Publishers are absolutely terrified "preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes," so the US copyright office has struck down a major effort for game preservation

market harm

Fucking die.

Maybe if your citizens weren't struggling for food, more people could buy shitty AAA games.
These pieces of shits have taken huge Ls for decades by virtue of emulators and ROMs existing. Fuck these ghouls, pirate everything and pirate forever.

Just pirate everything you can and call for a complete reform of copyright (or abolishment of copyright if you want to be actually cool). You'll never get anywhere with arguments about preservation and shit, why would a government that doesn't care about preserving the planet care about preserving some shitty videogames

Always pirate if you can. Fuck them.

That, and they were incredibly careless with the new technology. Fires burned quite a few of them because they weren’t properly or carefully stored.
- Most of Monty Python's original work at the BBC was simply taped over to cut costs. The only reason any of it survived is because one of them hoarded a bunch of it in their attic.

What if someone enjoys reading something preserved in the Library of Congress? Better shut it down just to be safe

- We have had local politicians clamoring to cut funding to our city's public library because Google exists.

The US copyright office has denied a request for a DMCA exemption that would allow libraries to remotely share digital access to preserved video games.

Damn, can't check out Leisure Suit Larry or Beat-em and Eat-em from my local library anymore because of "woke."

But they could make them again, perhaps as a collection of games on a bespoke console. It's like unexploited land that they're enforcing their borders around. It's just one more facet of digital enclosure.
- Counterpoint, if they haven't done it by now, they aren't going to.
It's not even that they want to make a profit off of old games. What they want is players to spend all their time in the new slop and if they can spend time playing retro games instead that would be a loss. Of course that's not realistic because treat addict g@mers and retro passionates aren't really overlapping but the suits don't know that they think there is one unique video games market
- Not to mention all the remakes game companies are churning out. I don't think people would be as eager to buy them if the originals are accessible.
- They can pry my Peggle from my cold, dead, hands!

Art under capitalism is so fucking sad.

Is medicinal use still accepted?

Piracy is a practical and moral imperative.

"This fails the needs of citizens in favor of a weak sauce argument from the industry, and it's really disappointing"

I wonder why the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie would side with capital over the proletariat?

death to all IP lawyers. modern games are all fortnite clone over-the-shoulder battle royale microtransaction games, even single player games have microtransactions and locked over-the-right-shoulder cameras. every time i see a new game i have to temper my excitement until i see gameplay footage to check if it has that godawful fortnite locked-to-the-right-shoulder camera perspective, which they almost always do. all 3rd person games should either have centered cameras or the ability to switch which side the camera is on so i can aim around cover to the left sometimes instead of always moving right or having the disadvantage against those who can.

i hate modern gaming, i'm going to go play Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri (the Terran Hegemony did nothing wrong)

Over two hundred years before the beginning of the game, Earth is subsumed by a world government called the Hegemony, whose "Publicanism" philosophy PC Zone summarized as "communism without the economic restrictions". The Hegemony annexes colonies throughout the Solar System, but the inhabitants of Jupiter's moons reach an agreement that allows them to relocate to Alpha Centauri, where they settle on the Earth-like NewHope and the frozen Thatcher planets.
so the villain is super communism and the protagonists are a bunch of space neoliberals that named their planets after fucking Margaret Thatcher?
holy shit the
in US sci-fi lmaooo
- SERIOUSLY! i read the lore entries in-game and almost every single thing they mentioned about the Hegemony was incredibly based despite being presented as some unspeakable orwellian evil lmao. like way more lines saying stuff like 'hegemony citizens all get healthcare and food and housing' than the bad stuff like 'they are ruled by a class of orphan oligarchs'.
You know what doesn't have the over the right shoulder view? Peggle

Publishers are terrified, just TERRIFIED, someone might enjoy some media without them receiving THEIR FAIR CUT!

I’m actually stunned. “Market harm” is a stupid term and it’s being used for games that aren’t even being sold anymore. Games that most kids or adults aren’t going out of their way to find. Anyone else want to play 8-bit Bug’s Life?

You wanna talk absurd--they argued that making a word processing program from 2004 remotely available for viewing primary sources could represent a "market harm" to modern word processing software.

Yeah man but tell me more about how women are ruining video games.

Very similar to last year's ruling against the Internet Archive's Open Library:

But Koetl wrote that any “alleged benefits” from the Internet Archive’s library “cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers,” declares that “there is nothing transformative about [Internet Archive’s] copying and unauthorized lending,” and that copying these books doesn’t provide “criticism, commentary, or information about them.” He notes that the Google Books use was found “transformative” because it created a searchable database instead of simply publishing copies of books on the internet.

Also for out-of-print media.

can't have shit in this country not even NES ROMs

I wanna strike down these publishers

That's the point?

"um but someone might play them"

I watched the public hearings for the proposed rule changes back when they were held in April and the smug-ass industry lawyers were fucking infuriating:

https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2024/hearings.html (if the highlight link doesn't work, the relevant videos are under Proposed Class 6)

Transcripts available here

edit: Probably the most absurd argument that stuck with me was during the second part of the hearing on non-game preservation. The people in favor of the new rule were talking about preserving ancient word processor software and allowing it to be accessed remotely so that people could access primary documents in their original form, and the software/IP lawyers seriously argued that remotely accessing 20+ year old word processing software would represent potential market harm. Here's a lightly edited transcript (mostly just taking out the moderator passing the baton), emphasis mine, with the representative's positions before their statements for clarity:

edit²: as disheartening an outcome as this was, one thing I did take away from the hearing was that there are some incredibly smart, passionate, and dedicated people working against all odds to try to get these rule changes enacted. So much respect for the people who believe we can have a better world and going up to bat against industries worth hundreds of billions of dollars.