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DMCA Exemption Campaign Would Let Fans Run Abandoned Games
An anonymous reader writes: Games that rely on remote servers became the norm many years ago, and as those games age, it's becoming more and more common for the publisher to shut them down when they're no longer popular. This is a huge problem for the remaining fans of the games, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forbids the kind of hacks and DRM circumvention required for the players to host their own servers. Fortunately, the EFF and law student Kendra Albert are on the case. They've asked the Copyright Office for an exemption in the case of players who want to keep abandoned games alive. It's another important step in efforts to whittle away at overreaching copyright laws.
Better idea: let people get really pissed at our current state of intellectual property laws. Preferably before the next Micky Mouse Shall Never Enter the Public Domain Copyright Extension Act.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
How about an exemption on ALL software? kthxbai
This type of exemption is just a crutch that can be rescinded any time it comes up for review. We need congress to codify it into law to be permenant.
Don't legitimize the DMCA further by asking for "exceptions", the argument should be that things like remote servers and always-connected DRM are illegal violations of a consumer's property rights.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
If the alternative is said abandoned house is left to become a massive health/fire hazard because no one is legally allowed to touch it and the rightful owners refuse either maintain it, tear it down or sell it, sure. Go ahead and live in that abandoned house.
All this will do is at best stop the companies from filing DMCA take downs on the fans; it will in no way obligate the company to release their internal software for the servers which ran the game.
Some countries do have what amounts to squatter's rights in that if you occupy and otherwise unoccupied dwelling for a long enough duration you can claim it as a residency and the actual owner will not be able to evict you.
The reason you can't live in an abandoned house is that it deprives the current owners the right to use the land that it is placed on, which in the example would be the servers the game was hosted on. No one is asking that the servers be handed over. If you could copy the house onto a different plot of land, and live in it while depriving the owner of nothing, then you certainly would be allowed to.
Does this mean I'll be able to play City of Heroes again?
If they simply refuse to purchase a game that requires this sort of remote server authentication, then the industry will cease this sort of behavior. "Caveat emptor", let the buyer beware. Cheers, -AB
Now only if they'd let me live in this here abandoned house. Perrect!
That's a poor analogy. This isn't a request for a blanket copyright exemption for abandonware. This is a request for a DMCA exception that lets people who already legally own a copy of a game to continue playing it by circumventing DRM and running their own servers.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
I am not a programmer for any of the giant game companies, so I might be missing out on something here. I expected that the games called back to the producer's servers by hard-coded names or IPs; this would make it rather difficult for fans to set up their own servers unless they did something a lot more clever than just setting up a server in their basement. Has there been a proof-of-principle on this with a reasonably recent game that has had its online components neutered by its parent company?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I thought reverse engineering the server protocol was perfectly legal. Samba/CIFS and Bitkeeper are two protocols for which this was an example.
Why does it take a student to do this...? No actual lawyers willing to take this case on pro bono?
Yeah well, that's basically theft. I'm sure che guavara would be proud.
actually exist. As an OpenTTD player, active that is, I can tell you that for some the fun of old games doesn't ever really go away. In the intervening decades since the original TTD, the community has actually advanced the game play well beyond what the creator was aiming at. If only graphics weren't so expensive to produce (time or otherwise), I think we'd see a major improvement on that too. But as I said, I'm an active player. There are similar communities, like the ones around Age of Empires 2 and Rise of Nations. The former seems to have a lot more success doing mods. This would be really, really awesome for games like Rise of Nations. I think it's a legitimate request even in the eyes of the copyright holders. In this case they've actively decided not to profit from the games online anymore. Users with legitimate rights (ie, purchased) should be free at least to keep their software functioning properly. The case could eventually gaslight the whole update scam some parts of the industry have been running for a long time. I'm not saying that someone should sanely be using software from the 1990s or anything, I'm just saying that they should have the right to try if they paid for the software. Similar to how you should not be limited on the number of devices you can sync a digital goods store to (if you violate the agreement in other ways, that's another issue, and arbitrary device limits are another way of forcing people to spend more money in some cases). In summary: fuck yeah.
When you buy one of those DRM games there is an implicit contract. The seller has agreed to provide authorization.
Contracts work both ways.
I believe Sony has already run into this problem.
All it takes is one class action suit (for the value of the purchase price of the game per plaintiff) against the current copyright holder to make it too expensive for any company to shut down the servers. Yes, it will take free legal services to do it, but they seem to be available.
In the cases where no one shows up to defend the copyright it's the best possible answer. The copyright is unclaimed and the work is either in public domain or worthless. No more DMCA.
Yep,
It's more like the local government granting that the community can take the title for an abandoned house the owner no longer keeps in good order and fix it up on the condition they never sell or rent it.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
So the place should go unused and rot, because of some idiot?
