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Legal Arcade ROM Vendor Talks Business
jvm writes "Remember StarROMs, the company selling legal Atari ROM downloads for a few bucks a piece? They're still around and Curmudgeon Gamer posted an interview with StarROMs co-founder Frank Leibly. Have they been successful so far? How can they possibly expect to compete with free downloads? Are they giving money to MAME as promised? And why has their listing of games dropped from about 60 games to just over 50? It's all here. (Slashdot covered their initial launch late last year, and Slashdot Games recently also recounted a different discussion with Leibly.)"
By implication, are folks who violate copyright by downloading various roms more legally liable if StarROMs' business model succeeds?
I'd imagine so, and I don't like it.
p.s. all STFU Pirate!!!!! replies will be ignored as missing the point.
I thought this was cool, you can pick up a Joystick with a built in Atari and 10 games for 20 bucks at walmart. Larger picture here
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
There used to be some great abandonware sites where you could download and upload stuff for free (aw.localhost.ee). Eventually they required log ins to download and upload and then they were eventually shut down. The problem was some people had uploaded stuff that though was no longer for sale, it was also not for free public consumption. Telengard, The Leisure Suit Larry series, Stronghold and others can only be found for sale on E-bay. The companies that sold the games no longer exist but the makers of the games and their rights over them do. The can't get a publisher to spend the money to market the games again because of their limited and dated appeal among nostalgic gamers so they just fall into limbo. This sucks for me and other gamers who fondly remember these old relics whose gameplay (though not graphics) surpasses many of todays new games. There has to be some solution besides just denying a viable market of what they want.
I'm trying to find on the StarROMs site... is it legal to use game ROMs obtained through them in a commercial arcade setting where a customer actually puts a quarter through to get past the "insert coin" prompt? The license terms seem to say nothing about that one way or the other...
There are a couple of machines manufactured that play classic games via emulation, and I believe that the games themselves are either licensed or no suitable copyright owner could be found. Ultracade is one of them (site requires Flash and is annoying as hell; visit this site for a picture of the cabinet and description). I *believe* that there is another, but I cannot remember the name of it now.
And then there is the venreable ArcadeControls.Com with a hundred or so examples of home-built MAME machines.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
A copy of the entire work is hard to justify as "fair use" in any situation. For written work, the general rule is no more than 50% of an article, or a chapter or two of a book, may be quoted as "fair use" without requiring permission. These limits are rubbery, and are rarely tested in court. If you can show you made some attempt to find the owner, and have an open offer to make an arrangement with them should they contact you, you would probably be reasonably safe. But if it's a company in the phone book (not some bankrupt and long-gone publisher) that just refuses to licence their work, you would be in trouble.
Or just get them from SuprNova. Almost zero hassle.
Close. It was 14 years plus a 14 year extension possible. I think your talk about the "artists tend to be poorer" is a rather large misconception. For the most part, only people with any significant level of learning could write proficiently enough to author a book. It wasn't until the 19th/20th century that there were folklorists and general widespread literacy improvements that allowed for the poor to write books, so most stories were still told orally for the poor.
During the time between a book starting to be written to the point where sales are enough to live off of, an author needs somewhere to live and eat. There wasn't much of a middle class at the start of the US, so generally that shifts virtually all writers into the comfortably rich. I think all this amounts to most authors of the time having a natural life span around 60 years (ignoring the revolutionary war that shrank writers lives).
However, I don't think that copyright as it was was 14 (+14) years because of the average lifespan of the author. US doctrine doesn't believe the author has any innate right to copyrighted works. In reality, the likelyhood is the 14 (up to 28) year span was more a result of communication lag which could mean it'd take several years before even a popular book to go from one major city to every rich person in even the more rural settings.
Today, it takes literally seconds for most works to go from a major city to a rural setting. While I don't believe a copyright the length of a few days would be sufficient incentive for an author (though it covers news stories well enough), if anything the increase in rate of information transfer should be *decreasing* the length of copyright, not increasing it. The US's adoption of the Berne Convention is to me, an ignorant surrender of a basic ideological difference between given and natural born rights. I truly wish that at some point the US takes measures to reaffirm the basics of what copyright is.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
A copy of the entire work is hard to justify as "fair use" in any situation.
I tend to agree, though as someone who understands why software differs from something like a book or a movie, I could also argue the opposite point...
With a book, a one-chapter excerpt can make quite a lot of sense, and give an idea of the feel of the work as a whole. With movies, the actual advertisements just take a set of very short clips and string them together. But with a program? How do you meaningfully use only part of a program? Sure, if you have the source code, you can chop out, say, eight of ten levels in a game. But from just a binary? You just can't do it.
So, although the entire work wouldn't normally count as fair use, with a ROM, you have no choice but to use 100% of it.
If you can show you made some attempt to find the owner, and have an open offer to make an arrangement with them should they contact you, you would probably be reasonably safe.
The very idea of abandonware (at least as defined by the more reputable sites) makes that rather easy - 99% of the games publishers from before the mid 1990's simply don't exist anymore. Tracking down who currently owns the "rights" to the games produced by such companies amounts to a snark hunt, as even if a legal chain of ownership does exist, in many cases, the current owner doesn't even realize it... "Yeah, I worked at Spiffware in 1987 - I designed 8x12 animated blobs that supposedly looked like aliens. What??? As the last surviving programmer who, under a bizarre contract clause, didn't go work for Nintendo, I own their entire catalog, including ZappoBlast 9000? Cool! Uhh... So what do I do with it? I don't even have a single copy of any of those games, though I do have a moldy ZB9k promo poster..."
Now, does that excuse blatant copyright infringement? IMO, as long as the original author/publisher no longer exists, I'd say yes - With the condition, though (as you suggest) that such use include an open offer to the current owner to either stop using it, or to make an arrangement to use it legally. Though, of course, my personal opinion does not carry the weight of law, and various anti-piracy groups regularly crack down on abandonware, despite having no idea themselves as to who can currently claim ownership of such material.
I was wondering about the current state of emulation the other day, as I too used to download/play a lot of ROMs. I can recall using some really good emulators - Genecyst and NeoRageX spring to mind - but that was back in the days of Windows 98/ME and increased DOS compatibility.
What is the go these days? Can anyone suggest what emulators are good, stable and above all have correct timing for modern processors running under Windows XP? I tried a DOS version of MAME the other day and it seemed to be waaay to fast on an Athlon 1800+.
I must play Puyo Puyo...
Read Pynchon.
I hate it when people call C64 or Amiga games ROMS. Those are not from a cartridge (except for a couple here and there), but are disk images or tape files etc.
I do think it is right to call arcade machine ROM dumps as ROM's though.
Slightly off-topic, but maybe interesting nevertheless: if you're into old-school games then check out ScummVM and play Beneath A Steel Sky and LOTS of otherse.
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I found this interesting:
When I first heard about StarRoms I naturally assumed that the rom images they provide would be obtained directly from Atari. After an email exchange with StarRoms, I was very dissapointed to find out that the roms they are selling were originally downloaded from the internet (i.e. the same images from the same illegal dumping activity that most of us have already). It seems StarRoms are missing the most important point to emulation fans and missing a real benefit that only a legitimate source can provide: we'd like to be sure that the rom images are 100% accurate by having them provided by, or at least authenticated by the manufacturer. Atari should naturally be required to provide them if they are also making money by selling/licencing them.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.