If a thing (game, software,...) is not "easily available" to buy locally, by the first party, in any usable form, companies should have no claims on damages, because piracy is a victimless crime.
Is ExampleGame(TM) on sale anywhere, on any platform? No? How can (eg) nintendo lose money then if i pirate it? Where's the harm in piracy then?
Nintendo and other video game companies don't want to have to compete with their past products. They want you to pay full price for their new games right now because it makes their sales figures look impressive. Older games too often lack the microtransactions, paid DLC, ads, and data collection that can enable companies to continuously extract money from their customers.
There are enough old games in existence today that a person could spend their entire life playing quality video games, be fully entertained, and never once touch a recently created title.
It's harder to keep coming up with new games that people will feel is more worthy of their time than older games. It's easy to just make sure that gamers can't access those great older games so that they're forced to put up with whatever expensive consumer-hostile garbage is on offer right now.
Companies currently have the freedom to keep burying their old games making them unavailable unless/until they choose to overcharge consumers and force them to pay again and again for ports and shitty/censored remakes of the same games they paid for before. They'll fight to keep that freedom.
> There are enough old games in existence today that a person could spend their entire life playing quality video games, be fully entertained, and never once touch a recently created title.
I cynically wonder if this is part of why these copyright laws will never change. People would buy fewer games if it were easy to play the good user-respecting classics. Can't have money go down, must maximize profit and sales.
I feel thankful to China. They don't usually have any regards for copyright, and that has allowed those cheap retro handheld consoles. They most often come with 1000s of games on a micro SD card. You have to stop import of those things, sue those Chinese makers or something to get rid of them. More power to them I guess.
I mean sure, but if I eg. pirate eg. Pokemon Blue (the original game for the GB, afaik, unavailable on anything that you can buy from nintendo today), and play that, I pirated it because I wanted to play that exact game (since i'm already pirating, i could pirate something newer for the same price of "free" if I wanted to, but no, I want pokemon blue). Assuming that I would buy (and pay for) whatever the newest pokemon game for switch instead is a stupid assumption.
If they want people to buy old games, sell them old games. Put a gamboy emulator on the switch, put a rom-store inside it, and charge a few bucks for a game.
There are many other media where you could stay with the old... books for example, there are many more out-of-copyright books than a person could reasonably read in a lifetime, but you still want to read some newest freshest bestsellers, not just the Mysterious Island from jules verne (which is actually available to buy, even if it's out of copyright!)
For that argument to work, wouldn't you need to have the assumption that people don't value the old games? Because people clearly do value being able to play these old games. Otherwise, emulation wouldn't even be so popular in the first place.
Remember, capitalism is all finding the maximum amount people would pay in order to be able to do something they value doing, and then charging them that. Or to put it another way, it doesn't matter whether Nintendo thinks it has any value, just that you do. And the way Western governments are set up kind of facilitates that.
The legacy video game libraries were kept alive by emulator developers and ROM collectors. Now that these emulators have re-invigorated enough interest to make some $$$, they want to kill them and reap the dough.
As a simple example, why would Amazon not immediately sell ebook versions of every book ever if copyright ended? Ditto for adding every movie and show to every streaming service, meaning there'd be no incentive to make them.
Copyright is way too long, but it's not worthless.
> As a simple example, why would Amazon not immediately sell ebook versions of every book ever if copyright ended?
Why would I even use Amazon in this scenario?
> there'd be no incentive to make them.
People do make stuff for reasons other than money you know. We might see less shows, but certainly shows of higher quality, originality, and passion. I’ve witnessed the opposite shift myself on several occasions, when creative communities I participated in suddenly found monetization (online videos, game mods, etc). Suddenly there’s much more junk from people trying to cash in. There’s a reason artists make fun of sellouts!
The point isn't "Amazon", it's "insert ebook distribution platform". If you prefer you can just as easily mentally substitute Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Apple Books, Pirate Bay, or "ebooks123 (dot) biz".
And sure, there'd be writing, but not "authors". There'd be movies, but nothing with an appreciable budget. Plenty of big budget movies suck, but that doesn't mean I'd rather they not exist as a category.
There's a middle ground that needs to be reached. I also know too many artists in creative communities that are forced into menial labor because they can't monetize their work enough to pay the bills.
