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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
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.
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.
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.
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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.