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Nintendo's Offensive, Tragic, and Totally Legal Erasure of ROM Sites (vice.com)
"The damage that removing ROMs from the internet could do to video games as a whole is catastrophic." From a report: In July, Nintendo sued two popular ROM sites, LoveROMS and LoveRetro.co, for what it called "brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo's intellectual property rights." Both sites have since shut down. On Wednesday, another big, 18-year-old ROM site, EmuParadise, said it would no longer be able to allow people to download old games due to "potentially disastrous consequences." Nintendo owns the intellectual property for its games, and when people pirate them instead of buying a Nintendo Super NES Classic Edition or a downloading a copy from one of its digital storefronts, it can argue it's losing money. According to Nintendo's official site, ROMs and video game emulation also represent "the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers," and "have the potential to significantly damage" tens of thousands of jobs. Even when a Nintendo game isn't for sale, it's still the company's intellectual property, and it can enforce its copyright if it wants.
But the damage that removing ROMs from the internet could do to video games as a whole is catastrophic. Many game developers and people who have otherwise made video games a major part of their lives, especially those who grew up in low-income households or outside a Western country, wouldn't have been inspired to take that path if it wasn't for ROMs. Entire chapters of video game history would be lost if ROMs and emulation didn't preserve games where publishers failed to. And perhaps most importantly, denying people access to ROMs makes the process of educating them in game development much more difficult, potentially hobbling future generations of video game makers.
But the damage that removing ROMs from the internet could do to video games as a whole is catastrophic. Many game developers and people who have otherwise made video games a major part of their lives, especially those who grew up in low-income households or outside a Western country, wouldn't have been inspired to take that path if it wasn't for ROMs. Entire chapters of video game history would be lost if ROMs and emulation didn't preserve games where publishers failed to. And perhaps most importantly, denying people access to ROMs makes the process of educating them in game development much more difficult, potentially hobbling future generations of video game makers.
Nintendo was for 18 years.
IP Protection laws need to be on a "use it or lose it" basis. If you're no longer producing or providing the ability to use an IP, you lose it to the public domain.
IP Protection laws are meant to protect profits derived from innovation. Once the innovation is finished and there are no more profits to protect, you're done.
That's the way it ought to be.
...is forever.
REPOST!
but's it's ok for Nintendo to use emu work done from ines and others in there own systems? or even used dumped roms from others (as if they lost there own roms)
We're one great solar flare from waking up one day to find that everything past 1970 never happened.
The vast majority of people playing these games before the NES/SNES/ATARI emulators did so via illegally downloading ROMs and playing them on Emulators. The whole market exists because of piracy.
Now Nintendo is making money off these things again, and of course suddenly it's all about suing. Of course, it doesn't really stop anyone. All the NES ROMS are on the order of a few hundred megabytes, and an individual ROM is maybe 100KB. SNES are a little bigger. The point being these things are so small they're incredibly easy to share.
I doubt the Mario/Zelda franchises would have the same penetration if ROMs weren't widespread as they are(were). Illegal use increases brand awareness and often leads to legal use.
Nintendo can sue all they want. There will always be a way to download the ROMS.
If anything, this will just be what prompts multiple new ROM sites to pop up and host and even larger catalog, in a place where Nintendo isn't able to get their ways, like so many torrents sites have.
is a global boycott.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
well theft is theft and they should be shutdown.
1) Remove anything published by Nintendo itself. That's what got the rom sites sued. Nintendo did not care about anyones's IP except theirs.
They are enforcing their copyrights and trademarks and their trademarks are still in active use. There are MANY nes and snes games that ninentendo did NOT publish and has no particular stake in.
2) If you get a letter from a copyright holder asking you to take something down you take it down, thats not rocket science it may even be basic courtesy.
If a copyright holder is active then its not abandonware.
3) Do not put any ads on the pages listing the roms themselves. Only the original copyright holder has the right to make money off these roms.
Nintendo is up to its old tricks.
Atari management did a lot to kill itself but Nintendo was there to help by telling developers that if they produced titles for Atari they would be banned from writing for Nintendo.
With Nintendo being bread and butter for most of these guys they had to comply.
I am sorry, but video games are just games.
If you are not willing to part a few bucks for the game then you really don't need it.
Back in them old days before ROMs kids would have to save their money to buy these games. Having bought them with their own money had them put a little extra value behind it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
and yet rom/emulation may of saved a lot of stuff even maybe helped start off the barcade market.
All this content should be on magnets, not site, anyway.
I purchased a Nintendo Super NES Classic Edition and I use emulators regularly. Not only did the SNES CE have a more comfortable form factor BUT it was a way of giving back to the company which made the games in the first place. Nintendo also had not doing been all that well financially of late so I bought one despite personally loathing the company because of issues like this. I also bought a Raspberry Pi around the same time to emulate platforms and games for which emulation are not readily available. I could have simply used that instead of purchasing the SNES CE, which cost me QUITE a bit more, but I still got one.
