This is about if you release something then years later stop making it available and prevent anybody from ever making a copy again.
(And the reason for that distinction is sound: the unreleased work is like nothing ever existed, the released work is part of the public culture.)
That hinges on the idea that nontangible assets are not scarce (which IMO applies or might just as well apply if it's in the internet). You are not entitled to a boxed copy of ET (1982), but the same arguments can't be applied to electronic copies of it.
I'm talking about having the right to never release a work to the public in the first place (replying to another comment on that). This has nothing to do with scarcity.
The simple argument is: you can choose to create something and never give it to anyone. Nobody is entitled to take it (that is a basic privacy principle). But if you do release something to the public, either for free or for sale, then there should be rules protecting the public's access to that work.
This doesn't mean it has to be the end of copyright. Yes there's no scarcity, but there still needs to be a function incentive to create the work in the first place, so a little artificial scarcity creates that incentive. But once the work has had a reasonable lifetime under copyright, or is no longer legally available, then yes we absolutely should be able to access it as part of the public domain.
Why should the government be enlisted to prevent the distribution of work?
The whole reason for copyright to exist is to provide a means for people to make money on their cultural work. How is society made better by removing works from the public?
In theory, a way for an artist to independently sustain continuous output of creations.
But how so? The only way it potentially makes sense is a Disney Vault like idea, but even then that only provides additional value for very old works that could be argued should be part of the public domain.
I can't think of a case where an artist would ban publication of their own work made within the last 20 years to make money, but please let me know of a potential case.
Artificial scarcity and charge high for the trickle of legal distributed works and content.
I'm asking for an example of an artistic work made in the past 20 years where that happens, where a work is pulled for an extended period of time.
What does the market currently do?
Nintendo won't say if Switch Online will get other legacy systems
This kind of thing (and e-waste in general) is why I think we need radical laws about unsupported hardware in general.
If an electronic device (phone, laptop, etc) stops receiving software support, the most recently available firmware should be made freely available under public domain.
Apple is obviously the worst offender, but it's just horrible when you have really great hardware that's 100% worthless just because the software is unsupported and proprietary.
The number of iPads, smart home products, and other devices that become e-waste every year is unsustainable. If companies were forced to release the code for free when they stopped supporting devices, maybe they would support them longer. Or at least bother innovating for a change.
This is only going to get worse with modern games. Always online to servers that won't exist. Digital only copies you won't be able to download.
Not only should the firmware be made available, I think if you are taking servers offline you should be required to release the source code.
I can still play my N64 and PS3 games with physical copies, but many on PS4 are basically unplayable without the day one patch at least
Ubisoft has made it clear, "Well, if you want to play Assasins Creed, or Farcry, we expect you to play the new ones".
Well, in both cases, the new ones are ass and I want to play the old ones, that I paid for.
As others have said on here, once the product is no longer supported, I feel the rights to that software should pass to the community.
I write code for a living, and when I'm done, the client owns that software. I hand over all the source code as part of close out. If they want me to maintain it, fine. If the want to go with someone else, its theirs to do with as they please.
How so? Because they produce hardware that one would actually like to use after firmware updates cease? They provide updates the longest and are evidently not worthless, as they have higher resale values than Android devices the same age.
None of that matters. Open hardware from 2003 still works because of course it still works. Apple is artificially bricking hardware for profit.
What is Apple bricking and in which way is it worse than any other android OEM that provides updates for shorter?
Apple stops updating devices and their phones are locked down and their macs are only really supported by proprietary software eventually losing functionality artificially.
Yes other companies are immoral and anti consumer. At least some Android devices let you install custom software making them easily outlive locked down ones.
Every intel Mac lets you install Linux too. M1 is well on its way.
As for phones: Apple provides updates longer than any android manufacturer. In android phones you too have non unlocked bootloaders as well as proprietary firmware blobs without which operating the phone is near impossible.
So I see no Dimension in which Apple is the worst.
You keep playing this comparison game…
The iPhone is full of anti consumer patterns, it simply is, and no external factors excuse this.
Of course I am comparing. Op stated Apple is the worst offender which only has meaning in comparison.
not necessarily manufacturers but the open source community can support 10 year old phones with new security updates like the LG G2 and Samsung Galaxy Note 3 LTE. https://doc.e.foundation/devices
On IPhones there is not really such a community because apple aggressively screws people for profit and will stay to do so in the future because that works.
