Posted by mikhael 1 day ago
You absolutely can check out video games just like library books -- physically.
What the article says is libraries can't make digital copies of the games and lend them remotely over the internet.
Nothing is preventing traditional physical lending.
I personally think it's time Congress got around to putting all works that haven't been commercially available for e.g. 5 years into the public domain. That's the easiest way to fix this. But that's the job of Congress, not the US Copyright Office.
http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/03/16/that_zediva_thing...
I’m in the middle of writing to the EFF to see if they would clarify if this pertains to non-profit educational organizations employees/volunteers. E.g. if an organization of researchers are providing educational information about games, can they privately access the same physical copy remotely sitting in a drive somewhere. The rules from 2018 don’t appear to support this, unfortunately.
A lot of research is currently restricted by the inflated cost of long out of print games. Dozens or hundreds of people might want to contribute, but if a non-EULA encumbered, physical copy costs hundreds of dollars it becomes harder to find people who both have copies and the skills or desire to do work as well.
5 is much too short, though. and "commercially available" is very exploitable. I think a flat 20-30 years would work out fine. 20 is generaally when we call a title "retro" anyway, right?
It's not too short for things that have stopped being sold. If a book or video game has no more commercial value in selling, why not end its copyright?
I'm not saying 5 years after something is published. I'm saying 5 years after it stops being sold by the publisher.
If a publisher wants to "exploit" that by keeping everything in print, then great. We still keep the existing copyright limits. But I guarantee you most of the stuff no longer being sold, they don't care about because it's not profitable anymore. If it was profitable, they'd still be selling it.
* it’s running via emulation or has been recompiled for a different architecture with noticeable changes from the original (control latency, graphical differences, fixed/new bugs)
* content has been added or removed (often due to licensing)
* an EULA has been added or modified
* it’s not playable on the hardware where it was originally released
This is unlike books and music, which rarely change, or movies where it happens but is certainly not common.Video games are different, though. The Genesis version of Sonic 3 has a different soundtrack than all others and hasn’t been available since 1997. Symphony of the Night had the most similar rerelease in 2006 on XBLA, but everything since has been a version with many big fixes and additions based on the PSP version. Final Fantasy VI has had many “enhanced” versions, but surprisingly the original ROM was available until the Wii U eShop shut down last year. Also aurprisingly, new old stock of the PS1 version could be bought from Square Enix up until a few years ago.
There are countless other remasters or ports that replace the original which is then never sold again.
If a game is recompiled under a new architecture, it's still the same graphics and text and levels and everything. It's not really any different from a new printing of a book in paperback instead of hardcover and in a different font. The copyright on those elements remains intact.
If you're simply talking about access to previous versions for researchers and archivists, that's more of a question of archival practices than of copyright. Which is a very interesting conversation, but a totally separate one.
I mentioned Sonic 3 because it’s not the same music after the initial release. Depending on the version, Symphony of the Night is not the same levels or graphics. There are multiple versions of Revenge of Shinobi which replace various bosses for the Sega Genesis. Final Fantasy VI may or may not be the same code. Later versions may or may not use resources from earlier versions, sometimes a release is a completely new game with the same gameplay and aesthetic (this was especially true in 16-hit and earlier eras when arcade and home versions were complete reimplementations of the same game).
They might have the same name, but at what point does the Ship of Theseus become a different thing?
Who knows, doesn't really matter. Like with most things, the courts can determine on a case-by-case basis whether or not a particular thing currently on sale is similar enough to the old/original version of it such that the original thing should still hold copyright. Not really a big deal from a legal standpoint.
I don’t think that concept is viable for other reasons, so hypothesizing is all we’ll ever have.
Well that's more for exploiting. They can stop making copies of say, Horizon Zero dawn that came out in 2017. And maybe they stop selling it in 2019 (in this theoretical) . Just when the 5 years are almost up, they start making another retail run of it, or the remaster in this case. Repeat and iterate until you get bored.
> I guarantee you most of the stuff no longer being sold, they don't care about because it's not profitable anymore. If it was profitable, they'd still be selling it.
I want to thank that, but companies still prefer to hoard IP's, if only to keep others from working with it. There are several IP's from now defunct companies that got picked up by non-gaming studios, who obviously have no intention of ever making a game. They just want a cut if anyone ever wants to try. Or to sue when fans try to do stuff with it.