Nintendo is a bit like the Disney of gaming really. All games need to be "family friendly" and any competition or fan works are meant to be crushed.
We really risk losing a couple of decades of cultural history due to this stupid legislation. Much like a lot of books from the XIXth century were lost forever because of the use of acid tree paper to print books. I regret that a lot of these sites closed. Take Mortal Kombat for example. I played it in the arcade with dual joysticks, you can only replicate that with a cabinet or MAME. If you go to some place like GoG.com you can only get the remarkably putrid PC port of the game. Why don't they just include MAME with the ROM files is beyond me. Other companies do that with DOSBox and PC data files. Yet this is not an obscure game! Good luck with replicating some of the more obscure titles if sites like these vanish.
Personally I think if software companies did not make the product available through their catalog for a set amount of years the copyright should simply lapse. Period.
but is there a p2p app for just roms sharing?
why can't we just buy the rom? and not be forced to use there crappy emulator?
There are lot's of poor paid emulators out there that suck next to the free ones that do more. Also there are people with flash carts that want to use real hardware as well.
What Nintendo should be doing is selling a CD or DVD or flash drive with all of its game ROMs for about $30. Lots of folks would buy it, or would have before Nintendo's attacks on ROM sites. The Nintendo Classic would have been much more successful if it had come wit the ability to ad more game ROMs without having to be hacked! There were only about 5 games out of the included ones that I liked, not enough to make me want to spend $60 for the locked down mini-console.
For about $20 more, I could get a RetroPie kit with everything included except the game ROMs, and that includes 6 foot HDMI and controller cables! And the RetroPie could play more than just NES games too.
Trump deserves to be hanged for treason. I guess we'll see.
If you are not willing to part a few bucks for the game then you really don't need it.
Where can I buy a lawfully made copy of those games that are not currently available through Virtual Console?
Steam has so many free games... my favorite game DOTA is free and after thousands of hours only gets more fun.
People get attached to free stuff and like the Buddhists say attachment is the source of all suffering. It sucks to lose but lets not blow things out of proportion.
There are so many free games on pc and cell phone and tablet people dont need your childhood games.
I get it I love mario too but the industry will survive without a new generation playing mario. its an old outdated game and id never be able to put a thousand hours into it. what it did influences what we see now and it will continue to do so without rom sites.
The tragedy element of this story is totally overblown, imho. First of all, people will still be able to download ROMs and play them for free. Torrenting a big bundle of ROMs, vs. downloading them from a nicely organized website, is more of an inconvenience than anything. Second, even though ROMs were such a formative part of these developers' lives, there are lots and lots of innovative, inexpensive and free games out there today. There are oodles of free-to-play and super cheap indie games available on Steam, for instance, and frequent Steam sales where penny-pinching gamers can pick up the mid-priced titles for a reasonable price. Even with these ROM sites shuttering, the barriers to making and playing games are probably lower now than they've ever been.
eBay or your local retro game shop.
Surprise, surprise, my original NES still works, as well as all the games I bought (and have bought since).
Emphasis mine. If they're not selling the game, then they can't be making money off of it, so obviously they can't be losing money due to copyright violations. The purpose of Copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
If Copyright is preventing progress of the useful arts by allowing a copyright holder to block distribution of a pre-existing work by both not selling it and preventing its illegal distribution, then that's evidence that the duration of Copyright is too long. Copyright duration is so long that it is no longer financially viable for the copyright holder to continue to distribute the work, yet because they still hold the Copyright they can prevent others from distributing the work to "promote the progress of the useful arts."
It's been suggested before, but Copyright really needs to move to a dynamic duration rather than fixed. The point of Copyright should be to allow a content creator to profit from their work, but once public interest has waned and the profit motive has mostly disappeared, the Copyright should expire. Give everything a 10 year initial copyright. At the end of 10 years, the copyright holder can elect to renew it for another 10 years by paying a fee. The amount of the fee should increase with each renewal - something like
$1000 the first extra 10 years (expires after 20 years)
$3200 the next 10 years (expires after 30 years)
$10k for the next 10 years (expires after 40 years)
$32k for the next 10 years (expires after 50 years)
$100k for the next 10 years (expires after 60 yearsl)
$320k for the next 10 years (expires after 70 years)
$1 million for the next 10 years (expires after 80 years)
$3.2 million for the next 10 years (expires after 90 yearsl)
$10 million for each subsequent 10 years (100+ years)
That would have the effect of flushing out financially unviable copyrighted works into the public domain rather quickly, while allowing hugely successful works like Disney's to continue indefinitely as long as they're making money from it. The way current Copyright durations keep being extended, some works are so old and lost from public awareness that the only copy is held at the U.S. Copyright Office. That makes us vulnerable to one of the greatest losses of historical intellectual property since The Library of Alexandria burned down.
(Hmm, I suppose an easier way would be to require that after the initial 14 year term (the original duration set in 1790), in order to retain copyright up to its current maximum duration, the copyright holder must continue to offer the work for sale.)
