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.”

  • @[email protected]English
    3•8 hours ago

    Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

    1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
    2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
    3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
    4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

    The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

    I’m no lawyer, but I can’t really find a way that fair use is applicable in this case. Also point 4 is taken into consideration here. And no I obviously don’t agree that games shouldn’t be allowed in libraries. The law should be changed. I just don’t see how fair use is relevant.

    • @reddig33English
      3•6 hours ago

      See also first sale doctrine:

      “Lending of physical books held by the library is permitted under the first sale doctrine. In other instances, such as making copies of articles and checking them out to students, libraries may rely on fair use to justify course reserves. A recent landmark case related to electronic reserves is Cambridge v. Patton, in which a group of publishers sued Georgia State University for their liberal e-reserves policy. The courts held GSU to be the prevailing party, finding fair use in the majority of alleged infringements”

      https://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/copyright/libraries#:~:text=to course reserves%3F-,A.,use to justify course reserves.

      See also Ben Franklin:

      https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-ben-franklin-invented-library-as-we-know-it-180983983/

      • @[email protected]English
        3•4 hours ago

        Interesting.

        If you click the first link under :

        Q. How does copyright apply to library lending? What is the “first sale doctrine” and how does it apply to libraries? Why are the rules for lending e-books different than print books? How does copyright relate to used book sales?

        http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#109

        You get a legal text which is almost completely unreadable to me.

        But the law explicitly mentions video games:

        (B) This subsection does not apply to—

        (i) a computer program which is embodied in a machine or product and which cannot be copied during the ordinary operation or use of the machine or product; or

        (ii) a computer program embodied in or used in conjunction with a limited purpose computer that is designed for playing video games and may be designed for other purposes.

        © Nothing in this subsection affects any provision of chapter 9 of this title.

        Do I understand the section above that? Hell no. It’s in a foreign language to me (literally and figuratively).

        I feed the entire section to chatGPT and asked it about libraries and video games. It says that video games generally aren’t allowed to be lend at libraries. It’s AI so take it with a grain of salt but to be fair LLMs are pretty good at analysing large amounts of text like this. But if you can read it, I encourage you to do that instead.