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

submitted 4 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] 3 points 3 weeks 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.

(C) 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.