Copyright still serves an important function (without any copyright, the companies with access to physical media creation would trivially steal from smaller ones) but 70-100yrs is an absurd amount of time that only benefits century old publishers.
Yeah the entire PS4 emulation effort is being driven solely by Sony's refusal to release Bloodborne on PC or make it playable at 60 fps on PS5.
And they have succeeded. Just about everything is perfect now. So naturally when Sony does decide to do what they should have done years ago they will probably pull a Nintendo and sue ShadPS4 into the ground, followed by using an emulator in a museum to showcase old games.
That's what Big IP wants. If copyright is drastically shortened, Mickey Mouse can rake in new IP more quickly and further reduce royalties for creators.
Instead let's support creators directly, boycott publishers, buy and produce physical media, avoid media subscriptions, and shift gaming to open source.
Besides the fact that I have yet to see any "Big IP" fight for anything but strengthening and lengthening IP rights, your premise doesn't compute: Depending on the country copyright is either by itself transferable (and by far and away is done automatically in an employer-employee relationship) or transferable via exclusive licensing rights (for example in Germany).
It's bizarre to think that Disney somehow has to fight their employees for Disney IP right. It would be nice if that was the case, but it isn't.
Disney as an IP hoarder would lose, but Amazon as an IP retailer would win. If there was zero copyright, how could a independent publisher or small author compete? Amazon could just take everything ever and sell it at lowest available price.
What? That makes zero sense, how do you figure that Disney, which makes a tremendous amount of money on licensing it's IP and is always fighting to strengthen and lengthen copyright would actually be better off if we did the opposite of what they've been fighting for for the last 100 years?
Most of their IP is itself derivative: fairy tales, mythology, classic novels, a Buston Keaton film, etc.
With OG Mickey now lost to the public domain, they're shifting to trademarks [1], merchandise, media access (i.e. hastening the demise of physical media [2] to regain the cinema-style control they always favored until VHS busted open their vault and briefly enabled media ownership/collectibility/free repeat viewing), sports, and theme parks. Note that they now bring in more from sports and experiences than entertainment. [3]
They'll look to commoditize copyright, so creators continue working for them for distribution instead of operating independently. If they can't automate the creators.
This is not a popular opinion: way too many games journalists have lost all notion of objectivity because they want to change copyright policy, and I am sick to death of intentionally misleading articles like this. Here is just one snippet:
> In an odd footnote, the Register also notes that emulation of classic game consoles, while not infringing in its own right, has been "historically associated with piracy," thus "rais[ing] a potential concern" for any emulated remote access to library game catalogs. That footnote paradoxically cites Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) founder and director Frank Cifaldi's 2016 Game Developers Conference talk on the demonization of emulation and its importance to video game preservation.
> "The moment I became the Joker is when someone in charge of copyright law watched my GDC talk about how it's wrong to associate emulation with piracy and their takeaway was 'emulation is associated with piracy,'" Cifaldi quipped in a social media post.
The minor issue is that you shouldn’t focus on errors in footnotes for 300-page documents (Orland makes no attempt at an honest summary of the judges’ reasoning). But the critical flaw in this snippet that Cifaldi is himself acting in bad faith, because he mischaracterized his own talk:
> Because [we demonized emulation] I think two things happened. One is that old games became the domain of the pirates, so people started thinking of games the same way we were thinking of MP3s in the Napster days, where it’s just like “music’s free now, who cares?” And we also I think by not getting ahead of it and getting games back in print through emulation, I think for a lot of games it’s too late now, and the legal rights are just never going to get cleared up for a lot of games. [errors are mine, this is from YouTube]
Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a powerful means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of game developers. The reason the US Copyright office cited this talk was to point this out, that the publishers’ concerns were shared by a prominent games preservation activist. Faced with this information, the activist simply lied about his own words, and the journalist did zero investigative work on his own, shamelessly smearing an honest judge who wrote an honest footnote.
Good arguments don’t need to be supported by easily falsifiable lies. Games journalists need to do their f*ckin’ jobs.
That seems like an unfair way to characterize what he was saying. The point is that of course emulators will be associated with piracy if publishers won't sell ROMs, and use technological measures to try to prevent third-party implementations from being able to run legitimately purchased games (i.e. perform product tying, which is supposed to be illegal), and bankrupt commercial emulator companies through lawfare even when they know they have a losing case. Average people don't have the means or technical know-how to rip ROMs themselves, so piracy becomes the easier path.