>"why can't we just buy the rom? and not be forced to use there [sic] crappy emulator?"
I support reasonable copyright laws (ours have become overkill now), but it is a crazy position for Nintendo to "protect" intellectual "property" which they no longer license or sell to the public. I believe there should be a grace period of a few years or something, and if a company no longer sells or licenses their "property", they forfeit it and it should go public domain, or at least some type of public, non-commercial, free-to-use/distribute license.
Same thing with music, movies, books, software. If there is no reasonable, legal way to buy/license/obtain it, then there is really nothing left to protect because they seem to imply it has no value anymore. An example- I asked Netflix why there are so many discs that are not being replenished... their answer? Many are no longer available for them to buy anymore. Ridiculous.
The hyperbole in TFS is insane.
The damage that removing ROMs from the internet could do to video games as a whole is catastrophic.....Many game developers made video games a major part of their lives....denying people access to ROMs makes the process of educating them in game development much more difficult, potentially hobbling future generations of video game makers.
Bullshit. Old Nintendo ROMs aren't teaching anyone about game development other than how to try to work around horrific hardware limitations. Limitations that even the phone in my pocket doesn't have today.
I'm sorry. I've tried go to back to the games that I loved from yesteryear, and most of them were absolute rubbish. If all the Nintendo ROMs go away today, there will be no significant impact to the world. There have been thousands of derivative works since that time, and they've built on the incrementally better hardware and game design theory that we've built over time.
ROMs are the vinyl 45s or 8-tracks of the music industry. Sure, you might be a collector, but to ascribe to them the level of importance to the art that TFA does to ROMs is asinine.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
not just the rom but the emulation system work that was ripped off.
why not buy the games legitimately? There are plenty of old catridges for sale out there.
Nintendo just helped provide a huge additional use case for hidden services though.
The ROMs are also everywhere if you know where to look.
Neither of those will help Nintendo make more money, of course. Silly Nintendo.
..don't panic
Unlike black lives, games don't matter.
Unlike other forms of entertainement, art and culture, gaming is a colossal waste of time, resources and energy. All this time should be used for finding a way to ensure long term survival of our species and our planet, for the advancement of knowledge in general and science in particular, and for space exploration, which is the ONLY way for humanity to survive.
I see no reason to give any advantage to the entertainment cartel by letting Disney and similar get to circumvent the original intention of copyright.
The original intent was to let the creator make profit for a time, but then for the work to have the opportunity to become part of the culture, part of what the public owned.
Our cartel thugs with lawmakers in their pockets need a purge.
...anyone involved with Nintendo's legal action should publicly destroy all of their own Nintendo hardware, and upload the footage to Youtube. If Nintendo wants so badly to be erased from our memories, we should certainly help them.
It is unfortunate that I have nothing to smash.
abandonware needs to be fixed as some stuff does not really have an owner or it's really hard to know who really owns it now.
Emphasis mine. If they're not selling the game, then they can't be making money off of it, so obviously they can't be losing money due to copyright violations.
Disney Vault. Especially with the success of the NES/SNES classics, Nintendo is going to sit on the IP for a few years, clamp down on alternate methods of playing the old games, then rerelease the games for sale on different mediums. It's just like what Disney does with their movies where they go on sale for a few months and then wait a couple years before releasing them.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Japan wants tariffs Mr Trump.
also can't change big fees for software to repair / restore images.
Let's say I have an arcade game that the HDD / sd card fails on. I should be able to download an image and not pay $50+ for an new SD card or pay for an NEW HDD from them with an markup.
But the damage that removing ROMs from the internet could do to video games as a whole is catastrophic.
If you believe this, I pity you. Just because these sites are getting nuked by litigation (or threat of) means nothing to ROM's being available online. It's the typical software piracy scenario, for every site they quash, 10 more will take it's place.
Also, all these ROMs are pretty easy to get via torrents. Claiming the sky is falling when it isn't is pretty old and worn out. Nintendo is perfectly in the right to be attacking these sites, but if you or they think it's going to stifle the availability of these ROMs, I got several bridges to sell.
With human rights!
How dare these insolent thieves attempt to steal from these fucking yellow bastards! The outrage!!!
Thank you US Supreme Court of Kangaroos
Copyright was never intended to be extended. That more than anything else has completely crippled the entire point of copyrighting works. Until the extensions Disney keeps winning stop, we'll never see rational and reasonable copyright law.
If it was kept at 20 years like it was intended, all would be fine and good. The founding fathers had great insights on how to run a country, and every time we tinker with the original vision, our country becomes weaker.
The popularity of ROM sites shows how much money there is to be made by companies selling these titles again (along with of course the popularity of the new NES, SNES, Genesis, Atari, etc ... consoles and the money Nintendo has made on virtual console). They just need to decide how they want to do it. If there is a way to buy these, I'll give them my money and I'll even agree with them on the lack of validity to the "victimless crime" argument. But if I can't buy a working copy of Battletoads (amongst many other titles) anywhere for any amount of money, then I will download it from a ROM site instead.
