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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.
make the law simple
If company hosts content on its own servers, and it shuts down servers. company loses all rights to any IP related to the product unless they allow people to run their own server. (which would allow people to run their own servers)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
> producers have no innate right - only virtual rights granted by law.
To quote Terry Pratchett's book, the Hogfather:
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
Intellectual property, the power of knowledge, can be considered as valid as any other concept. And it has history and law behind it.
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.
That's not a bug, that's a feature. They don't lose their copyright just because they stop running a server. This is just an exemption that wouldn't let them sue gamers for DMCA violations when they reverse engineer their own servers.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
I thought reverse engineering the server protocol was perfectly legal. Samba/CIFS and Bitkeeper are two protocols for which this was an example.
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.
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?