The U.S. Copyright Office denied an exemption from the DMCA to allow gaming historians to access out-of-print games they can’t legally get.

“Most of the world’s video games from close to 50 years of history are effectively, legally dead. A Video Games History Foundation study found you can’t buy nearly 90% of games from before 2010. Preservationists have been looking for ways to allow people to legally access gaming history, but the U.S. Copyright Office dealt them a heavy blow Friday. Feds declared that you or any researcher has no right to access old games under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.”

  • mPony@lemmy.worldEnglish
    591·
    9 hours ago

    FTA

    Industry groups argued that those museums didn’t have “appropriate safeguards” to prevent users from distributing the games once they had them in hand. 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 agreed with the industry groups.

    So as long as someone, somewhere, might make a penny off of them, they can’t be free. Insert your own metaphor here.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
      5·
      3 hours ago

      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.

      • Dark ArcAEnglish
        62·
        7 hours ago

        There is a difference there in that these are digital copies (easy to make more copies) vs physical books (hard to make more copies).

        That said, the only reason this is an issue is copyright lasts too long on relatively short lived games. If copyright on games was a more reasonable “15 years since their last major revision”, this wouldn’t be a problem.