Huge Ruling concerning retrogaming

[Punisher5555]

I do not know if anyone has seen this.

In the December 2003 issue of Game Devoper (industry magazine for video game programmers) on page 8 in the Industry Watch section:

Preserving the real Atari.

In response to a filing by Brewster Kahle of The Internet Archive, Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons, and others, the Librarian of Congress granted access exemptions from the copyright protection measures in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to obsolete videogames. The exemption applies to games that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, and it determines a format obsolete "if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace." According to the original filing, the exemption was proposed in order to migrate degraded and obsolete works to modern storage systems and enable "archiving, future scholarship, and commentary."


So this means ROMS of old games on the internet are legal. As long as you are archiving, studying, and commenting on them.

[Sniderman]

Wow. That's VERY interestng. Post a link please. Thanks.

[ghsqb]

That is HUGE!

I can already see many complications with type of ruling.

The two main ones are:
"The exemption applies to games that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access"
Couldn't a company like Activision contest this by saying that through the releasing of new compliation discs for current gen systems, that the original hardware is in fact NOT required?

and secondly:
""if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace."

What would you define as reasonably available, and a commercial marketplace?
For example, you can find most any console on ebay at any given time...

This is a very big ruling, and a step in the right direction, but I feel that the lawyers will have an easy time picking this apart until the terms are more narrowly defined.

Thanks for posting it though.

[FABombjoy]

This applies only to the circumvention of copyright protection schemes, not the data itself.

Example:

The suicide battery runs out on your CPS-1 arcade board & the graphics become corrupted. Under the DMCA, decrypting & reinstalling the affected ROMS was illegal. Now it is no longer illegal.

Trading or disseminating said ROMs is still illegal.

[badinsults]

This is old.

Bottom line, roms are still not legal, unless you own the original cart, and you dump the rom yourself.

[Ze_ro]

As far as I can tell, the only thing this law now grants to the emulation community is the ability to break old encryptions without breaking the law (Of course, emulation people have been breaking the encryptions anyways, so it's not like this is going to be some big revolution or anything).

They left it somewhat vague about what's covered by this though (although this is likely intentional, since they're largely ignorant of what should be covered). Breaking CSS encryption on DVD's is certainly still illegal, but breaking CPS-2 encryption is probably allowed now. CPS-3 might be a bit of a grey area...

Of course, just because a system is obsolete doesn't mean you can legally pirate the roms for it. I've seen tons of people try to twist this ruling to support that, but it's simply not the case. The DMCA never covered that kind of stuff in the first place.

--Zero

[Ed Oscuro]

Punisher5555.

I can't say that I wasn't swept away (if only for a few hours) by this news as well, but it's a load of crap. Just like the "24 hour rule."

The ruling means that you can legally break anti-copying schemes on older software. That doesn't mean that you can legally own old ROMs -- on the contrary, almost all computer software (more than 99%, easily) was developed after revisions were made to the copyright laws allowing copyright to be claimed on works that don't even have a copyright notice on them.

Sorry, ROMs are still illegal.