Pirates now the only ones preserving this culture, yeah

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

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.

I really feel like the source code needs to be released after 25 years. We need to be able to protect older games.

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.

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

They're trashing our rights!

Hack the planet!

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::

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.

I'd say it's more intolerably long copyright terms than the DMCA specifically.

Hey now...we all of course only have copies of our own blurays and DVDs on our home media servers.

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.

That's not enough, let's outlaw lobbying.

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.

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".