Video game libraries lose legal appeal to emulate physical games online
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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?
The law still pretends that there's a transfer of value there when there's obviously not, the society has moved on.
Remember, capitalism is all finding the maximum amount people would pay in order to be able to do something they value doing, and then charging them that. Or to put it another way, it doesn't matter whether Nintendo thinks it has any value, just that you do. And the way Western governments are set up kind of facilitates that.
(I'm not a fan of capitalism. Can you tell?)
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.
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.
If they want people to buy old games, sell them old games. Put a gamboy emulator on the switch, put a rom-store inside it, and charge a few bucks for a game.
There are many other media where you could stay with the old... books for example, there are many more out-of-copyright books than a person could reasonably read in a lifetime, but you still want to read some newest freshest bestsellers, not just the Mysterious Island from jules verne (which is actually available to buy, even if it's out of copyright!)
So you could probably recreate the original monopoly in 2030?
Copyright needs to be drastically shortened.
Instead let's support creators directly, boycott publishers, buy and produce physical media, avoid media subscriptions, and shift gaming to open source.
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...
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.
Copyright is way too long, but it's not worthless.
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!
The point isn't "Amazon", it's "insert ebook distribution platform". If you prefer you can just as easily mentally substitute Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Apple Books, Pirate Bay, or "ebooks123 (dot) biz".
And sure, there'd be writing, but not "authors". There'd be movies, but nothing with an appreciable budget. Plenty of big budget movies suck, but that doesn't mean I'd rather they not exist as a category.
There are lots of things produced without a copyright-like legal structure that gives retained property rights.
And what do you mean by "retained property rights" over the contents of a book, such that it isn't just renaming copyright?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Does it really take mental gymnastics to read the above quotation that way?
Going from that to "emulation caused irreparable harm to developers" takes some chutzpah.
Even the people who only pirate games that are no longer for sale could end up withholding money from the industry because their gaming needs are met by the quasi-piracy.
You can disagree with him, but smugly pretending he doesn't have a point is disingenuous.
People who live can also be divided into groups who would have and who would not have paid for a game. There is damage done, despite all the people who only live ethically.
Even the people who do something else (than buying a game that can't be bought) could end up withholding money from the industry because their gaming needs are met by something else.
That's not an argument for why "something else" is bad.
It's ridiculous.
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.
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.
> "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.
Your argument is the one that is disingenuous.