Like I don't own a Switch and I'm not going to buy a relatively expensive single-purpose piece of hardware like that to e.g. see what TotK is about. If I were going to buy a handheld, I'd probably buy something like an Asus or Valve device, which are higher performance and can run Linux. But in order to use an emulator, you necessarily have to pirate it because they won't sell it. For older games, the rights holders don't publish it at all, so again naturally over time as the old copies are discarded or damaged, only pirated copies will remain. That has nothing to do with emulation, and everything to do with the fact that the things being pirated aren't for sale.
If the music industry still refused to sell anything other than vinyl, portable music players would've been associated with piracy too, but only because most people aren't going to bother to rip their own music off a record player when someone else already went through the trouble. DRM is just doubling down on this thinking. If they wouldn't sell anything older than 5 years out of their catalogue, rock music would also be associated with piracy.
I don’t see the “clear acknowledgement that emulation … has done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of game developers”. Cifaldi is arguing that _because_ emulation was not better supported, users had no choice but to pirate the games they wanted to play. He’s asking game developers to provide a convenient and legal way to play the games, and predicting that will reduce piracy. I tend to agree with the argument. Between buying copies for friends and getting new versions, I’ve orchard age of empires at least 10 different times on steam. But before it was available on steam, I absolutely was pirating it (please don’t hurt me FBI). Pirating is annoying, I don’t want to deal with sketchy websites, I just want the game. Of course that’s just one datapoint
I've bought games Steam that are available for free (not pirating, literally no charge) for the convenience of Proton setup. In other cases, I've bought on Steam as a way to support the Dev (Krita comes to mind... not a game, though).
I and many others paid for Dwarf Fortress, you can go to their website and download (admittedly a non-GUI version) for free right now. Make good things, and make them available and people will want to pay you.
> Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a powerful means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of game developers.
Why didn’t you say profits?
The game developers didn’t lose their right through emulation.
And how much profit they lose is to debate because the film industry claimed the same with billions of damage as if every pirated copy would have been as sold copy without piracy.
Too bad a study of the EU showed otherwise.
> "Further, while the Register appreciates that proponents have suggested broad safeguards that could deter recreational uses of video games in some cases, she believes that such requirements are not specific enough to conclude that they would prevent market harms."
They're clearly only worried about profits when the purpose of copyright is not to enforce profits but to promote the creation of new works.
You're forgetting that copyright is limited. The public grants companies a limited license to profit off the work and then it enters the public domain. At least, thats how it's suppose to be, but corporations lobbied to extend copyright for, how many years is it now?
Tell me you're an IP lawyer without telling me you're an IP lawyer:
> Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a powerful means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of game developers.
It's not mental gymnastics to say that the people who use emulation can be divided into groups who would have and who would not have otherwise paid for a game. There is damage done, despite all the people who only use emulation ethically.
Even the people who only pirate games that are no longer for sale could end up withholding money from the industry because their gaming needs are met by the quasi-piracy.
You can disagree with him, but smugly pretending he doesn't have a point is disingenuous.
People who live can also be divided into groups who would have and who would not have paid for a game. There is damage done, despite all the people who only live ethically.
Even the people who do something else (than buying a game that can't be bought) could end up withholding money from the industry because their gaming needs are met by something else.
That's not an argument for why "something else" is bad.
Nope sorry. There is no data that supports that. We are mostly talking about emulation to play games that are no longer playable that are considered abandonware. Copyright was meant to be a short limit so an organization or individual can profit and then the work gets put into the public domain. There is no god given right to maximize profits beyond 5 or 10 years a most. The whole 95 year thing is a sham meant to prevent creative works from entering into the public domain.
old games became the domain of the pirates, so people started thinking of games the same way we were thinking of MP3s in the Napster days, where it’s just like “music’s free now, who cares?”
Does it really take mental gymnastics to read the above quotation that way?
The part you cut from the quote actually gives it the opposite meaning: emulation was demonized so only the people who were okay with piracy considered it.
Going from that to "emulation caused irreparable harm to developers" takes some chutzpah.
Copyright laws really really need a reform.