If they can't see me putting money in front of them - because their own heads are too far up their own asses - then I have no pity for them.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I support reasonable copyright laws (ours have become overkill now), but it is a crazy position for Nintendo to "protect" intellectual "property" which they no longer license or sell to the public.
I'm in the same boat. Our copyright laws are a mess, but a good idea in general. Nintendo.... DOES license and sell this stuff to the public. Most of it anyway. A decade ago that wasn't true and I was pirating ROMS right and left and wholly supporting tearing down copyright law as laughably out of date because all this was abandonware that you couldn't get elsewhere. Bullshit artificial scarcity where there was no cause.
Nintendo took down ROM sites then too and I raged. Like a piece of my childhood and culture was being destroyed for no reason. And then the Wii had an emulator built in. And then everything had an emulator built in so you could keep buying Zelda over and over again. All them. Every game, rebought on every system.
And I'm ok with that. They can sell what they want.
BUT. I consider any license or contract which stipulates how you're going to use their data to be bullshit. Here's a number, but don't you DARE put it on a TI calculator, we only let you put it on a Casio calculator. Pft, utter bullshit. If you bought Zelda, the first one, in any capacity in any format for any system, you should have the right to use peek into that cartridge and use that big long string of binary however you see fit. Same way that if you buy a CD you can rip it to your computer and listen to it on your 32MB MP3 player with real LCD screen. Or if you buy Zelda again on their latest platform and do some crazy hardware RAM probing and extract the ROM out of it... and then shoe-horn it into some sort of NES cartridge reverse emulation... all the more power to you because that ought to be legal.
But Nintendo, Disney, and others own pieces of your childhood. Your childhood doesn't entirely belong to you.
CONSUME
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Jasper:
Are they talking about the bordello?
Grampa:
No, the burlesque house, so keep your mouth shut!
Riiiiiight, lemme guess, just blow on those cartridges that randomly flash rainbow sprites and frantically power cycle the console until it works. Works every time! Fuck those emulators and their reliability.
buy old games at retro-shops, pawn shops, Goodwill, garage sales, e-bay, whatever.
You want them on virtual console? well yeah, maybe I do too. But the rights for many old games are complicated.
Lets take for example, Rock N Roll racing. Who owns the rights? The game had TWO developers, Interplay was the publisher and does not exist as a singular entity. Who has Interplay's publishing rights? And what about the rights to the music, they were instrumental versions of rock songs, remember? Were they negotiated for a fixed term? fixed fee? royalties?
Heck it might require negotiation for EACH platform so say if it was on Wii, it might require more contracts and negotiation and MONEY to put it on WiiU, 3DS or Switch.
Or lets talk Diablo on the PSone which is NOT on PSN. The credits have Blizzard, Climax Entertainment, Davidson & Associates, Virgin Interactive, and EA! Think about the complexity of Sony trying to get the rights to put it on PSN.
no one thought of writing in accomodations for future technology into contracts. So you can't entirely blame Nintendo or Sony or whatever.
What a fucking joke! I've been trying to buy that from a non-scalper now since the damn thing came out. There are STILL no copies available anywhere.
Fuck you Nintendo. You're doing an excellent job in trying to change my mind.
You can still buy a replacement for the 72 Pin connector for less than $10
[citation needed]
And the the fans are going to keep buying Nintendos anyway.
no one thought of writing in accomodations for future technology into contracts. So you can't entirely blame Nintendo or Sony or whatever.
That's why people send it all to hell and play for free on emulators. This is all too inconvenient to be on the legal side.
The answer is simple: because in many cases, that's simply no longer viable even if you have the money to do so.
Let's start with the display: most old consoles output in 240p. TVs that supported 240p stopped being made probably 20 years ago. Even if you find one, the chances of it having a good tube and the flyback not breaking down from age are pretty low. Now, you could go out and buy an Open Source Scan Converter or a Framemeister, but both of those only work with component input, which means no NES and no N64 without hardmods. Your only other option is something like a component to HDMI converter, which might work provided your TV is good enough. Otherwise, you probably need a PC capture card. There is no one easy solution to this.
Next, let's hope that the capacitors in the consoles themselves haven't gone bad after 20+ years.. or that the CD drive lasers still work if you're talking a Playstation or Dreamcast, since the lasers go incredibly easily on them. Sure, you could order a Chinese replacement laser and hope your soldering job works or re-cap the console, but good luck with that.
Finally, let's hope that expensive cartridge you bought still works, since you're not going the piracy route and using a flashcart. Bitrot is already potentially setting in, and things like save batteries have to be manually desoldered and replaced.
Even assuming you have all of those things, how much longer do you think they're going to last?
It just means the people who onesy-twosy'd ROMs from these sites need to just make like more savvy pirates and just pull the entire NES/SNES/GBA/DS/N64/etc etc libraries from Bittorrent.