Other companies copied Apples design choices like unmovable batteries because that works. And some fans argue "but not replace batteries are more water proof" and such but the phones only got more fragile.
And its not like they are the best in customer service, i mean they only offered repairs for design flaws when a lot of people sued them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8&t=801s&pp=ygUUbG91aXMgcm9zc21hbm4gYXBwbGU%3D (25 minute video by Louis Rossmann about apples repeated design failures)
And for the M1, i looked into it, nice that they don't lock the boot-loader without jailbreak. But they don't help with the OS, that again is the open source community.
And you are right: Apple is not the worst, Nestlé is the worst but a completely different topic.
I know that the products of apple are very user friendly and everything can like work together. The software is brilliantly comfortable so that a users don't want to use everything else, because how comfortable it is. For me it is a trap by a greedy mega cooperation.
Jesus that’s depressing. Thank god for the Internet or wonder how much of that 87% would already be lost forever.
Think of everything lost from even recent eras without the internet! Like 99% of what we've made, even in the domain of awesome impactful stuff, must have been lost to time
A lot of it got lost because we invented newer technologies, sure we can't work stone with the same methods the ancients used to but that's because we have bolts, steel, and concrete now.
colonialism also destroyed millions of art/literature
Copyright as it is today is one of humanity's worst mistake.
You can actually blame Disney for much of this.
Well, humanity did make a HUGE amount of mistakes worse than current copyright, to be honest. That one’s an abomination, but we’re generally really good at ruining stuff.
that's why the "ahoy mateys" system exists
This is why emulation is important.
Most classic everything is no longer available. This is a function of time and the general human desire to make new stuff. Otherwise antiques wouldn't really be special.
If we want our stuff more permanent, this will be a change from the past that we need to specifically enact. Otherwise it's just people being subtly out-of-touch with how time will eventually destroy not just them, but their works too. Only the influences it left behind echo into the future, for as long as our art does anyway.
This is a new trend thanks to so many products requiring web services to function. Back in the day the only thing that made products inaccessible was the fact they were not produced.
Nowadays a lot of stuff is just a useless brick purely because an unnecessary web endpoint has been shut down. Especially video games.
I would say it's not new per se, just a new mechanism for an old phenomenon.
If that one problem were solved, it would improve the situation, but not perfectly remedy it. This just makes it more noticeable, it reeks pretty badly of planned obsolescence.
But it isn't the inevitable ravages of time that take away digital media. It is easier to preserve than anything before, and there's no lack of interest to do it. The real obstacle are laws that put corporate profits above public interest and demand that we expect an untenable amount of time such that old media just completely decays. Often old digital media only gets preserved in direct defiance to the law.
It really concerns me how this mindset has been spreading, where games and media get wiped away due to companies ceasing services with no interest in preservation, then people start to wax poetically about the inevitability as if this is Ozymandias' statue from the poem. Not even Ozymandias himself is truly lost to time. No, a decade is nothing in terms of cultural loss, that's not whats wiping out those works. What is responsible for it is a business strategy of disposability enabled by laws with no regards for our culture.
I genuinely think it's inevitable, with our current technological, economic and legal frameworks. While that can change, I think the amount of effort it would require far outstrips the gain.
The entire issue bugs me a little bit, actually. It only gets so much attention because its games and the internet has a lot of gamers. There are far bigger challenges to tackle though.
There are volunteer emulator developers. There are people who downright reverse-engineer online games whose servers close down. If loss was inevitable, this couldn't happen. The limitations can't possibly be so great that this is easier than, you know, the company releasing server code and technical information as they phase out projects
The limitations are not technological in any sense, and they are only economic in so far as we are subjected to whatever the interests of wealthy executives and investors are as the main priority, because those pushing back against it manage to do a lot even having very little money compared to those businesses. The biggest obstacle is the law, and the law is not unchangeable. This is just a matter of the political tendencies of these years.
While I personally care particularly about games, this isn't really just about games. As the copyright length increased, we got to a point there are old movies that also got lost because they studios behind them didn't preserve them properly and nobody else was allowed to, so they rot away. This applies to all digital media. While I could see some limits like backing up the whole of YouTube, there is no reason why major movies or online games should just become lost by delisting.
