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
> 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.