Yeah, it's nice to just pick out what you want and get it, but the entire library of every NES/Famicom game ever released (including some that weren't!) is a commanding...50 or so MB. Just do a one-and-done torrent for each system and throw it on a thumbdrive or in your cloud storage (with a password protected archive) or burn it to Bluray/DVD or whatever and never have to think about it ever again?
I've bought a ton of shit from Nintendo over the years. In a lot of the straight-rereleases and Virtual Console games they're literally using the ROMs the pirates ripped back in the 80's/90's with fucking cart readers, along with GPL sourcecode for NES/SNES/etc emulators that they don't contribute their changes to or make code available for. Fuck em.
If we limited copyright terms to instead of 3 LIFETIMES (life of author plus 150 years) to say... 10-20 years. The constitution, which doesn't directly mention copyright but "securing for limited time exclusive right to authors..." I don't think anyone would say three lifetimes counts as a 'limited' time.
Visual pinball / pinmame back in 2000 likely helped save pinball from deaths door.
As an IP owner, your ability to alienate potential customers is a power you need to be careful with. If you want us, the general public, to protect your IP, you need to remember not to rub us the wrong way - or, when the genie gets out of the lamp, it might not do you any favours. IP protection is a contract between you and us, and it is looking like our side of the negotiating table has sold us down the river. We are NOT happy bunnies.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Log shall you live!
https://thepiratebay.org/search/Emuparadise/0/99/400
(Not posted in the wrong thread.)
pro-corporate, anti-consumer, anti-worker bias. From our basic gov't structures to our media to our culture as laid out for us. It's easy to get discouraged, especially when you have to make a living doing actual work as opposed to living off the proceeds of your dad or granddad's work.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
up there with Blizzard & Bethesda fans. So I don't think that's likely. I'm not sure if this will turn out for them. Give it a few months and the sites will be back minus Nintendo properties. As it gets harder and harder to get Nintendo games they'll lose generations of gamers. Meanwhile anyone who turns the proverbial blind eye will garner those.
For me, I've got so many games I don't know what to do with them. Nintendo is vying for my time more than ever while putting out kind of mediocre stuff. I played a bit of Super Mario Odyssey on a kiosk and it was OK, but Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper or even Mario 64 seems a lot better overall. Meanwhile I'm working my way through the Amazing Batman Arkham games (I'll probably stop at Origin, I didn't like what little of Knight I played).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I think it should work in different way. Works should automatically go into public domain as soon as tax filings confirm that it brought the amount of revenue equal to its production cost + 30% profit. This will ensure that both creators are compensated and that there is no excessive restrictions once they got their fair payment.
they've largely corrected their mistakes with the NES & SNES mini and made them accessible. The WII and WII U virtual consoles are even still up and running and you can buy games. Sega makes a lot of games available on steam and even allows modding.
But also to be fair, there's some real classics (Panzer Dragoon Saga comes to mind) that are the video game equivalent of unobtainium...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When I was a child my parents wouldn't let me have a Gameboy or a Sega mega drive or N64. A little later I found I could play Gameboy games and SNES games on a Pentium 2. I explored quite a lot of ROMs and really liked Nintendo. They were struggling at this time and I bought a GameCube with my first job. Eventually I had 15 games for it and several of my friends bought GameCubes too because we enjoyed super smash Bros and Mariokart.
I hooked my brother on to Nintendo. I didn't buy more consoles myself, I grew out of gaming but he went on to buy a Gameboy advance, a Nintendo ds, a Wii, a wii U and a switch... Because he too played the roms.
If it wasn't for ROMs I probably would have got a PlayStation 2 like everybody else.
Nostalgia and the fact that I thought it was pretty awesome Nintendo was pretty relaxed about the free advertising they received from rom sites really appealed to me.
All a long I thought it was pretty stupid Nintendo never basically set up a legal firm site themselves.
Im going to strongly consider whether I get my children Nintendos now. I'm willing to bet my brother will too because he's probably more extreme in his opinions around this than I am.
We aren't all made of money at the beginning and yet we can still enjoy the product. You kind of feel obligated to spend a little, a little bit more probably, when you've downloaded something.
As companies crack down on piracy I find I tend to stop downloading but at the same time spend less on their legitimate products. The value decreases because of the DRM, the fact I am not getting extra value as I choose, and to be quite frank the entertainment industry has severely degraded in quality (but that's more for the mppa, RIAA type stuff which I have pretty much boycotted for over 5 years)
Having worked in a previous life in the arcade game industry repairing coin-op games, I can tell you that all you really need to do if you need ROM images for an old coin-op game (if it's a coin-op game we're talking about that is) is to locate one of the companies still around that can repair them, and buy a set of replacement ROMs, then find someone with a chip programmer to read them out to binary files for you. Who you get the ROMs from might even be so nice as to give you image files of them. It's not like there's any copy protection on the ROMs/EPROMs themselves, they're just memory devices. Console game ROMs could be obtained from their original hardware sources with slightly more difficulty, but it's still relatively trivial, all you'd really need is a chip programmer and some basic soldering skills.
