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Archive.org Hosts Massive Collection of MAME ROMs
An anonymous reader writes to point out a giant gift to the world
from the Internet Archive: a massive collection of MAME ROMs, playable in your browser using Javascript Mess. From the blog post announcing this extension of the already mind-blowing Internet Archive: "Like the Historical Software collection, the Console Living Room is in beta – the ability to interact with software in near-instantaneous real-time comes with the occasional bumps and bruises. An army of volunteer elves are updating information about each of the hundreds of game cartridges now available, and will be improving them across the next few days. Sound is still not enabled, but is coming soon. Faster, more modern machines and up-to-date browsers work best with the JSMESS emulator."
Excuse me if I'm just not getting it but isn't this copyright infirngement?
Unfortunately, the only format they released the ROMs in is one huge ZIP file. Even the torrent, where torrent software might have allowed picking-and-choosing individual ROM files, is only the ridiculous 42.8GB ZIP.
I'm still looking for a list of files, but for that size, it might be EVERY MAME ROM in the MAME database of over 7000 ROMS.
Legally, it isn't a grey area: It's civil infringement at the very least. The only area in which the 'not freely available' may come into play would be deciding upon the damages. If there is any copy-prevention technology involved or if you accept payment in any manner for distributing the roms, including accepting other infringing data in return (ie, using a torrent client) then it's also a criminal offense in the US under the DMCA and NET Act respectively.
On the other hand, screw the law. It's an unfair, counterproductive, rampantly abused law resulting only from a century of corporate lobbying and I have no respect for it whatsoever.
Look at the stuff in the "MESS and MAME" collection. There's PSX dumps, there's Saturn dumps, and there's a whole bunch of arcade games that I know for a fact cannot be legally distributed (Raiden, Raiden Fighters, a couple of CAVE games, etc). I'm not even sure how legal those ROM dumps are even if you own the original arcade boards- almost all arcade PCBs have hardware protection on them (think of DRM, but a billion times worse), and in order to dump the ROM contents properly and/or run them you'd have to crack that protection first.
I mean, shit, this is basically a ROM hoarders wet dream. I have never ever seen that stuff hosted anywhere other then torrent websites. I'm honestly surprised that archive.org allowed this to be posted and I'm surprised the mamedev guys haven't freaked out over it, because this could potentially attract a lot of negative attention (and mamedev is very, very prone to sudden outbursts of illogical drama).
http://archive.org/about/dmca.php
They seem to have an exemption.
WTF? Baseline MAME will compile on Linux or OSX now, using SDL bindings and a Qt or Cocoa debugger UI. It's even in the repos for some popular Linux distros.
That only exempts them from the anti-circumvention provisions. Plain old copyright law still applies.
A lot of the old games will have effectively lapsed now simply because their owning legal entities ceased to exist, but confirming that poses quite a challenge itsself. Just because the publisher is out of business doesn't mean the game is in the public domain - there may well have been a selling-off of rights during bankruptcy, or another company may have aquired the defunct publisher.
How hard? Well, let us say you have a game called The Lords of Midnight, published by Beyond Software. You look it up, and Beyond Software is long defunct. Game good for the taking, right? Well, no: Beyond Software was aquired by Telecomsoft, so you need to look them up too. Also defunct. Good? No, because Telecomsoft (Better known as 'Firebird') was actually owned by BT, the British telephone company, who (AFAIK) still retain the copyright. That was an easy case, it was all documented on wikipedia and the companies involved are very well-known. Identifying the true owner of something more obscure is a much more difficult prospect.
I can vouch for this as me and a programmer friend looked into recreating the days of shareware for the current gen. What we found was a minefield where even if the company closed its doors you had pieces of the company going here and there and nobody knew who the fuck, what the fuck, or where the fuck some 20+ year old game went. The few we did find wanted more money for the rights to distribute the SHAREWARE version of their game than a triple A title from the period could ever hope to make, we are talking about $100K+ for just the limited locked shareware even though we were doing it non profit. That is of course if they would even speak to you, we got many that were like "Oh we have zero plans for it but we might do something someday" so they refused to allow anybody to sell or distribute the shareware version.
The saddest part? We were told flat footed if we would just make it in China all our problems would go away. this is why i think China will be the next hotbed of innovation, as unlike the USA you can actually make things without having to spend the majority of your capital on lawyers.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I think you have to put this in context. Were you expecting to get any more money from the work you put into that product? I don't think it would be reasonable to expect that these games (or at least the vast majority of them) would ever make money again. (If you think otherwise, it sounds like you *have* legal recourse here because the games are not out of copyright.) If I were in your position, though (which I kind of have been a number of times now, except most of my games were non-commercial) I would just be glad that someone gave them new life for another generation. Otherwise it would have faded into obscurity, giving you even less than you have now.
Take a step back and see that they are not trying to insult the authors as you suggest, but benefit everyone and honor the authors by propagating the work that would otherwise have faded away. I suspect (just a guess) you might be surprised at how accommodating and respectful these folks would be toward original authors if you approach them as a friend. You see them as an enemy, but really I think they are just trying to save and re-popularize something worth saving and appreciating for a bit longer, and couldn't find a practical way to contact a zillion non-existent authors in the process.
I'm also an author of one of these games. No one asked me my permission either. Of course they didn't have to, I'm not the copyright holder. The company I worked for at the time is. I doubt they asked them either, though.
But good for Archive.org! I'm glad to see an easy way to get this collection. I'm downloading it and will be seeding it. And when I get around to overhauling my MAME cabinet I'll be using it as my source of ROMs.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.