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Feds Say You Don’t Have a Right to Check Out Retro Video Games Like Library Books (gizmodo.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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"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."

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

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

Libraries rent out ebooks too, also easily stripped of DRM and copied if someone wants to so that. But that is seemingly not an issue.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

As someone who may or may not have stripped DRM from library books, they certainly never seemed to care about that. And it was never even to share, but rather to store for myself so I could read it at my own pace. And the worst part... I read it for RECREATIONAL USE