Also Nintendo is attempting to close the barn door long after the horses have left, moved on, started over, raised families, had grandchildren, and settled into retirement; never forget that once something has been out on the Internet, it's there forever, someone else will have them. All Nintendo has done is driven the source(s) of them underground.
17 USC 117(a):
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. -- Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
So, has Nintendo actually gone on to prove that the site owners have never owned these games, nor have the people that have downloaded them? Otherwise, no copyright law has been violated, and the burden of proof falls on Nintendo to make. Without proving that is the case, then no violation has taken place, and thus, no case.
It's the same reason you can burn CDs, DVDs, etc, and MP3s have been legal for longer than you could buy them.
"It's okay to steal if you are poor or otherwise disadvantaged." Really? IP is important. It belongs to someone.
Bill Gates is a communist -- he's just more equal than the rest of us.
Sounds like some lame pirate rationality. Just going to "test" this new game out to see if I like it before buying it!
We should start putting this stuff up on public blockchain where Nintendo can't possibly take it down. These ROMs are very small (esp. NES) so this would actually be practical.
Fuck those Nips! Im never giving them another dime.
Many game developers and people who have otherwise made video games a major part of their lives, especially those who grew up in low-income households or outside a Western country, wouldn't have been inspired to take that path if it wasn't for ROMs.
Many people who didn't grow up with a yacht wouldn't have been inspired to take up naval architecture or oceanography. That doesn't mean you're entitled to a yacht.
People seem to forget that just because you want something doesn't mean you're entitled to it.
And it shows!!!
Nintendo has been going after rom sites since the 90s. This is not news. Nintendo has always hated roms, always. Roms are piracy and like all piracy they'll survive in torrents forever. This is just nintendo pulling down a few signs in a public place rather than actually affecting anything important. I will miss emuparadise though. Luckily I downloaded all their fullsets a long time ago, knowing that this would eventually happen.
If there's no DRM, then the DMCA in the US says it's completely OK and legal to copy those ROMs onto a PC and run them with your emulator of choice (personal backup copy, format shifting).
They have repeatedly demonstrated extremely aggressive stance on derivative or historical works of classic games of the former company, they are not a company for making games anymore they are just yet another short term money milking corporation. Do your part to hurt their bottom line in order to protect computer game history and tell everyone who cares about how they destroy ROM sites, DO NOT BUY NINTENDO.
It's marketing catering to a 30-something and 40-something mid-life crisis.
It is a bit sad that 30-somethings already want to re-live their childhood. Have things really gotten so bad?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Why deal with the console? Just buy the cartridges, discs, etc, and make a legal format-shifting backup copy (at least for the ones without DRM). I'm not going to argue for the RetroPie because I would rather have accurate emulation than cheap, but just about anything is easier than using original hardware to play on.
But, as an IP owner, I have WAY more money than you, and am partnered up with a whole group of fellow, rich, IP owners.
That means we can just buy whatever legislation we want, whether you like it or not.
And of course that includes keeping IP piracy illegal and ramping up enforcement.
i get the moaning about preservation and use for research to an extent, but letâ(TM)s be fair, this is tiny proportion of users. most users are blatantly and shamelessly stealing other peopleâ(TM)s work just because they can. this is not ok, and will never be ok.
shutting down pirates is not tragic. it is necessary.
This. I almost exclusivly buy games i pirate. I am looking at 2 indie adventure games on steam at the moment, and would be more than willing to purchase them, but i simply wont unless i get to play a pirated copy first. Maybe a demo would suffice, but i have never been too fond of demos. Looking back through the list of game purchases i have made, 90 cents out of 100 that the gaming industry gets from me are a direct result of pirating.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
...yet they still seem to have a lot customers for new games. As long as games and hardware keep pushing the envelope, there's plenty of incentive to buy new games.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
>"Wow, did you not even RTFS? Nintendo's selling retro consoles and licensing these ROMS today."
Every game they ever made? I doubt it. And what about the years between the first market and the retro console?
I am at a loss here. Does slashdot advocate piracy by calling this offensive and tragic? Does slashdot advocate openly breaking the law on a wholesale and perpetual basis?
cost_to_register(year) = ((2 ^ (year))/100) USD
Year 0: Free (1 year of automatic protection)
Year 1: $0.02
Year 2: $0.04
Year 3: $0.08
Year 10: $10.24
Year 20: $10,485.76
Year 30: $10,737,418.24
Year 40: $10,995,116,277.76
You can pay in advance for as many years as you like.
As long as its still protected, you can extend your copyright by paying for more years, as you like.
If your work enters an unregistered year, it irrevocably becomes a part of the public domain.
Please make checks payable to: Uncle Sam
Just upload the ROMs to the internet archive. Half its catelogue appears to just be copies of torrents and other copyrighted works. And they are legaly exempt from copyright claims from my understanding.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Nintendo is damn sad. Every time a new Nintendo platform gets released less and less content is produced and more and more "retro" and indie crap floods the catalogue... that they see fit to now chase after people for platforms they have abandoned decades ago is a sad reflection of Nintendo laziness.
