Slashdot Mirror
World of Spectrum gets a Visit from the IDSA
Dasaan writes "the
World of Spectrum
, a site that legally archives old Sinclair Spectrum games, has been accused of distributing copyrighted material by the
IDSA
.
The list of games supposedly being offered on the site include titles such as Soldier Of Fortune and Barbarian. And a quick search of the site shows that these titles are indeed being offered, however they are the original versions that were released many years ago and have now been officially made legal to supply by the current copyright owners." Their correspondence is also available.
I was wondering this...
Why are copyright owners tracking down such things which wouldn't get pennies nowadays (they were selling off the old cassettes for 10p long ago).
Only thing I can think of is that some people are realising the value of not so much the games, but the ideas. Things like Sabre Wulf is one of the old Ultimate franchises which can be updated, and its franchises which sell nowadays. A lot of licenses tied up in those games too (I think Ocean owned the franchise for Batman for a long time too), maybe thats what they are trying to protect.
Or maybe they're just going to sell them all back to us again, like nintendos been doing with the GBA.
I suspect the former... I mean, have you played some of those games recently? While they had value at the time, they are not up to par graphics wise to something like the GBA...
They might even be under the impression that the SOF download is one of the new Activision/Raven games. And then simply threw in a couple of more titles to give the letter some weight. This is typical heavy handed legal hardballing that the BSA is also famous for.
My apologies. I have removed the mirror after noticing that there was a copyright notice on the original page, prohibiting any reproduction of the emails.
I wonder if Google will cache the page?
-MFS
If you read WoS's FAQ it even pretty much admits that their archive isn't fully legal...And if you read the correspondence, it only really deals with SoF, it ignores the other infringing games such as Frogger, Donkey Kong, etc.
The IDSA wants all emulators to be banned. More on this here.
More bullying by IDSA and Cox.
I'm guessing the IDSA is a games-only version of the BSA.
Or, as is more likely, they'll be re-selling the rights to such classic games for inclusion on mobile phones...
Since most spectrum games were way better than anything seen thus far on a mobile phone...
I think this is caused by the new versions of Mobile Phones.
In days of Olde, these games were so popular because of the actual gameplay. Yes they had limiting graphics, but what they had worked so well. Now in this day of new mobile phones (Ericcsson P800 springs to mind) people are looking back at these games and thinking "that could easily be ported".
I grew up and learned to program in the Spectrum era. In fact if you hunt closely you may find one of my games. (^_^) Mobile Phones are now reaching the kind of status as a portable entertainment device. And games obviously figure quite highly on the list of money making revenue that the providers like. Forget Tetris. Multi-player Barbarian anyone?
Ever play Elite?
Right now, on alt.fan.elite, there are threads going on where one of the joint copyright holders has 'asked for' (required) all Elite-a-likes to be removed from download. The reason was that he'd just realised a commercial Elite-a-like for handhelds, and when searching for reviews of it he found only illegal ports of Elite to the handhelds.
So yes, it may well be that they're trying to preserve copyrights so that these older games can be ported to mobile phones, PDAs...whatever. They do own the copyright, and they are within their rights to do that.
Cheers,
Ian
I'm the sort of person that was pretty much raised on computer games. Although these game companies only consider games "consumer products", I consider computer games an integral part of our culture. Destroying computer games are not unlike burning books.
/Lars
There are several ways of destroying games and one of the most effective ways is to simply not preserve them while trying to stop others doing so. Spectrum games are stored on ordinary cassette tapes that unlike paper books does not stand the test time. The information deteriorates over time, and it's most unlikely that these cassettes will be usable in 10 years time and definately not in 50 years.
With the IDSA, MPAA and organizations fighting emulation with stupid laws like the DMCA and threats like this, they are making both themselves AND future generations a big disservice. How many here honestly believe that Nintendo (who owns the copyright of the Mario character) actually have a copy of Mario for the Spectrum?
I collect games. But I don't store 10000 old 8bit games so I can sit and play them all day. I also collect them to ensure that they aren't lost. Do take a look at the "Missing in Action list att WoS to see the names of games that didin't make it. I don't trust a single person or a handful of them to actually manage keeping this stuff alive for future generations. I would like as many as possible to store stacks of old games on CD:s in their homes.
Software companies could aid this preservation in mainly two ways. They can either:
1) Allow free distribution. There's no drawback in doing so for them. It's goodwill and it's allso an efficient way to keep your company name fresh in peoples mind. These games are not something they will make very much money off anyway, and granting free distribution does NOT mean that they would lose copyrights for the lucrative characters.
2) Sell their old games. And I don't mean in newly "touched up versions". Just fill a CD with the original games and sell it in bulk. Currently, no company does so, although I applaude Sega and Konami for releasing at least some of their back catalogue commercially in _almost_ original shape.
If for instance Codemasters* were to ship a CD with all of their 8/16-bit games (which would easily fit onto 1 cd), I would buy this CD. As it stands now, Codemasters probably doesn't even have all their games themselves so they can't even compile such a CD anyway.