Hard-coded names are easy - you make some entries in your hosts file. You can map any name to any ip address you like - such as mapping "gameserver.somecompany.com" to the ip of your basement server.
If you want to get fancy, you run your own DNS server. Then, everybody who want to play on your basement server simply use your dns server. A third way is to alter the name inside the game binary - which may be easy or hard.
Hard-coded IP address: a firewall can rewrite IP addresses. NATing is the common case - but remapping some game server address to your basement server's address is certainly another possiblity. Easy enough with linux+ipatbles. Another way is searching for the ip address in the game binary, and changing it there. But DRM may get in the way then - no DRM when you instead hack your router.
Yes, it is theft.
The question is whether theft is always wrong.
By the mantra of, "Life, liberty, property and nations founded by businessmen who wanted taxes to go to them rather than to the English monarch," it is(*). But when people/countries grow up, they realise that human attempts to suggest human laws are "natural" are the very essence of religion, and religion has no place in an advanced civilisation.
(*) The protests were never anti-tax, which is in ownership terms a claim of proprietary interest by the government on behalf of the people to everything. They were against taxation without representation.
Some countries do have what amounts to squatter's rights in that if you occupy and otherwise unoccupied dwelling for a long enough duration you can claim it as a residency and the actual owner will not be able to evict you.
Do these countries happen to be countries overrun by war?
Enormous parts of European cities were emptied of citizens that were stuffed into camps and vanished
or simply displaced by destruction and war. Some laws were crafted to legalize the good,
bad and ugly parts of this chaos.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
"Software Freedom Conservancy has filed a Comment ... to legally permit circumvention of encryption for firmwares found on Smart TV products from manufacturers"
News:
http://sfconservancy.org/news/...
The submission:
https://sfconservancy.org/docs...
And another submission in part by Karen Sandler about allowing putting free software on medical devices such as the one in her heart:
http://copyright.gov/1201/2015...
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
No, that's abandonment. If the property owner abandons the property such that it becomes a health and safety hazard for the neighborhood (not to mention a property value destroying eyesore), then there is a risk that a squatter will come in, properly maintain the property, and gain rights to it.
That law exists in many places in the U.S. as well.
We have similar laws to cover other sorts of property as well.
A law student? Is that the best EFF can do? Then they know the war is lost. I hope she has a good escape plan. If she's any good, she'll become a corporate lawyer. If she's not, slighting the industry is... Unwise. I hope she will enjoy her career in fast food.
It is more like the goverment has closed down town hall and demolished it and because there is no government you are not allowed to use your house.
Now this kid and the EFF wants the right to create a new town hall and therefor allow people to use their homes again.
Hi! This proposal is overdue, but it is a really a good thing. People buy software, but their software is useless with "key-activiation-servers" (Windows XP) or "network-requirement" (Steam). So the same thing should be done here in europe, years ago! Nobody can gurantees the existence and service availibity for legacy products or even busted companies. Gone away: SGI (now Cray) ? Sun? Novell? 3DFX? Aureal3D? Nokia? Well, and nearly Apple. And no one can gurantee the existence of Valve, Google, Amazon or Microsoft. So this must be changed, the companies shall prepare measure in case of being busted and must "release" the necessary keys or final "fix" which open up their unmainted legacy software. A good example would bei Counter-Strike 1.6 in some years or Windows XP. So one question remains: Why is this only about video games?
Actually it's more like you bought a house and now the water company stopped treating water and pumping it to the house. The fact that you own a house without running water makes your property useless for the desired purpose of being a residence. In this case the law forbids you from digging a well and treating water yourself to make your property useful again.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
You don't own abandoned property. Saying that is theft is like saying settling an area uninhabited for hundreds of years is theft.
Common law is good and allows for the forward progress of civilization. Roman law is bad, and causes the decay and destruction of civilization. You can tell which countries have which just by seeing which ones never made it into the first world.
If the alternative is said abandoned house is left to become a massive health/fire hazard because no one is legally allowed to touch it and the rightful owners refuse either maintain it, tear it down or sell it, sure. Go ahead and live in that abandoned house.
That's exactly what I keep telling the cops!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
in my country it is legal to modify software for reasons of interoperability, and if the vendor shuts down the license server that counts.
I hope they get far. This obviously is not hurting anyone and is only fair to the consumer.
I think that's right, most squatter's rights mandate that the squatter must be properly maintaining the property.
Western European law from medieval times all the way to the Napoleonic code has been based, in part, on Roman law concepts based on the Emperor Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis. Since Western Europe isn't exactly made up of third world countries, I'd take issue with your assertion.