How's about they redirect some funds away from lawyers and toward making games people want to play? Copyright should have ended on the abandoned crap years ago yet big media keeps paying off congress to extent terms forever.. what started at 14 years is now creeping up on 140. It's not a legitimate system.
Also worth mentioning NES games are 100-300k a pop. Whole archive of every NES, SNES, N64, GENESIS...etc game ever released throughout the entirety of old console era in every region/language ever released fits comfortably on a single bluray disk. It's not going away.
Jesus people, get a grip.
in the eyes of fans the world over, in the name of protecting it's IP. doh!
Requiem for the American Dream
$1000 the first extra 10 years (expires after 20 years)
$3200 the next 10 years (expires after 30 years)
$10k for the next 10 years (expires after 40 years)
$32k for the next 10 years (expires after 50 years)
$100k for the next 10 years (expires after 60 yearsl)
$320k for the next 10 years (expires after 70 years)
$1 million for the next 10 years (expires after 80 years)
$3.2 million for the next 10 years (expires after 90 yearsl)
$10 million for each subsequent 10 years (100+ years)
Your price schedule essentially ensures large companies get the same copyright term - effectively in perpetuity - while smaller content creators get no protection. That's even worse than the clusterfuck of IP law now. Current IP law is essentially theft from the public, this would be a license for large companies to do so en masse and leave smaller companies and individuals nearly helpless..
And not just every game Nintendo ever made, every game ever made for each console for which the rights still belong to other companies; some of which have since folded and no one really knows WHO owns the rights anymore.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Yap. See a nice avant garde novel that could be made into a great movie? Why, just wait 10 years, after the novelist couldn't afford to get the copyright renewed for the first extension, you don't have to bother with negotiating for optioning it.
I would be happy with the original terms of copyright—28 years, registration required, and renewable for one term for additional 28 years. (And no more worrying about the author's estate—do what rest of us do and bequeath your heirs money, not IP.)
I have a special place in my heart for emulation, so I'll let you all in on what to do. Go to a DHT aggregation search engine like BT Kitty and type "NESRen" and "Hyperspin" as separate queries. You will have ROMs for almost every older (PS2 down) system ever created coming out of your ass by the time you're done downloading it all.
10 years automatic with a 10-year extension if filed for in a timely manner. End of story. It's good enough for patents which drug companies invest literal billions into; it should be good enough for copyright as well. 20 years = automatic public domain. There needs to be a federal Constitutional amendment to limit copyright to 20 years maximum regardless of laws in all state and local jurisdictions.
A few minutes opening up the case for an original NES, and you can get rid of flashing crap. It's caused by their lockout chip, and it's trivially easy to disable. https://www.thevintagegamers.c...
I hate fat people.
Many ... people who have otherwise made video games a major part of their lives ... wouldn't have been inspired to take that path if it wasn't for ROMs.
What!? They might have bumped across it anyway, or anyway they'll find something else to do. Maybe they'll like the new thing more, or maybe less.
Poor or non-western country. Yep. And I'm not going to be in SpaceXs space tourism stuff, either. Sucks to be poor and poorer. (Not that I'm either. I'm pretty sure that most (all?) of us in the US are in the top 10% of the world, if not 1%.) Worrying about how many genders there are is MUCH much easier when you have clean water, good food, are healthy, warm and safe than when you're literally dying from thrust and hunger in the rain.
Entire chapters of video game history would be lost if ROMs and emulation didn't preserve games where publishers failed to.
That's nice. Entire chapters of human history have been lost before, this won't be the first and won't be the last. News, 1 day ago: "Archaeologists fear biblical artifacts, monuments won't survive Yemen war." OH NOES, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial video game won't be around noes mores! Oh the humanity majors!
I have unpaid for copies of Nintendo ROMs. I'm literally looking at a video game console: Space Duel. Not a ROM dump -- a real, actual, physical, original working console. A friend of mine owns Joust in somehow like-new condition. I have a "licensed" copy of PacMan for the PC and an unlicensed one for a PC emulator. I'm sorry the sites are gone as well, but each "individual game template" IS theirs. And at least USED to, they don't have the reach to be everywhere in the world at once, or profits to even want to bother. Want to help them with that? Become a distributor.
It's culture only because we made it so (and probably addictive as well), but someone else does actually own it. (Depending on copyright and length of time maybe they shouldn't anymore, but that's a different argument.) Taken any aspirin? Used a Xerox lately? Seen a talking Mouse? Used your Clout recently? (That came from Visa 20 years ago; I still remember their commercials using it.) Language is easier to get away things than with physical (logical) objects -- especially if they can FIND you.
