Copyright on software should be much shorter than other media.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
88 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
3 readers
1 users here now
founded 2 years ago
Copyright on software should end once it’s no longer commercially available for purchase.
That seems incredibly reasonable.
This is why emulation is so important. Media must be preserved.
We are fortunate that MAME exists.
So many games are released in a broken state and require online updates, even with the physical media in the future the game could be unplayable.
LAN play is nearly extinct at this point. Devs will say, "hardly anyone uses it, so we didn't include it", but it's a convenient way to build a dependence on their online servers for multiplayer to curb piracy. Eventually those servers shut down, and LAN will be required to play those games multiplayer, but the feature won't be there to lean on.
This is the problem I’ve started finding. I have another comment on this post about it, but I’ve bought 2 games now that have inactive servers. Because the disc still exists and I buy mostly physical, used.
Can’t play them, and probably never will be able to, but the guy working the used game place didn’t alert me to the servers being shut down so it was just an unpleasant surprise…
Servers are horrible for gaming. I get it when it’s something like wow, you need servers, but the games I buy I get because they appear to be single player, or can be played single player. The fuck do I need to access a server for for a single player game?
I try to avoid games that require online play, but even that is getting harder because it doesn’t specify that the game could die at any time if they close the servers…
I had a network card addon for ps2 -and this was when ps3 was already a few years old- logged in to play champions of norrath. No other players. But it wasn’t on a server, or perhaps it spun one up when I connected, so even way after the game itself died, I could still play online if someone else did. They didn’t, but that’s not the point.
Yeah, I've stopped buying those games too. No time or attention from me unless that game can survive the situation where the server at the other end goes down. This does create a lot of grey areas though. Does Hitman count? You can technically finish the whole story mode, but the progression and replay unlocks are all stuck behind a server authentication. How about fighting games? You can play the entire competitive game locally, forever, but once the server is gone, you'll never be able to play online again except with subpar solutions like Parsec. The way I've drawn my line in the sand, and I'm free to redraw it, is that Hitman is unacceptable, and the state of fighting games right now (we'll see what happens with Multiversus and Project L) is begrudgingly acceptable.
With Multiversus, they've at least said that offline play will remain available.
It wasn't available before, so I'm not sure how much I trust them.
at least java minecraft does that part right with the offline mode that switches off auth checks. for a real online server you need a login plugin then (makes sense that some form of username ownership verify is needed in that case) but for a secured LAN it is usable by default.
Fortunately, there are cracks that remove the always-online dependence of a lot of these games.
Not according to my ROM archive.
Right, but that's not the availability problem that this survey is highlighting. They're always going to be available illegally - no one's debating that, even the VGHF folks have said as such.
The problem is that video games aren't legally protected for institutional use the same way books, movies, music, etc are.
Lol and the AVGN has a whole basement full of them as well…
And yet the subsequent owners after numerous acquisitions will still often pursue those who try to archive such things in the off chance they might one day re-release some niche game from 1980.
@cnk I upload my collection to archive.org
Good idea! But I suppose that's a bit of a grey area in terms of rights?
@cnk so. That is a long story. They want to be legal under the term of 'fair use'. And want to protect history of books, software, web and alike. They lost lawsuits over ebooks. It's a big problem I think. Sure copyright is to protect the writer or producer. But at the same time we can't just lose all the data from the past if we aren't allowed to archive it?!?
I'm no expert in the law, but I hope we can archive old software and digitalize other content in a legal manner.