If a thing (game, software,...) is not "easily available" to buy locally, by the first party, in any usable form, companies should have no claims on damages, because piracy is a victimless crime.
Is ExampleGame(TM) on sale anywhere, on any platform? No? How can (eg) nintendo lose money then if i pirate it? Where's the harm in piracy then?
> Where's the harm in piracy then?
Nintendo and other video game companies don't want to have to compete with their past products. They want you to pay full price for their new games right now because it makes their sales figures look impressive. Older games too often lack the microtransactions, paid DLC, ads, and data collection that can enable companies to continuously extract money from their customers.
There are enough old games in existence today that a person could spend their entire life playing quality video games, be fully entertained, and never once touch a recently created title.
It's harder to keep coming up with new games that people will feel is more worthy of their time than older games. It's easy to just make sure that gamers can't access those great older games so that they're forced to put up with whatever expensive consumer-hostile garbage is on offer right now.
Companies currently have the freedom to keep burying their old games making them unavailable unless/until they choose to overcharge consumers and force them to pay again and again for ports and shitty/censored remakes of the same games they paid for before. They'll fight to keep that freedom.
> There are enough old games in existence today that a person could spend their entire life playing quality video games, be fully entertained, and never once touch a recently created title.
I cynically wonder if this is part of why these copyright laws will never change. People would buy fewer games if it were easy to play the good user-respecting classics. Can't have money go down, must maximize profit and sales.
I feel thankful to China. They don't usually have any regards for copyright, and that has allowed those cheap retro handheld consoles. They most often come with 1000s of games on a micro SD card. You have to stop import of those things, sue those Chinese makers or something to get rid of them. More power to them I guess.
I mean sure, but if I eg. pirate eg. Pokemon Blue (the original game for the GB, afaik, unavailable on anything that you can buy from nintendo today), and play that, I pirated it because I wanted to play that exact game (since i'm already pirating, i could pirate something newer for the same price of "free" if I wanted to, but no, I want pokemon blue). Assuming that I would buy (and pay for) whatever the newest pokemon game for switch instead is a stupid assumption.
If they want people to buy old games, sell them old games. Put a gamboy emulator on the switch, put a rom-store inside it, and charge a few bucks for a game.
There are many other media where you could stay with the old... books for example, there are many more out-of-copyright books than a person could reasonably read in a lifetime, but you still want to read some newest freshest bestsellers, not just the Mysterious Island from jules verne (which is actually available to buy, even if it's out of copyright!)
I'd go further than that, there's no valid reason to monetize 40 year old games where most of the devs are retired or dead.
The law still pretends that there's a transfer of value there when there's obviously not, the society has moved on.
For that argument to work, wouldn't you need to have the assumption that people don't value the old games? Because people clearly do value being able to play these old games. Otherwise, emulation wouldn't even be so popular in the first place.
Remember, capitalism is all finding the maximum amount people would pay in order to be able to do something they value doing, and then charging them that. Or to put it another way, it doesn't matter whether Nintendo thinks it has any value, just that you do. And the way Western governments are set up kind of facilitates that.
(I'm not a fan of capitalism. Can you tell?)
Has it ever been tested in court? Has anyone been sued for pirating a game that isn't for sale anywhere?
Is there a cut-off to this or is it completely inclusive of stuff like Spacewar, Pong, Colossal Cave Adventure and pedit5?
It's copyright, so... 95 years or whatever.
So you could probably recreate the original monopoly in 2030?
The legacy video game libraries were kept alive by emulator developers and ROM collectors. Now that these emulators have re-invigorated enough interest to make some $$$, they want to kill them and reap the dough.
Copyright needs to be drastically shortened.
Or ended. The idea of owning ideas is dumb, and corporations abuse the concept more than it benefits individuals.
As a simple example, why would Amazon not immediately sell ebook versions of every book ever if copyright ended? Ditto for adding every movie and show to every streaming service, meaning there'd be no incentive to make them.
Copyright is way too long, but it's not worthless.
> As a simple example, why would Amazon not immediately sell ebook versions of every book ever if copyright ended?
Why would I even use Amazon in this scenario?
> there'd be no incentive to make them.
