If a company is going to argue that this would harm potential future re-releases of their games, they should be forced to rerelease those games in less than a years time. Otherwise it can be understood they have no interest in bringing those games back to market.
Allow libraries to do this for games that have no re-release, and have them remove the game from emulation options if it does get a re-release. Simple solution.
The human world works in order that companies make money, not for you to have fun.
It doesn't have to work that way. It works that way because they have more money, not because it is good for humanity.
The human world should work in order for us to have fun, not for companies to make money.
That's what I've been saying for awhile. If it's not readily available after a certain amount of time, for a certain amount of time, emulation should be 100% legal. Sell it to me or fuck off.
Emulation is 100% legal, at least in the USA. Do you mean downloading a copy of such a game from the internet? Because I would agree.
Yes, I meant obtaining a copy and emulating it. If you can't show damages (it's not costing them sales) then it shouldn't be punishable.
The argument against it is founded on copyright.
We fund copyright in order to enrich our culture, by incentivizing creative works.
Blocking creative works preservation strips away the cultural enrichment.
What's left? People being compelled through taxes to fund profit police for copyright holders who aren't holding up their end of the bargain.
It's worth noting that publishers, and especially the "rightsholder groups" that they hire, are not artists. They are parasites. They are paid more than fairly for their role in getting creative works out there in the first place. I can't think of any reason why they should have continued control after they've stopped publishing them.
Time to do anyway.
Thanks for making things a pain in the ass to find, idiot companies.
Short version I wrote for another news piece but that, to my understanding, should apply for this too:
The text is obtuse and the article’s title and cover are pretty clickbaity, so here’s a tl;dr:
In the US, according to the article, it’s possible to lend multiple forms of digital medias and software as you’d do with physical medias. But when requested to extend this understanding to games too, the US Copyright Office denied the change.
I think its time for the lawmakers that enable this to retire and move into their windowless and doorless retirement homes in the ground.
I love this plan!
Are there any instances of a 3rd party making digital copies of games available and paying some licensing fee back to the copyright holders? Something akin to how book libraries handle ebooks?
Maybe Steam falls in this category a bit, but I'm thinking something more exhaustive and focused on games that are otherwise out of production.
Good Old Games (now GOG.com) has quite a few titles that are old and out of production, made compatible with modern systems and sold in DRM-free digital format, in addition to whatever new stuff they can get (also DRM-free, to my knowledge.
I'm sure their payment agreements with publishers are much like Steam's, just with different exact terms and different amounts of money per game due to the age of the games in question.
This is the situation that the video game history foundation made their famous study, to have as ammunition for their debate in favor for libraries and research and historians. What a sad ending, I hope they find another way in the future.
You see those cheery icons (on the cover image), with its bright colors, full of joy, entertaining and shit? Yeah me neither...
fuck the ESA and the in-the-past-stucking Copyright Office.
Vintage gaming community.
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