"But Information wants to be free." So what's your bank account number and mothers maiden name again? I'll be right back.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
You, sir, are a scholar and a gentleman.
most old consoles output in 240p. TVs that supported 240p stopped being made probably 20 years ago
What the hell are you going on about, most HDTV's support 240p, no problem. There were some early models that didn't, though. Are you one of those nerds who gets outdated info fixed in their heads and never updates their info?
things like save batteries have to be manually desoldered and replaced
Nope, just pry the battery lose, put a new battery in. Sometimes you can just squeeze the contacts to hold it in place (Did that with a NES Zelda) or you can use a bit of tape.
There's no need to overcomplicate things.
As a form of entertainment in moderation, all this focus on gaming is fine. Moderation meaning "it leaves time for continuing education, socialization, direct interaction with family, working to repair all the cultural fragmentation going on around us, checking out all the claims in the media so we are properly informed, and so on." But gaming typically ends up being a 4-16+ hours-a-day distraction from reality leaving no time for anything substantive.
A meaningful life is not one spent entertaining one's self.
Interesting fact is that Nintendo themselves downloaded ROM images from the internet for use in their Virtual Console. An example for this is a Super Mario Bros ROM for the NES. Where the image used on the console was stored in a format that was first implemented by the developer of the iNES emulator (Marat Fayzullin) and later adopted by other emulator authors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It might be ok for YOU to make a copy of works you own, but downloading someone else copy is different.
I still say we should move to a "you stop supporting it, you lose your rights to it" intellectual property methodology. If congress won't do it, then the citizens should.
Copyright and patents are utterly out of hand; corporate manipulation of the legal system has tilted the playing field beyond any reasonable conception of...
At this point, patent and copyright law directly and effciently degrade progress. It's time — past time — to just say no.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I believe there should be a grace period of a few years or something, and if a company no longer sells or licenses their "property", they forfeit it and it should go public domain
Pretty easy to get around that restriction, just charge $10^100 per copy.
That's just a matter of adjusting the cost scale. You can start with $1 for the first year and double it every year thereafter. It's a reasonable $1024 after 10 years and a much more costly $1,048,576 after 20. Disney might have a deep wallet, but they don't have an exponentially deep wallet.
>"Pretty easy to get around that restriction, just charge $10^100 per copy."
Good point. Maybe it should be based on sales and not offers.
The vast majority of past games are not available on Atari flashback, NES classic, etc. What happens if there is a game they want to put on a system and the company who developed it are out of business?
One small nit to pick. Zero TVs back then supported 240p. ZERO. That p stands for progressive-scan, this was not in use on televisions way back in the NES days. Those TVs (NTSC and PAL) supported 480i, which is interlace-scan with scanlines. 240p didn't come along until more recently.
The entire article is a giant "Think of the children!"
Can we move past such arguments as a society?
Or they need to learn from the music industry and just sell the ROMs. They should have gone to EmuParadise and said "You have 3 months to implement a billing system, pay us $2 per download, and lets make millions together."
It's not totally legal.
If it infringes fair use rights, or rights arising the 9th Amendment (right retained by the people, any and all rights the people want to assert), it's an illegal infringement of the law by the copyright holder.
The preservation of old ROMs is an exercise of such rights, superseding the time limits of copyright created by Acts of Congress.
Congress is not the highest law in the land - the Bill of Rights is the highest law in the land, and the Bill of Rights is open-ended.
If the copyright holder doesn't continue to produce any particular game, other people can make the ROMs available. That's fair use. The copyright holder might have grounds for asking for money if this is being done for gain, but has NO legal basis to prevent it from happening.
Infringement of fundamental rights "under the colour of law" is a criminal offence under US federal law, as well as grounds for civil suit. It's only corruption in US government and ethics problems in US law that allow companies to engage in this sort of illegal behaviour contrary to the law. Clearly the lesson the US government and US legal profession want our children to learn is that crime does pay.
You don't actually need to host ROMs on websites or BitTorrent. Dump them on Freenet, re-insert them once per month. Get the word out how people can get them (forums etc). Done, history preserved.
Nintendo only has control over Nintendo Roms.
And now I know why my generation got sick and tired of your BS NOA! Lol ðYNo Earthbound Trilogy in America even after 1995-2006!? I call you garbage Nintendo because thatâ(TM)s what you are today garbage!
buy old games at retro-shops, pawn shops, Goodwill, garage sales, e-bay, whatever.
Until other publishers start following the lead of Bethesda in threatening to sue secondhand sellers.
Try to prove I didn't. Especially if I bought and sold my ROM dumper secondhand.
Let's to the same with books and music: We can not afford the future generations losing access to all these relics!
Fortunately... There's a library exception to copyright law. Libraries CAN collect/hold/distribute ROMs.
The internet archive does so. Both for coin-op and consoles.
https://archive.org/details/internetarcade
https://archive.org/details/consolelivingroom
They even have MAME implemented in Javascript so you can play right there in the browser.
Control your anger kid. One of the roms on an official Nintendo platform was a hacked version of the rom, with changes made to it. Some roms get skinned. People hex edit the roms and change some of the graphics around. Nintendo accidentally published a skinned version of a rom instead of an unchanged version.