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 post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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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.
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.
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.
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...
How does a 1998 law have retroactive rights over previously published works?
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."