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IDSA Forces Arcade Game Manual Archive Offline
AtariKee writes "The IDSA and the DMCA has struck again, this time forcing the maintainer of Stormaster.com, a coin-operated video game manual and tech information archive, to shut down. Stormaster has been an invaluable resource for collectors of classic coin-operated video games for years, and this loss further demonstrates the idiocy that is the DMCA. I can understand ROM images to some extent, but 25 year old coin-op operator/tech manuals? The full text of the IDSA's letter can be read on Stormaster's site." Previous Slashdot posts about IDSA (Interactive Digital Software Association) show that this is typical of the organization.
No. The bit at the bottom applies to anyone who is NOT the intended recipient who might get the letter. If you drop some of the excess verbiage, it reads:
"Any dissemination by persons other than the intended recipient is prohibited."
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The Underdogs has manuals of many old (but better than most of the newer ones) PC games available for downloading. You can also have the games for some of the manuals, but don't tell anyone.
If you read closely the prohibitions apply to persons or entities other than the intended recipient. I believe the idea here is that the intended recipient is obligated to be truthful (at lawyer-point), but if his ISP sees the letter going by in the "suspicious mail" folder and does a routine SPAM reveiw on it, the ISP cannot then publish what he found.
In fact to state that the intended recipient is not allowed to have the letter "reviewed" by a lawyer would be contrary to their purpose of using expensive lawyers to handle what should be done by decent thinking people.
As a previous poster noted though, the letter does not include specific references to the manuals for those games, and it wasn't and endless list of games.
If I had to take a wild stab at it I'd wager the site-owner is just frustrated by running a non-profit site that isn't doing any actual damage to anyones business and getting kicked in the teeth for it by lawyers anxious to justify their billable hours.
"Look! We stopped another person from freely sharing information that will never be of use to anyone! That'll be $1200 dollars please."
Looking at the Wayback Machine archive for the stormaster.com site, it looks like it included ROM images. That'd probably be why the DMCA was invoked.
I can understand why the game makers would want those ROMs taken down. People are still willing to pay for versions of the classic games -- look at the various "oldies" cartridges for modern game systems. Two of the games on the list I know to be available in stores: Frogger was recently remade as a 3D game, as was Dig Dug. Both include the "classic" game. (I saw Dig Dug at my local job-lot clearance store just the other day.)
It's not a case of the code having no value. Clearly, you can still sell that code. So, having it available for anyone with MAME to use is stealing from the pockets of the current rights-holders.
As much as I think DMCA is bad law and is abused, this is one case where it seems to be used as intended.
Or, maybe it *was* copyright infringement.
*Gasp* Unpopular observation I just made on Slashdot, but let's remember something.
This site was (AFAICT) distributing copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright owner.
And that, BTW, is illegal.
The DMCA doesn't apply here (unless I'm a loser who doesn't know what he's talking about). Unless IDSA wants to argue that opening the cover of a manual is circumvention of a copy-control device.