this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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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] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

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".