Hacker News Reader

Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

Sadly the ruling directly forbids reverse-engineered protocols and custom made servers that emulate the original server. The ruling also states that these abandoned online games could only legally run at a museum/library and that it's against the law to distribute them to the internet or host them publicly.

> and the video game is not distributed or made available outside of the physical premises of the eligible library, archives, or museum.

View on HN

What does it take to get your basement classified as a "private museum"? A sign?

Probably not bothering a large enterprise who thinks you are cutting into their IP’s profits.

“Profits” from a game they abandoned and aren’t marketing the IP? Would be a pretty weak argument in court.

IANAL, but it’s not just that particular game, but sequels, alternatives, or the right to release a remastered version that they could claim damages on. And really they just need standing to sue to make it not worth a hobbyists time, I can’t see most of these things making it to court.

You have to convince a human that your basement is a museum in order to make this work rather than a simple robot. A sign won't be nearly enough.

Obviously. But that doesn't help figure out where the boundary is between "collection" and "museum".

Ah, so that's what .museum domains are for.

Presumably having hours when it's open to the public... but I imagine you'd need to set up a non-profit as well, in this case.

You can post "by appointment only". Hell, there are government offices that play that card.

So what does this even cover then? If you can't reverse engineer the server, it would have to be provided by the copy-write holder, no? And if the holder has given the code willingly to someone, then you don't need the exemption in the first place, right?

What am I missing here?

So I guess this rules out archive.org taking up the mantle?

Perhaps they could become a "museum" and change a dollar for "membership"? (Kinda like the bars in Utah.)

I like the analogy; it's an apt workaround for this sort of problem.

Just FYI, Utah is slowly modernizing its alcohol laws and as of 2009 no longer requires 'club membership' to enter a bar. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_laws_of_Utah#2009_effo...

A closer comparison is the Vancouver International Film Festival. From their website:

> Under the laws of our province, only registered non-profit film societies such as VIFF are allowed to screen films that have not been classified by Consumer Protection BC. Only members are permitted to be present at the place where a non-classified film is being exhibited.

...so they charge $2 annually for membership, where you can pay that fee along with your ticket (and then keep the membership for any other shows you're going to see that year.)

Aren't they a library?

Such BS really, with so many games going online MP-only the moment the servers close you're left with nothing.

> host them publicly.

What about HTML5 / JavaScript games where you have to upload publicly?

Further, how are they defining "abandoned"?

[0] the ruling, page 60 outlines the terms

> [copyright owner] has issued an affirmative statement indicating that external server support for the video game has ended and such support is in fact no longer available or, alternatively, server support has been discontinued for a period of at least six months

[0] https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g...

Does the "or" belong to the affirmative statement or the support not being available no longer?

I am not a lawyer, but the awkward phrasing `or, alternatively,` seems to be the complex legalese separator clause here, which would seem to indicate to me it is not a part of the affirmative statement requirement, but an alternative to it.

(It is somewhat fascinating that lawyers use written languages like programming languages in trying to avoid logical ambiguity, but of course the legal approaches to such questions evolved so entirely different including very different environment pressures.)

It would be really neat if we could start using a progrmming language-like syntax for logical expressions instead of English.

Sure there would be learning involved, but not nearly as much memorization.

The Obama Administration's "CTO" office pushed for more laws to include working/testable Python code as artifacts to work through conditional logic in the law. A very small selection of Federal laws did get that added, I don't recall which ones.

Exploring the boundaries between legal code and programming code is a fascinating subject, and one of these decades maybe there will be the right combination of nerds in government to see something systematic attempted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com