As the situation is today, I consider sites that distribute abandonware and old games freely to be custodians of our cultural heritage. Future digital archaeologists will thank "petty criminals" like Martijn Heide for the work they put into preserving these games. They are heroes!
* I use Codemasters as an example since they have denied distribution of their old 8bit games.
It's just another way to stifle competition, in this case competition from older games/platforms.
1) File lawsuit against people making old games available.
2) Non-profit guys scared shitless, can't afford lawsuit, remove old games from site.
3) Old games no longer available, sales of new games up.
4) Profit.
They are surprisingly pro-rights-holder. Unlike most such sites, they don't simply say 'we can distribute this because we want to', but they acknowledge that a company who has spent many hours (albeit 10 or 20 years ago) and money developing a game has the right to distribute it (or not!) as they feel fit.
Reading that link you realize that essentially they are PRO-IDSA.....
They have *every* Spectrum game I hold copyright on up there. No-one has ever asked for permission to distribute and I've not given it.
Every time I've been asked I've given conditional permission, don't ask first and I call it piracy and take a hardline. Please don't assume that when pirates claim they have permission its not just a lie.
We need general copyright law reform. Copyrights should require explicit renewal once the material enters the commercial market and after a suitable initial period of protection.
Something on the order of - lifetime of the author until a copy of the copyrighted material is made available to the public. From that point, the material is protected for 20 years without renewal. At the 20 year mark, and every 20 years thereafter, the copyright must be explicitly renewed by the copyright holder to remain in force.
That'd protect authors with unpublished work. But, once the work gets published, it would make it far more likely that the work would pass into the public domain before being lost.
Too bad the Berne Convention essential makes copyright reform in this direction impossible.
I used to be a narrator for bad mimes. (wright)
They have *every* Spectrum game I hold copyright on up there. No-one has ever asked for permission to distribute and I've not given it.
Please accept the apologies of the WoS team for that; we have made good faith efforts to contact copyright holders of all Spectrum programs we know about, as can been seen from the lists available.
If you do wish your games to be removed from WoS, mail mia (at) worldofspectrum.org and they will be removed ASAP. However, I would like to take this opportunity to ask for your permission to distribute your programs from WoS. Contact me or WoS if you would like any further details.
In The Netherlands it is kind-of legal (I don't know exactly how legal, IANAL) for you to live in a house that's been abandoned by the owner. Abandoned in this case means that the owner keeps the house unused for his own reasons (e.g., waiting for a better housing market to make a profit). AFAIK, it's not actually legal but they can't deny you stuff like electricity and water and they can't kick you out unless the owner is actually going to do something with the house. A strange consequence of this is that owners now rent their houses to other people even if they don't really want to, just to prevent other people from moving in there - so, the final effect of this being legit is not that it's legal to live in other people's houses for free, but that it's become impossible to keep unused houses off the market if there's a housing shortage, which is a good thing. I think there should be something like this in the law for IP, e.g., that you can't keep intellectual property that you own off the market if you're not going to do something with it yourself, and that you might be forced to allow licensing if you don't have plans to develop a product with the knowledge. The "abandonware clause" is a solution very much like in the abandoned-houses example. This would work well to prevent the just-because-we-can type of keeping-stuff-off-the-market behavior we see from companies that are too lazy to look if they're actually doing something with things they own.
If they're not just using a robot search program that go through their database of titles.
Another site that got attacked.
mmmm. Interns....
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
the way the IDSA is going about it (trawling the web and sending off threatening letters based on filenames) is completely out of line.
/games/ directory. Then we collect the threatening letters. If this works, we'll have plenty of evidence against them in court.
Is this really how they are doing it? If so, can anyone post the list of file names that they are looking for?
If we can get the file names, we can easily set up a sting operation. We just invite all our readers with web sites to create dummy files with those names, perhaps in a
It hardly seems likely (or even vaguely reasonable) that anyone could own the rights to a file name. I typically create hundreds (sometimes thousands) of file names each day during software testing. Right now I'm working on a web site, and a test I'm running is creating roughly 100 files per second. If I have to check for possible copyright infringement of every file name, the job becomes utterly impossible, since what was a 10-second test run will take years.
If companies are really making copyright claims based merely on file names, we should stop this practice right now. Anyone want to help?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Let me get this straight: You attempted to contact copyright holders, and when you didn't receive a response from them, you assumed it was okay to continue to offer their works for download? In other words:
Dear Copyright Holder:
We are offering your works for download on the internet for free. If you would like to Opt-Out of this arrangement, please let us know by clicking the link below. Otherwise we will continue to offer this service, even though we don't actually have your permission.
Cheers,
The WoS team.
So your desire to have a "useful resource" is more important than observing copyright law?
If you couldn't contact the copyright holders, then they clearly *did not* give express permission for you to freely distribute their stuff. You can't just assume that their silence means their agreement.
Imagine the fuss if I "tried" (not very hard) to contact the author of some GPL'd stuff, and after a week with no reply decided that they had agreed to my putting it all out as public domain, sans copying.txt!
That old Donkey Kong clone from Ocean was in fact called "KONG" and was itself an illegal (not licensed) copy of the Nintendo game. Ocean did this rather often...
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)