People do make stuff for reasons other than money you know. We might see less shows, but certainly shows of higher quality, originality, and passion. I’ve witnessed the opposite shift myself on several occasions, when creative communities I participated in suddenly found monetization (online videos, game mods, etc). Suddenly there’s much more junk from people trying to cash in. There’s a reason artists make fun of sellouts!
> Why would I even use Amazon in this scenario?
The point isn't "Amazon", it's "insert ebook distribution platform". If you prefer you can just as easily mentally substitute Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Apple Books, Pirate Bay, or "ebooks123 (dot) biz".
And sure, there'd be writing, but not "authors". There'd be movies, but nothing with an appreciable budget. Plenty of big budget movies suck, but that doesn't mean I'd rather they not exist as a category.
There's a middle ground that needs to be reached. I also know too many artists in creative communities that are forced into menial labor because they can't monetize their work enough to pay the bills.
Why would anyone buy an ebook from Amazon in this world where books are free?
There are lots of things produced without a copyright-like legal structure that gives retained property rights.
It was just an example. Without copyright, ebooks would pretty immediately be free, so why "buy" any book?
And what do you mean by "retained property rights" over the contents of a book, such that it isn't just renaming copyright?
Copyright still serves an important function (without any copyright, the companies with access to physical media creation would trivially steal from smaller ones) but 70-100yrs is an absurd amount of time that only benefits century old publishers.
Yeah the entire PS4 emulation effort is being driven solely by Sony's refusal to release Bloodborne on PC or make it playable at 60 fps on PS5.
And they have succeeded. Just about everything is perfect now. So naturally when Sony does decide to do what they should have done years ago they will probably pull a Nintendo and sue ShadPS4 into the ground, followed by using an emulator in a museum to showcase old games.
That's what Big IP wants. If copyright is drastically shortened, Mickey Mouse can rake in new IP more quickly and further reduce royalties for creators.
Instead let's support creators directly, boycott publishers, buy and produce physical media, avoid media subscriptions, and shift gaming to open source.
Besides the fact that I have yet to see any "Big IP" fight for anything but strengthening and lengthening IP rights, your premise doesn't compute: Depending on the country copyright is either by itself transferable (and by far and away is done automatically in an employer-employee relationship) or transferable via exclusive licensing rights (for example in Germany).
It's bizarre to think that Disney somehow has to fight their employees for Disney IP right. It would be nice if that was the case, but it isn't.
Disney as an IP hoarder would lose, but Amazon as an IP retailer would win. If there was zero copyright, how could a independent publisher or small author compete? Amazon could just take everything ever and sell it at lowest available price.
If there was zero copyright, why would I pay Amazon any price? And if I do pay someone, why would it be anyone other than the original author?
What? That makes zero sense, how do you figure that Disney, which makes a tremendous amount of money on licensing it's IP and is always fighting to strengthen and lengthen copyright would actually be better off if we did the opposite of what they've been fighting for for the last 100 years?
Most of their IP is itself derivative: fairy tales, mythology, classic novels, a Buston Keaton film, etc.
With OG Mickey now lost to the public domain, they're shifting to trademarks [1], merchandise, media access (i.e. hastening the demise of physical media [2] to regain the cinema-style control they always favored until VHS busted open their vault and briefly enabled media ownership/collectibility/free repeat viewing), sports, and theme parks. Note that they now bring in more from sports and experiences than entertainment. [3]
They'll look to commoditize copyright, so creators continue working for them for distribution instead of operating independently. If they can't automate the creators.
1. https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-courts-dog-toy-ruli...
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2023/08/02/with-sale...
3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/193140/revenue-of-the-wa...
This is not a popular opinion: way too many games journalists have lost all notion of objectivity because they want to change copyright policy, and I am sick to death of intentionally misleading articles like this. Here is just one snippet:
> In an odd footnote, the Register also notes that emulation of classic game consoles, while not infringing in its own right, has been "historically associated with piracy," thus "rais[ing] a potential concern" for any emulated remote access to library game catalogs. That footnote paradoxically cites Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) founder and director Frank Cifaldi's 2016 Game Developers Conference talk on the demonization of emulation and its importance to video game preservation.
> "The moment I became the Joker is when someone in charge of copyright law watched my GDC talk about how it's wrong to associate emulation with piracy and their takeaway was 'emulation is associated with piracy,'" Cifaldi quipped in a social media post.
