this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
425 points (99.3% liked)
PC Gaming
8651 readers
392 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Copyright should only exist if the entire work, including the entire code base, is held in escrow by the copyright office.
If you don't do that, you don't get protection. This is literally the reason why patents exist, you tell us how you did it, and we prevent anyone else from copying that method for a period of time.
Mandatory deposit is already required for copyright registration, and this includes video games.
Wtf??? Then they have nothing to fucking say about the copyright of games, if they don't have them preserved at the copyright office
Do we know if they send copies over there, or otherwise archive them there? If not, then fucking hell
That interview was in 2012, in case you're curious.
The issue here isn't the absence of archived video games. Copies of those games exist at the Library of Congress. And just like a physical book at your local library, you have to go to the library if you want to borrow them.
The Video Game History Foundation wants to download those games, kind of like the e-books available at many libraries. By law, this requires a licensing agreement between the library and the copyright holder. That's why for many books, libraries only have physical copies. So the VGHF wants to change that.
🫢stealing this library and creating a torrent would be such a pirate move, like, I don’t know what could top that, global hero
They are in physical form, so they all still have the original DRM. And if the DRM has been cracked, then a torrent probably already exists.
If the game is popular enough, I guess
Just having a copy of a Game doesn't help at all with preservation when the games have DRM. Preservation is more then just safe storage, preservation also means to ensure that the content can be used by future generations. This is in general not really an issue with physical media like sculptures, books or paintings. But with digital media this often means that the data has to be copied to other media, convert the data to other formats, or write/use emulators or even rebuild the engine of the game to ensure that a piece of software written now can still be used by whatever hardware/software architecture is in use 20, 50 or 100 years from now. And such preservation has to start when the data is fresh and new, not in 50 or 100 years.