Both Roman civil law and English common law have their strengths and weaknesses, but both are systems that have been used successfully for centuries which suggests that they are hardly a root cause of civilization decay.
Even then I think they usually think that the rights to Snow White are owned by Disney.
In some cases, Disney has acquired exclusive rights under trademark law to sell toys based on adaptations of public domain works. For example, Disney owns PINOCCHIO® in the "dolls" category, despite the fact that copyright in Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio expired in 1940 and would have expired in 1960 even under today's extended copyright terms.
Unconstitutional laws are not laws
Constitutional is whatever nine men and women in black robes say it is.
and it's not especially hard to mount a whole variety of solid constitutional challenges to the DMCA.
The Supreme Court already upheld reextension of a copyright term as constitutional (Eldred v. Ashcroft) and restoration of copyright in works that have entered the public domain as constitutional (Golan v. Holder). What makes you think the DMCA will be any easier? And if you invalidate the whole DMCA, don't you also invalidate the safe harbor for online service providers against claims of contributory infringement (17 USC 512) that was enacted as a rider to the DMCA?
Evolve (evolvehq.com) already does this to an extent. As long as a game has LAN multiplayer, Evolve basically fools the game into thinking that remote users are on a local network. I think that Hamachi does the same thing.
I play a lot of games with dead servers with Evolve.
Unless you bought the game, new, and they turned the server off in a couple of months, I don't think you'll have a leg to stand on.
That has happened. Often I have bought a game new in original shrink wrap at a big box store, put it in, and come home to a message to the effect "This software title is no longer in service."
I wonder at what point copyright and trademark enforcement diverged
Copyright and trademark law have different origins. They never fully converged in the first place. The fact that there's some sort of unified "intellectual property" to diverge in the first place is a lie of the industry. In any case, copyright and patent law do have the equitable defense of estoppel by laches, which is sort of analogous to genericization of trademark but not nearly as broad in scope.
Hard-coded names are easy - you make some entries in your hosts file.
Applying the well-known APK workaround doesn't work when the application sees that the certificate doesn't match the certificate that the application expects.
why can't these 100 users find another game?
Because the developers of the games that are shut off sue the developers of too-similar games for copyright infringement. For example, Tetris DS has been shut down, and The Tetris Company has successfully sued cloners.
Some games console manufacturers did a similar thing. The console checks for a particular string, say "Produced by or under licence from Sega", in the ROM. If it isn't there the game won't run. If someone puts it there without getting a licence they can be sued for copyright infringement
The console maker can sue but won't necessarily win. In the United States, for example, copying a "magic string" of this sort is not infringement per Sega v. Accolade and Lexmark v. Static Control Components. If a publisher of an original game adds the magic string without permission from the console maker, is sued in the United States for copyright infringement by the console maker, and has a lawyer aware of these cases, he will likely defeat the console maker the same way that Accolade defeated Sega.
No actual lawyers willing to take this case on pro bono?
I don't think many lawyers who supported the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act would support limiting anti-circumvention rights under copyright.
(Oh, you meant the other kind of bono.)
How many immigrants could your country absorb?
aha... I learned something new today :) Actually, I sort of knew about laches but couldn't remember what it was called. Having used it a couple times, too. I must be going senile.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You can tell which countries have [a legal structure closer to English common law or to Roman law] just by seeing which ones never made it into the first world.
The two sides in World War III (1947–1991; also called the Cold War) were the "first world", led by western Europe and the United States of America, and the "second world", led by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. France was a founding member of NATO, putting it squarely within the first world, and French law is based on Roman law.
I thought Steam games required renewal of the cached receipt every 30 days or so. Did this change? If so, when?
Dosbox or a VM perhaps?
When I wrote the above, with tongue firmly in cheek, I was thinking more along the lines of the libc5 vs glibc issues we had 15 years ago, or dependencies on other old libraries
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
There are several MMOs that no longer have servers at all, ie. being essentially abandoned. Do those worlds not deserve to be preserved for posterity or for game enthusiasts?
Exempting MMOs across the board from this process seems short-sighted.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Now that sounds like a much more realistic analogy. I will however, go a step further on this though.
This would be like buying a house which is only accessible by a bridge built by the previous owner who several years later decides that the tolls collected from the bridge are no longer enough to be profitable so they decide to destroy it. While you were going grocery shopping the previous owner has the bridge demolished, and there is a law which says that you cannot build your own bridge to access your house which you paid for and own.
If the alternative is said abandoned house is left to become a massive health/fire hazard because no one is legally allowed to touch it and the rightful owners refuse either maintain it, tear it down or sell it, sure. Go ahead and live in that abandoned house.
Around here, the local government will eventually confiscate it and either sell it or tear it down. But it might take a court case, depending on local laws.