For 5 years in advance, it's not hard to keep a disc run or remaster in mind. Just look at Sony. For a longer term like 20 years they need to be more creative.
And this is exactly why the suggestion upthread is a good one. As a society, we shouldn't allow people to hoard IP and withhold it from the public.
Otherwise, we'll still see companies make stuff and kill it and sit on it for decades. (Often binning fully-finished releases without ever letting it be sold ever -- see Discovery and Disney's recent releases)
Preservation should start the minute access is threatened, not some decades later when it's likely too late.
And I certainly don't want to start a precedent where people are forced to publish things they don't want to. That's kind of the polar opposite of freedom and liberty.
If something hasn't been released yet, and never will be, then why does it matter? It might as well not exist.
No one should be obligated to publish something they want to keep private, for whatever reason.
I'm tired of video games being treated as something that they're not. They're not services and they're not just for entertainment. It's an art form and they become part of the broader culture, not to mention their full potential as an interactive medium has only barely started to be explored.
And as others mentioned, I’m not even sure if the market is big enough.
Many times those new owners aren't really concerned with some 30 year old game from an IP they may not even remember having being distributed, but the fact they still could at a moment's notice is a possible threat.
But yeah, if there truly is no existing owner, it's basically free game (literally).
Any examples come to mind? I’d love to try (or at least read about) some games like this!
Rez has the property of being so good that other developers (expectedly) made games that try to do what Rez did, missed the mark completely, and still ended up with really cool games. Thumper, Aaero, and Sayonara Wild Hearts come to mind, as does Jeff Minter's take on Polybius.
Every three years, the US Copyright Office considers petitions for exemptions to the DMCA. The big famous example that everyone talks about is in 2015, teachers won the right to bypass DVD copy protection to preserve teaching materials. This exemption had been rejected at least twice previously, but they finally won approval in 2015.
Every three years though, it's a fight. Previous exemptions can also be withdrawn during these proceedings if the Copyright Office or the Librarian of Congress believes that the exemptions are not working as planned and are harming the market.
For a long time now, folks like the Internet Archive have been petitioning to legally allow digital lending of all kinds of content, including video games. This is far from the first time this exemption has been considered. However, these proceedings include testimony and discussion, and the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) always sends lobbyists to oppose the exemptions.
In the past, one of their main arguments that worked was that those who wanted to allow digital lending were customers and enthusiasts who wanted to open their own digital arcades. There was no serious scholarship behind it.
They also were able to imply that video games weren't culturally important like books or movies because they were purely entertainment, and therefore not worth studying or preserving. And this argument worked because indeed, the Registrar of Copyrights saw video games as lesser cultural artifacts.
That's one of the reasons why organizations like the VGHF became so important to the fight. By proving that there is an academic community and non-profits engaged in treating video games as seriously as they deserve. Because of that the ESA shifted its argument completely to the economic harms to the retro game market.
To counteract that argument, the VGHF performed a study last year showed that 87% of video games are no longer commercially available, so there's there's no market to ruin if those 87% were allowed to lend. They even proposed a lot of safeguards to limit the number of copies lent and DRM schemes to prevent borrowers from dumping the ROMs (which are out there anyway).
The ESA countered that those games would still be competing with retro games that are still being sold on the market, and that the protections weren't good enough. DRM can be cracked, and they don't trust the people who want to lend the games to not introduce side-channels to get around the restrictions. In their argument, only the rights holders can properly protect their games, and only with help from the DMCA.
It's worth noting that the Registrar of Copyright is famously even more strict than rights holders at these arguments sometimes. In 2012, they denied the request for teachers to break DVD encryption, even though lobbyists for the motion picture industry said they would accept it.
And so that's what this news is about. Despite the lobbying and the studies, they sided with the ECA, seemingly taking their arguments all at face value.
I should also note that publishers do often go after libraries for lending books. It's often said in these circles that if lending books through a library weren't already common when the DMCA was enacted, we'd have to fight just as hard every 3 years to get exemptions for what libraries have always done, and we still probably wouldn't get everything.
The difference is in who's money and how much is behind the law at the relevant points in time.
If you have the resources, then a maximalist IP agenda would be the most rational, to extract as many rights as possible because it creates wider moat for attackers to cross. You keep them busy fighting things that don't matter to you, so they stay far away from your core business interests.
