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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.
The ultimate geek builds his own, see CmdrTaco's for an example, but in the future, there might be a market for people who want mame cabinets for sheer nostalgia reasons, as more and more, the computer seems to be in the right position to trump the arcade soon.
And of course, you're not going to put illegal roms on a commercial product. Enter StarROMs...
"How can they possibly expect to compete with free downloads?"
There's a couple of ways:
1.) If they advertise, then people who haven't heard of ROMs before know where to go.
2.) Service. I mucked around with ROMs a while back. It was a pain in the ass finding them. Even bigger pain in the ass downloading them. If I wasn't entering pop-up hell (not so rough these days given modern browsers, etc...), I was being asked to vote for places in order to proceed.
If I ever get the itch to play with ROMs again, they'll be the first place I try. Why would I do that instead of trying to find free downloads? Because free isn't so free when you're hugely inconvenienced along the way.
"Derp de derp."
I think this could do well to somewhat brush up the image of emulation as a whole that Nintendo have done their best to smear (ultrahle, that handheld emulator) be it commercial or purely as a technical proof (what ultrahle was). Hell, i could even think of a somewhat commercial version of mame that has an itunes music store type thing in which you can buy the roms directly (call it Mame$ or something).
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
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.
ROMs are a great reason to support HR2601 -- the Public Domain Enhancement Act. Copyrighted works that aren't commercially viable stand a chance to enter the public domain after 50 years. If you live in the US, I think you should write you Congressional representatives to co-sponsor this bill.
Digital Citizen
Since when has making a product unavailable for purchase meant you can steal er violate copyright?
From City University of New York's discussion on fair use:
"The fact that a work is out of print or unavailable, or that there is no ready market for permissions weighs toward favorable to fair use."
Not exactly a guarantee, but the fact that, for most abandonware, no legit source exists weighs positively in favor of otherwise-illegally obtaining it falling under fair use.
Of course, considering the four points that determine whether or not a given activity falls under fair use, I'd say the idea of abandonware scores at best a 50:50 shot. For the "purpose and character", noncommercial preservation of culturally relevant materials weighs as a positive. For "nature of the copyrighted word", a game purely for entertainment scores a negative. For the "substantiality of the portion used", I'd call 100% a definite strike against abandonware. And for the "potential market", that could go either way... Currently unavailable would count as a positive, but by infringing copyrights to get the ROMs, one could argue that downloading them would tend to reduce the potential market (though, I would personally say it increases the market, when a friend comes over and plays Pac-Man via MAME and then goes out and blows $1500 on a vintage machine...).
PS - IANAL, as if it needs saying.
A LOT of these games are 20-25 years old. In the intervening years the original licensor may have gone out of business and determining who has the licensing rights after the business was dissolved requires a lot of legwork... or there may still be pending disputes between former owners of the businesses that tie up doing anything with the game until the dispute is resolved.
Tracking down the person with rights or waiting for a rights dispute to be settled are both reasons I've heard for some classic films languishing in the vault without seeing the light of DVD.
Games disappearing from StaROMs may be ones that were licensed to them in good faith, but were later found out to have a murky provenance where determining, finding contact information for, and coming to an agreement with the party that has licensing rights became difficult.
I'm not going to comment on other aspects, but I wouldn't use the drop from 60 to 51 games as an indicator of imminent failure of the site.
Start a happiness pandemic
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
Interview: Frank Leibly of StarROMs
Wednesday, March 31 2004 @ 08:01 AM CST
Contributed by: jvm
Last Fall I interviewed Jeff Vavasour (parts one, two, three) and asked whether we'd ever see any game companies offering game ROMs in a pay-per-download service. Within a matter of days, StarROMs appeared in the public eye and caused a stir by offering several dozen classic Atari arcade ROMs for download, apparently legally, for a couple of dollars each. Shortly thereafter, I purchased several ROMs and enjoyed playing them in MAME, leading to one of the more curmudgeonly, controversial posts to ever grace this site.
Having already poked the ROM pirates with my sawed-off pointy stick, it seemed appropriate to needle the StarROMs people themselves. In the period shortly after their launch, however, StarROMs disappointingly declined my request for an interview. Being the patient type, I asked again recently and this time StarROMs co-founder Frank Leibly agreed to answer my questions.
Here, at last are answers to the big questions: How can StarROMs, a pay-to-download business, really expect to compete with the free, pirated ROMs people are already downloading? Have they been successful? And, are they really going to donate some of their earnings back to emulation projects like MAME?
jvm: Let's get right to the big questions. You've had your business open for nearly five months. Is StarROMs successful so far?
Frank Leibly: I think we're doing pretty good so far. Longer term, we aren't going to be happy until we get every copyright owner on board. And that's going to take some time. But I think we've made a lot of people very happy with what we have to offer now.
jvm: You're charging a couple dollars per game. How can you possibly compete with the "free" downloads of ROMs that any modestly skilled net surfer can track down?
FL: This is really the same issue every copyright owner and media company has been dealing with for years. As a kid I bought blank tapes and copied records and tapes from my friends but when I got to the point when I could afford it I bought the CD's. And I still do. If you look at the demographic of who we're selling to, it's people in their 20's, 30's and 40's for the most part. Spending a few bucks is pocket change and it's worth it to know you're dealing with someone legitimate. I like to think the service we provide is worth something too.
I also think the illegal sites are going to continue to experience pressure and when you get right down to it I'm not sure I see the point of putting up illegal roms if there is a legal source available.
We're also starting to work with some folks who are selling MAME cabinets who want to provide their customers roms legally. These customers are spending big money and they deserve to get something that's fully legitimate rather than pirated.
jvm: There has been some contraction in the catalog of games at StarROMs. I purchased Gauntlet II from you, and it's not listed any more. Could you explain this?
FL: We had a rights issue emerge with respect to ten of the titles we were initially offering, where a third party came along and said that they had rights to these games and that we couldn't sell them without their approval. We hope to offer these games again in the future, but for the time being we agreed to settle this issue amicably by pulling the titles from our offering.
jvm: So, is my license to use Gauntlet II a valid license, even though the game has been removed from your catalog?
FL: Yes, the license is still valid. Likewise, we will continue to provide support for customers who have purchased these games through us, including providing update ROM versions if necessary.
jvm: StarROMs says they'll give a portion of the annual profits to projects that support the emulation of classic games. Some are skeptical about how, or perhaps even whether, this will be done. What does StarROMS have in mind, specifically and when can
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.
Seems perfectly reasonable usage. Most of these files are copies (or derived from) the code that was in a physical ROM. Do you also get annoyed if someone refers to a CD "ISO"? That is somewhat sillier if you recall what the letters mean. Extending usage of a term is fine as long as there is no confusion created.
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.
The hard work is arranging the licensing. You know - negotiation, people skills, all that? sheesh -- yep got karma to burn
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.
If you could copy a Ferrari without taking it away from the original owner, you should go right ahead.
Your analogy is flawed.
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.