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How does a 1998 law have retroactive rights over previously published works?
I could lend out my old computer with old games installed to somebody else to use, right?
What if instead i lend my hard drive, is it still the same thing? Or what if I lend out my remote access screen sharing password to my old PC. Still the same?
Maybe the legal workaround is to game the system here a bit - forget downloading executables which feels a lot like pirating and just lend access to a system that is legally running the original license.
Not a lawyer but I believe in the US this would be legal as you are granting the use of the original license and not duplicating any content for simultaneous use by others.
What I would like to see is a gentlemans agreement of sorts where companies agree not to come after people for playing pirate, emulated or archival copies of games that are decades old and not for sale in any format anymore. I guess this is somewhat encompassed in the framework of "Abandonware".
Well, maybe we need a movement to make physical copies of these games and the consoles needed to play them available in actual public libraries, then? That doesn't seem to be affected by this ruling and there's lots of precedent for it in current practice, which includes lending of things like musical instruments and DVD players. There's a business near me that does something similar, but they restrict access by age to high schoolers and older, and you have to play the games there; you can't rent them out.
good emulators out there. haven't tried any lately
Hell yeah. Everything “retro” is easily emulated. And anything easily emulated has a ROMpack of all of the games that exist for it, you can download if you have a HDD that costs less than the cost of the original console alone.
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Alright. Now enforce it. Good luck with that.
Libraries are physical locations staffed by arrestable people, they can enforce it.
Torrents OTOH...
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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