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.

Comments

Re:Need a "use it or lose it" IP policy

[MightyYar]

This just shows that copyright terms are too long. Copyright is meant as an incentive to produce new creative works, and no one (especially a business) is significantly motivated by what might happen after they are dead. Make it roughly equal to patent protection and move on - Toru Iwatani didn't create Pac Man because he thought royalties would be paid to Namco for 90 years, he did it because Namco paid him to fulfil an immediate need they had to sell competitive arcade consoles. If they only had 5 or 10 years of protection, they still would have paid him to create Pac Man.

Surprised people aren't making the connection here

[Solandri]

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. [...] 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.

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.)

Here's one way to get around this:

[Rick Schumann]

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.

Re: Need a "use it or lose it" IP policy

[dissy]

Why LIMITED though?

Because that is what artists agreed to for copyright to exist.

You don't just get to limit everyone's rights for no reason or benefit to them. We exchanged some of our rights for a limited time, to give you some incentive to create art.

Remember that our deal to you was optional, it is todays government that is forcing that deal upon you no matter if you like it or not. Go blame them for that.

Or alternately if you'd prefer, if we didn't get anything out of the copyright deal, we wouldn't GIVE you a deal at all.
So limited is there so you have an additional reason to make art, you have a time to profit.
Not limited means no deal, you get nothing, no protection, no time to profit, nothing.

The thing is, as an artist, you have to follow the law just like everyone else.
Perhaps not you personally, but the VAST majority of artists today feel so entitled they can simply break the law and ignore the deal set forth in copyright law.

Finally, eventually, we have said fuck it. If artists refuse to follow the law, there is no reason for us to do so either, thus the piracy is pretty universally thought of as moral. Even artists who say it isn't moral pirate, showing they really feel the same.

Look at Nintendo. Right there in their statement:

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,"

You may not be aware, but Nintendo has consistently claimed emulator software is illegal and infringes their rights.
They are, falsely, claiming ownership of a CPU they never were involved in making. They have NO rights to the 6502 CPU yet right there in bold they claim they own all rights to a piece of hardware completely designed and produced by MOS Technology.

Nintendo has no problem claiming things created by not-nintendo are theirs.
How can they, or you for them, possibly follow that up saying its OK when they claim ownership on other peoples property, but not OK when we claim ownership of Nintendo's property?

Nintendo doesn't wish to follow the law, they outright admit following the law shouldn't be done, evidenced by the fact they haven't done so for over 30 years.
There is no moral complaint possible from them when we don't follow the law either and refuse to give them any copyright protection.

This thinking isn't unique to Nintendo either, most all artists think this way, and your question implies you do or did think that was somehow the normal and standard.

You should think long and hard about questioning the value of a gift given to you, because the fact of the matter is we chose to give that gift to you in the first place, and we can choose to stop offering you gifts completely when everyone is so ungrateful for it.

I still say we should move to...

[fyngyrz]

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...

to promote the progress of science and useful arts

...as laid out in the US constitution (I'm a US citizen, so it's the US I am concerned with.)

At this point, patent and copyright law directly and effciently degrade progress. It's time — past time — to just say no.