Absolutely. In fact it's unusually popular. In undergrad I remember the only people reading physics books were physics students, but it wasn't only film/media studies etc checking out DVDs. I'm just about old enough that unlimited streaming wasn't ubiquitous, so people would go to the video stations in the library and bingewatch there.
edit: despite my anecdote, this service is available online too, see for example the service, Overdrive, which is popular with municipal libraries.
That's the answer, the IP conglomerates aren't arguing in good faith, they just want to defend their moat as much as possible and push the debate outside of rethinking media consumption in the digital age.
Those IP conglomerates have nothing to gain from any legislation change, they basically already have all the rights they could possibly have and want to keep their position. If that means throwing away some old games under the bus, they are happy with that.
Countdown to Internet Archive getting sued on this one starts now. https://archive.org/details/internetarcade
I understand that the current state of copyright put them on thin- to no-ice. But that shouldn't be the case, IMHO. It's a net gain for the universe to let them loan these out-of-print materials. Publishers are working hard to make sure it's very expensive or impossible to do Internet lending. And Internet lending is exactly what the future of libraries should be unless we want to be stuck in a perpetually diminishing 1990.
IA is fighting the good fight against some seriously long odds.
Also, it's popular criticism - things go wrong, the team gives up a few goals, and the bad response, the loser response, is when people start pointing fingers at each other in the locker room. The right respnose - the only one that wins - is to pull together and fight harder.
But.. can any legal experts here explain otherwise, that this is a smart ruling?
No, you just need to clearly and effectively pressure elected officials, and to do that you need to raise awareness, educate people, etc.
> almost impossible
Never accomplished anything ever.
The more people who have complete archives (even if they're not being distributed freely) the more likely these games will survive.
That’s effectively what the decomp community is doing. Instead of PDF and interpreter it’s git and compilers. (Though music and visual artwork must be excluded for different copyright reasons).
My pitch to the lawyer was that it was simply a case of "longer wires" in terms of board input and output, however there is something in EU law that addresses encoding and transport over networks which causes the issue in terms of IP.
Super disappointing.
Zediva and Aereo had the same issue, albeit in a commercial application. I was hoping libraries would be given a little more freedom since their purpose is educating the public.
Not without separate licensing for electronic lending. At least that’s what publishers insist.
Nobody would say that your stock purchases should expire if you're not actively meeting with a financial advisor or following the market. "Finders keepers, you weren't using your copyright" is just a recipe for artists to get robbed by lawyers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
I kind of like the idea of allowing verbatim redistribution if the author or their estate is demonstrably not planning to make money off it, but attribution and integrity of the work should be preserved.
Big IP holders make a large effort to mix both of those so they argue in bad faith that their profit advances human culture. Do not fall for it, they are very different things, and if somebody proposes extra protection for moral rights, only those big IP holders will be against it.
You are appealing to people's ignorance (including your own) by evoking an idyllic past that doesn't actually exist. The copyright problems between individual authors are substantively indistinguishable and the law correctly acknowledges this. The only difference is completely insubstantial: irrational emotional appeal.
“It also marked the first time that copyright had been vested primarily in the author, rather than the publisher, and also the first time that the injurious treatment of authors by publishers was recognized; regardless of what authors signed away, the second 14-year term of copyright would automatically return to them.”
Your source, as best I can tell, has nothing to do with work for hire or collaborative works.
While trying to find more information, I came across this article from Cornell[0] that suggests the idea that an employer would own the work of its employees was a novel concept that originated in the late 1800s and was codified in 1909. That’s long after the Statute of Anne and early US copyright laws.
While your idea is certainly not one I’m familiar with, you seem relatively confident in it. Is there something I’m missing?
0 - https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
Copyright itself only lasted about 15 years originally, which is a reasonable amount of time to commercialise a work. If you haven't done anything commercial with it in 15 years, it seems reasonable to me to allow the public to enjoy the work.
The law keeps contorting itself into knots to entrench specific versions of the past. The Aereo lawsuit comes to mind as wildly anti-civilian, concocted to make the legal regime as tall and wide as possible. It's just so sad that legalism and Terms of Service feel like they are in a race to remain bigger than technology & possibility, to keep things the same.