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.”

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
    53•11 hours ago

    Feds are wrong, or would be if copyright continued to serve its original purpose (according to the Constitution of the United States) to create a robust public domain.

    All media should be accessible through public libraries, and arguments by federal courts presumes that the public does not have vested interest in content. It presumes the government isn’t there to serve the public, which raises questions as to why we have government in the first place.

    • @FreakinSteveEnglish
      1•18 minutes ago

      This is the kind of fucking bullshit that creates assholes like trump and rfk jr.

    • @timetravellerEnglish
      3•1 hour ago

      So weird because as a kid, I would rent these video games day 1 from the local library… free of charge.

      What is the issue now that they are retro. Shame.

      Thankful to have all mine… back… up… and running.

    • @LovableSidekickEnglish
      3•4 hours ago

      Correctamundo! Intellectual property law is yet another thing that needs reform. I don’t even like the term “intellectual property”. It’s a modern invention. For thousands of years everybody just repeated what they saw other people do, in a process called “the spread of civilization.” It worked great until inventions like the printing press created opportunities for business people who didn’t create anything to get rich by getting exclusive rights to other people’s ideas. But even then, copyright was always something you held not something you “owned”. The modern IP industry has done a very effective job at converting everybody to think of rights as property and infringement as theft. We need to return to the original concept that creators, who used to be freely imitated, can temporarily have exclusive rights to what they create because the public lets them. There’s nothing evil about this, it’s just a return to sanity.