[HN Gopher] Video game libraries lose legal appeal to emulate ph...
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Video game libraries lose legal appeal to emulate physical games
online
Author : nfriedly
Score : 56 points
Date : 2024-10-29 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| mmastrac wrote:
| The legacy video game libraries were kept alive by emulator
| developers and ROM collectors. Now that these emulators have re-
| invigorated enough interest to make some $$$, they want to kill
| them and reap the dough.
|
| Copyright needs to be drastically shortened.
| maxwell wrote:
| That's what Big IP wants. If copyright is drastically
| shortened, Mickey Mouse can rake in new IP more quickly and
| further reduce royalties for creators.
|
| Instead let's support creators directly, boycott publishers,
| buy and produce physical media, avoid media subscriptions, and
| shift gaming to open source.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| What? That makes zero sense, how do you figure that Disney,
| which makes a tremendous amount of money on licensing it's IP
| and is always fighting to strengthen and lengthen copyright
| would actually be better off if we did the opposite of what
| they've been fighting for for the last 100 years?
| maxwell wrote:
| Most of their IP is itself derivative: fairy tales,
| mythology, classic novels, a Buston Keaton film, etc.
|
| With OG Mickey now lost to the public domain, they're
| shifting to trademarks [1], merchandise, media access (i.e.
| hastening the demise of physical media [2] to regain the
| cinema-style control they always favored until VHS busted
| open their vault and briefly enabled media
| ownership/collectibility/free repeat viewing), sports, and
| theme parks. Note that they now bring in more from sports
| and experiences than entertainment. [3]
|
| They'll look to commoditize copyright, so creators continue
| working for them for distribution instead of operating
| independently. If they can't automate the creators.
|
| 1. https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-courts-dog-toy-
| ruli...
|
| 2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2023/08/02/with-
| sale...
|
| 3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/193140/revenue-of-
| the-wa...
| CBarkleyU wrote:
| Besides the fact that I have yet to see any "Big IP" fight
| for anything but strengthening and lengthening IP rights,
| your premise doesn't compute: Depending on the country
| copyright is either by itself transferable (and by far and
| away is done automatically in an employer-employee
| relationship) or transferable via exclusive licensing rights
| (for example in Germany).
|
| It's bizarre to think that Disney somehow has to fight their
| employees for Disney IP right. It would be nice if that was
| the case, but it isn't.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Disney as an IP hoarder would lose, but Amazon as an IP
| retailer would win. If there was zero copyright, how could
| a independent publisher or small author compete? Amazon
| could just take everything ever and sell it at lowest
| available price.
| whythre wrote:
| Or ended. The idea of owning ideas is dumb, and corporations
| abuse the concept more than it benefits individuals.
| delecti wrote:
| As a simple example, why would Amazon not immediately sell
| ebook versions of every book ever if copyright ended? Ditto
| for adding every movie and show to every streaming service,
| meaning there'd be no incentive to make them.
|
| Copyright is way too long, but it's not worthless.
| malwrar wrote:
| > As a simple example, why would Amazon not immediately
| sell ebook versions of every book ever if copyright ended?
|
| Why would I even use Amazon in this scenario?
|
| > there'd be no incentive to make them.
|
| People do make stuff for reasons other than money you know.
| We might see less shows, but certainly shows of higher
| quality, originality, and passion. I've witnessed the
| opposite shift myself on several occasions, when creative
| communities I participated in suddenly found monetization
| (online videos, game mods, etc). Suddenly there's much more
| junk from people trying to cash in. There's a reason
| artists make fun of sellouts!
| dmonitor wrote:
| There's a middle ground that needs to be reached. I also
| know too many artists in creative communities that are
| forced into menial labor because they can't monetize
| their work enough to pay the bills.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Why would anyone buy an ebook from Amazon in this world
| where books are free?
|
| There are lots of things produced without a copyright-like
| legal structure that gives retained property rights.
| dmonitor wrote:
| Copyright still serves an important function (without _any_
| copyright, the companies with access to physical media
| creation would trivially steal from smaller ones) but
| 70-100yrs is an absurd amount of time that only benefits
| century old publishers.