And maybe even backing up the whole of YouTube could be possible if there was a major concerted effort among international governments to preserve all forms of digital media, rather than leaving it to the efforts of hobbyist archivers. But no, apparently all that international governments will come together to is to enforce copyright and punish piracy.
Of course there are volunteer devs. Do you think each project will always have some though? Particularly passion projects that have no profit? Just because things are a certain way now, does not mean they will be 10, 20, 40 years from now, when who knows what computing looks like.
This is the technological aspect, its swiftly changing nature making everything require maintenance. It's a fundamental principle that seems like it will remain true for the foreseeable future. Perhaps I've gotten used to it simply due to the sheer quantity of projects I have seen fall by the wayside in the past decades, but it's just a lot. The basic idea is this: At no point can you just stop and say "this thing will work for the next few decades". Your software will go out of date, your hardware will break and replacement parts will go out of production. Etc etc. I feel like it's just part of tech for now.
So sure, we've identified the problem and that's great. But it has no good solutions. Which is why it bugs me as a debate. As I said earlier, the effort to fix this, the political will it would require, is just not worth the benefit of preserving art large-scale for the first time in human history. That's just not good enough to fight for, in such a problematic world. Imo at least.
Btw, thanks for the engaging discussion. I've never debated this particular topic actually.
It's true that not every game will keep being updated to play on the latest Windows and Android, and I agree that this would be an unrealistic expectation, But we do have a solution even for that. There are virtual machines and emulators and compatibility layers we can use to replicate these older software environments. I can play a 1990s DOS game or an Atari game just fine today, even if we don't have River Patrol for Windows 11.
There is also a noteworthy distinction between keeping a game updated or available. Maybe we could get to a point when nobody cares about Ultima Online or Club Penguin, although it's noteworthy that it didn't happen yet. But we could go through decades of dust gathering only for someone to become interested in it again. Why shouldn't we keep at least the codebase and assets and documentation available as they are for when that time comes? Then they could put the effort into porting it, or maybe just study it for learning and inspiration. And we have the means to do that today, it's the matter of copyright infringement that gets in the way.
I'm glad you enjoyed the discussion. It's a topic I care about a lot as you can tell.
The main problem I foresee is scaling. Right now the number of consoles that has ever existed is still fairly manageable. That's slowly changing. Once the current generations of players have died away and everyone with a personal, nostalgic relationship with the oldest art is gone, it becomes more of an academic matter for future generations.
I'm sure they'll keep some of it around, but over time I expect most of it to start to fade more rapidly at that point. It's still a very young medium. I doubt many films were lost in their first 20 years of existence. But the 20 years after, and the next, etc etc causes accumulating attrition.
I'd certainly like to see the problem solved, if it was feasible. I think the closest we'll get is long-term physical storage from pirated sources though. Which some future-dweller could then design an emulator for on whatever the current state of hardware is. I certainly don't expect corporations to care, or for us to overpower them any time soon.
Movies also have been lost for the same reasons game do, because the law is more concerned to restrict who get to keep copies of it than to preserve the cultural history. All it takes is a neglectful company or a bankruptcy and they are left to rot in a basement. Comes to mind how many works only escaped being completely lost because of people recording VHS tapes, to the chagrin of movie industry executives.
Even without formal methods to do so, people will preserve works that they love, and that's how we can keep up. This is only an issue in the case of video games because of online games that are split between the player's client and the servers that they rely on. It's why we have nearly complete collections of games released in the 1980s but completely lost many 2010s games.
If we talk about bulk of works being released as far as the inability to keep up matters, then it still seems like videos are the works that are most threatened. Games are a complex multimedia art form, so they cannot be created quickly enough such that an overwhelming number of them will exist, when you consider our capabilities society wide. A single person can keep entire collections of games for previous consoles. In what other medium is that even remotely believable? No personal library could approach the number of physical books created during a decade. As much as technology goes obsolete, the digital format gives games a huge advantage when it comes to preservation.
It's downright impressive to consider things like Flashpoint, where collections of games were preserved even despite obsolete online technologies and that most of them came from small teams and hobbyists. If this is what volunteer archivists can do, our society is capable of much more than that. Which shows that when a high profile game disappears, it has nothing to do with how technically difficult it is to preserve it, and everything to do with deliberate obstruction.
