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Twitter Stops Users From Playing DOS Games Inside Tweets
jones_supa writes: Twitter has killed off an interesting trend of playing DOS games in tweets. Last week, users discovered they could use the new "Twitter Cards" embedding feature to bundle full DOS games within tweets. Running DOSBox inside the web browser is possible thanks to an Emscripten port of DOSBox called Em-DOSBox. The games were pulled from Internet Archive's collection of 2,600 classic titles, many of which still lack proper republishing agreements with the copyright holder. So, is embedding games within Twitter Cards, against the social network's terms of service? Either way, Twitter has now blocked such activity, likely after seeing the various news reports and a stream of Street Fighter II, Wolfenstein 3D and Zool cheering up people's timelines.
The main concern is that enough people rediscover old games, not upholding copyright. Personally, even as a good ranking gamer in contemporary FPSes, I could ditch every game made past 1983 and be very happy with the earlier ones.
Yes - and THAT would be a blatant copyright violation.
Back in the mists of time, it was understood that no one was guaranteed any profit from any publicized work. The idea was, that IF there WAS a profit, then the author(s) should get some of it.
Casual users playing around with the code is cool, in my opinion. Corporate users making a profit, however indirectly, is not so cool.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Back in the mists of time, it was understood that no one was guaranteed any profit from any publicized work. The idea was, that IF there WAS a profit, then the author(s) should get some of it.
Umm, when was that exactly? Wide-scale publication was not possible until the invention of movable type in the mid-1400s. The first copyright privilege after that was granted in 1486, and others quickly followed in the 1490s and early 1500s. They were almost exclusively granted to PRINTERS, not authors.
It would take a couple more centuries before authors (not printers) tended to be granted copyright and thus had primary control over profit.
(I of course take your point that Twitter making money off of this would be copyright infringement in the modern sense. But your idyllic "back in the mists of time" when no one was guaranteed profit and authors got some of it... well, it wasn't quite like that.)