| internet101010 wrote:
| Yeah the entire PS4 emulation effort is being driven solely by
| Sony's refusal to release Bloodborne on PC or make it playable
| at 60 fps on PS5.
|
| And they have succeeded. Just about everything is perfect now.
| So naturally when Sony does decide to do what they should have
| done years ago they will probably pull a Nintendo and sue
| ShadPS4 into the ground, followed by using an emulator in a
| museum to showcase old games.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| This is not a popular opinion: way too many games journalists
| have lost all notion of objectivity because they want to change
| copyright policy, and I am sick to death of intentionally
| misleading articles like this. Here is just one snippet:
|
| > In an odd footnote, the Register also notes that emulation of
| classic game consoles, while not infringing in its own right, has
| been "historically associated with piracy," thus "rais[ing] a
| potential concern" for any emulated remote access to library game
| catalogs. That footnote paradoxically cites Video Game History
| Foundation (VGHF) founder and director Frank Cifaldi's 2016 Game
| Developers Conference talk on the demonization of emulation and
| its importance to video game preservation.
|
| > "The moment I became the Joker is when someone in charge of
| copyright law watched my GDC talk about how it's wrong to
| associate emulation with piracy and their takeaway was 'emulation
| is associated with piracy,'" Cifaldi quipped in a social media
| post.
|
| The minor issue is that you shouldn't focus on errors in
| footnotes for 300-page documents (Orland makes no attempt at an
| honest summary of the judges' reasoning). But the critical flaw
| in this snippet that Cifaldi is himself acting in bad faith,
| because he mischaracterized his own talk:
|
| > Because [we demonized emulation] I think two things happened.
| One is that old games became the domain of the pirates, so people
| started thinking of games the same way we were thinking of MP3s
| in the Napster days, where it's just like "music's free now, who
| cares?" And we also I think by not getting ahead of it and
| getting games back in print through emulation, I think for a lot
| of games it's too late now, and the legal rights are just never
| going to get cleared up for a lot of games. [errors are mine,
| this is from YouTube]
|
| Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a powerful
| means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to the
| intellectual property rights of game developers. The reason the
| US Copyright office cited this talk was to point this out, that
| the publishers' concerns were shared by a prominent games
| preservation activist. Faced with this information, the activist
| simply lied about his own words, and the journalist did zero
| investigative work on his own, shamelessly smearing an honest
| judge who wrote an honest footnote.
|
| Good arguments don't need to be supported by easily falsifiable
| lies. Games journalists need to do their f*ckin' jobs.
| senko wrote:
| Tell me you're an IP lawyer without telling me you're an IP
| lawyer:
|
| > Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a
| powerful means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to
| the intellectual property rights of game developers.
|
| That's some serious mental gymnastics, man.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _old games became the domain of the pirates, so people
| started thinking of games the same way we were thinking of
| MP3s in the Napster days, where it's just like "music's free
| now, who cares?"_
|
| Does it really take mental gymnastics to read the above
| quotation that way?
| senko wrote:
| The part you cut from the quote actually gives it the
| opposite meaning: emulation was demonized so only the
| people who were okay with piracy considered it.
|
| Going from that to "emulation caused irreparable harm to
| developers" takes some chutzpah.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| That seems like an unfair way to characterize what he was
| saying. The point is that _of course_ emulators will be
| associated with piracy if _publishers won 't sell ROMs_, and
| use technological measures to try to prevent third-party
| implementations from being able to run legitimately purchased
| games (i.e. perform product tying, which is supposed to be
| illegal), and bankrupt commercial emulator companies through
| lawfare even when they know they have a losing case. Average
| people don't have the means or technical know-how to rip ROMs
| themselves, so piracy becomes the easier path.
|
| Like I don't own a Switch and I'm not going to buy a relatively
| expensive single-purpose piece of hardware like that to e.g.
| see what TotK is about. If I were going to buy a handheld, I'd
| probably buy something like an Asus or Valve device, which are
| higher performance and can run Linux. But in order to use an
| emulator, you necessarily have to pirate it _because they won
| 't sell it_. For older games, the rights holders don't publish
| it at all, so again naturally over time as the old copies are
| discarded or damaged, only pirated copies will remain. That has
| nothing to do with emulation, and everything to do with the
| fact that the things being pirated aren't for sale.