Yes, I'd like to move past the heavy emphasis on how corporations and their regulatory/legal capture are making it happen. That is fully understood and someone would have to be a little bit dense not to understand it, imo. They are entities that exist exclusively to create profit, they will pursue all legal means to do so, and attempt to influence the law to their own ends. This is simply the logical thing to do, in their situations. I can't blame them for it, generate profit is what we create them to do. I'm about as anti-corporate as people get, I fully expect them to obstruct to preserve every penny of potential gain they could ever possibly have, with a preference towards being short sighted. This constant criticism of them feels like shaking a baby for crying. It's just what babies do.
Unless you have some kind of plan? I understand your passion, but ... it'd be cool if we could keep moving forward instead of constantly looping back.
You did get me wondering exactly where the line should be drawn. All art is clearly not equal, shouldn't it be the ultimate responsibility of the property owner to preserve it? Whether the physical holder or the intellectual owner? Not legally speaking, again I give no fucks as I expect the law to become compromised by money, but practically speaking?
Regarding the online service games you mentioned, I hadn't even considered those, but I do know what you mean. I've played a few that are long gone now, to my dismay.
I wouldn't compare companies to babies. Not only because they are organizations controlled by rational human beings, but if it is to treat their chase of profits as an inevitable urge, I think an animal is a more fitting metaphor, particularly regarding their disregard to human concerns, their potential to cause harm and that we sometimes need to restrain them for our well-being. It's deeply dysfunctional of our society when companies are only bound by law as far as it guarantees maximum profits to investors, when that often comes at the expense of the rest of society. If they can't help themselves, they should be treated accordingly and regulated.
When it comes to the particulars of how to effect preservation, the users themselves already do a lot of the work in preserving, they just need the protection to do so and not be punished by the law for it. The only requirement towards the companies, which makes for the greatest hurdle, is that companies which charge for online games ought to be obligated to release their servers on discontinuation. It already shows a certain disregard to customer rights that online games can charge players thousands of dollars for fictional digital in-game items, then they can close down the server and the value that player paid for is all gone. The player ought to have a way to retain what they paid for.
Of course this is a complex matter and it likely wouldn't be so simple, but it's not acceptable for things to remain as they are, when our culture is already facing losses exclusively because of the legal framework that was built.
Another thing to consider is how in the internet we are constantly communicating through derivative works which are technically intellectual infringement. Nearly every meme would count as such. But the law doesn't acknowledge it in any way, maybe because it would be a huge can of worms, and it would force them to recognize that copyright cannot be so strict as it has been codified, as it doesn't represent the moral values and habits of average people in today's society.
The difference here is that the data exists still and can be played via emulators still. However, it violates copyright laws to do so. It has nothing to do with “time destroying all works” (at least not yet)
Good point. And with continuous maintenance to keep the ever growing number of emulators maintained with the ever-shifting operating systems, that will remain true. The moment our maintenance of any one thing stops...
It’s being done for a lot of stuff, just not videogames.
From the linked article:
He who does not pirate software steals from himself
Ah, classic Confucius.
The only games I buy these days are indie games and those by consistently based companies like fromsoft
Though on the other hand, he who pirates software leaves door wide open for hackers posing as crackers.
At first when my antivirus software started getting hits in my cracked software folder, I thought it was just the companies working together to label pirated software as something scary. It wasn't until later that I realized that the antivirus software might have just been doing what it was supposed to. Though a false positive is also possible since injecting a crack might use code that looks similar to malicious code injection, but then I wonder if all of these crackers are just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts or if even just one of them can be malicious and I honestly see them going both ways.
Now do TV
The secret is crime
I regularly donate to the Internet Archive but after reading this decided it was time to do it again!
I love the sneaky Pac-Man graph.
I wonder what proportion of the average user's rom library is from the 87%
Probably around 87% of it
now that's a real problem
Why was this cross-posted to bisexual?
i forget where i found this, maybe it was hacker news or the alien place that shall remain nameless, but someone posted this cool site https://oldgamesdownload.com/ from a similar discussion. found several obscure childhood PC games I've been desperately looking for, hasn't failed me yet... or set the sails on the right path.