|
| If the music industry still refused to sell anything other than
| vinyl, portable music players would've been associated with
| piracy too, but only because most people aren't going to bother
| to rip their own music off a record player when someone else
| already went through the trouble. DRM is just doubling down on
| this thinking. If they wouldn't sell anything older than 5
| years out of their catalogue, rock music would also be
| associated with piracy.
| croes wrote:
| > Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a
| powerful means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to
| the intellectual property rights of game developers.
|
| Why didn't you say profits?
|
| The game developers didn't lose their right through emulation.
|
| And how much profit they lose is to debate because the film
| industry claimed the same with billions of damage as if every
| pirated copy would have been as sold copy without piracy. Too
| bad a study of the EU showed otherwise.
| autoexec wrote:
| That bothered me about this statement too:
|
| > "Further, while the Register appreciates that proponents
| have suggested broad safeguards that could deter recreational
| uses of video games in some cases, she believes that such
| requirements are not specific enough to conclude that they
| would prevent market harms."
|
| They're clearly only worried about profits when the purpose
| of copyright is not to enforce profits but to promote the
| creation of new works.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I don't see the "clear acknowledgement that emulation ... has
| done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of
| game developers". Cifaldi is arguing that _because_ emulation
| was not better supported, users had no choice but to pirate the
| games they wanted to play. He's asking game developers to
| provide a convenient and legal way to play the games, and
| predicting that will reduce piracy. I tend to agree with the
| argument. Between buying copies for friends and getting new
| versions, I've orchard age of empires at least 10 different
| times on steam. But before it was available on steam, I
| absolutely was pirating it (please don't hurt me FBI). Pirating
| is annoying, I don't want to deal with sketchy websites, I just
| want the game. Of course that's just one datapoint
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| I've bought games Steam that are available for free (not
| pirating, literally no charge) for the convenience of Proton
| setup. In other cases, I've bought on Steam as a way to
| support the Dev (Krita comes to mind... not a game, though).
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| Is there a cut-off to this or is it completely inclusive of stuff
| like Spacewar, Pong, Colossal Cave Adventure and pedit5?
| dmoy wrote:
| It's copyright, so... 95 years or whatever.
|
| So you could probably recreate the original monopoly in 2030?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Copyright laws really really need a reform.
|
| If a thing (game, software,...) is not "easily available" to buy
| locally, by the first party, in any usable form, companies should
| have no claims on damages, because piracy is a victimless crime.
|
| Is ExampleGame(TM) on sale anywhere, on any platform? No? How can
| (eg) nintendo lose money then if i pirate it? Where's the harm in
| piracy then?
| realusername wrote:
| I'd go further than that, there's no valid reason to monetize
| 40 year old games where most of the devs are retired or dead.
|
| The law still pretends that there's a transfer of value there
| when there's obviously not, the society has moved on.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Where's the harm in piracy then?
|
| Nintendo and other video game companies don't want to have to
| compete with their past products. They want you to pay full
| price for their new games right now because it makes their
| sales figures look impressive. Older games too often lack the
| microtransactions, paid DLC, ads, and data collection that can
| enable companies to continuously extract money from their
| customers.
|
| There are enough old games in existence today that a person
| could spend their entire life playing quality video games, be
| fully entertained, and never once touch a recently created
| title.
|
| It's harder to keep coming up with new games that people will
| feel is more worthy of their time than older games. It's easy
| to just make sure that gamers can't access those great older
| games so that they're forced to put up with whatever expensive
| consumer-hostile garbage is on offer right now.
|
| Companies currently have the freedom to keep burying their old
| games making them unavailable unless/until they choose to
| overcharge consumers and force them to pay again and again for
| ports and shitty/censored remakes of the same games they paid
| for before. They'll fight to keep that freedom.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > There are enough old games in existence today that a person
| could spend their entire life playing quality video games, be
| fully entertained, and never once touch a recently created
| title.
|
| I cynically wonder if this is part of why these copyright
| laws will never change. People would buy fewer games if it
| were easy to play the good user-respecting classics. Can't
| have money go down, must maximize profit and sales.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Has it ever been tested in court? Has anyone been sued for
| pirating a game that isn't for sale anywhere?
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