The minor issue is that you shouldn’t focus on errors in footnotes for 300-page documents (Orland makes no attempt at an honest summary of the judges’ reasoning). But the critical flaw in this snippet that Cifaldi is himself acting in bad faith, because he mischaracterized his own talk:
> Because [we demonized emulation] I think two things happened. One is that old games became the domain of the pirates, so people started thinking of games the same way we were thinking of MP3s in the Napster days, where it’s just like “music’s free now, who cares?” And we also I think by not getting ahead of it and getting games back in print through emulation, I think for a lot of games it’s too late now, and the legal rights are just never going to get cleared up for a lot of games. [errors are mine, this is from YouTube]
Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a powerful means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of game developers. The reason the US Copyright office cited this talk was to point this out, that the publishers’ concerns were shared by a prominent games preservation activist. Faced with this information, the activist simply lied about his own words, and the journalist did zero investigative work on his own, shamelessly smearing an honest judge who wrote an honest footnote.
Good arguments don’t need to be supported by easily falsifiable lies. Games journalists need to do their f*ckin’ jobs.
That seems like an unfair way to characterize what he was saying. The point is that of course emulators will be associated with piracy if publishers won't sell ROMs, and use technological measures to try to prevent third-party implementations from being able to run legitimately purchased games (i.e. perform product tying, which is supposed to be illegal), and bankrupt commercial emulator companies through lawfare even when they know they have a losing case. Average people don't have the means or technical know-how to rip ROMs themselves, so piracy becomes the easier path.
Like I don't own a Switch and I'm not going to buy a relatively expensive single-purpose piece of hardware like that to e.g. see what TotK is about. If I were going to buy a handheld, I'd probably buy something like an Asus or Valve device, which are higher performance and can run Linux. But in order to use an emulator, you necessarily have to pirate it because they won't sell it. For older games, the rights holders don't publish it at all, so again naturally over time as the old copies are discarded or damaged, only pirated copies will remain. That has nothing to do with emulation, and everything to do with the fact that the things being pirated aren't for sale.
If the music industry still refused to sell anything other than vinyl, portable music players would've been associated with piracy too, but only because most people aren't going to bother to rip their own music off a record player when someone else already went through the trouble. DRM is just doubling down on this thinking. If they wouldn't sell anything older than 5 years out of their catalogue, rock music would also be associated with piracy.
I don’t see the “clear acknowledgement that emulation … has done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of game developers”. Cifaldi is arguing that _because_ emulation was not better supported, users had no choice but to pirate the games they wanted to play. He’s asking game developers to provide a convenient and legal way to play the games, and predicting that will reduce piracy. I tend to agree with the argument. Between buying copies for friends and getting new versions, I’ve orchard age of empires at least 10 different times on steam. But before it was available on steam, I absolutely was pirating it (please don’t hurt me FBI). Pirating is annoying, I don’t want to deal with sketchy websites, I just want the game. Of course that’s just one datapoint
I've bought games Steam that are available for free (not pirating, literally no charge) for the convenience of Proton setup. In other cases, I've bought on Steam as a way to support the Dev (Krita comes to mind... not a game, though).
I and many others paid for Dwarf Fortress, you can go to their website and download (admittedly a non-GUI version) for free right now. Make good things, and make them available and people will want to pay you.
Yes, that was one of the ones I purchased. The Dwarf Fortress team deserved it.
> Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a powerful means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of game developers.
Why didn’t you say profits?
The game developers didn’t lose their right through emulation.
And how much profit they lose is to debate because the film industry claimed the same with billions of damage as if every pirated copy would have been as sold copy without piracy. Too bad a study of the EU showed otherwise.
That bothered me about this statement too:
> "Further, while the Register appreciates that proponents have suggested broad safeguards that could deter recreational uses of video games in some cases, she believes that such requirements are not specific enough to conclude that they would prevent market harms."
They're clearly only worried about profits when the purpose of copyright is not to enforce profits but to promote the creation of new works.
You're forgetting that copyright is limited. The public grants companies a limited license to profit off the work and then it enters the public domain. At least, thats how it's suppose to be, but corporations lobbied to extend copyright for, how many years is it now?
Your argument is the one that is disingenuous.
Tell me you're an IP lawyer without telling me you're an IP lawyer:
> Here Cifaldi clearly acknowledges that emulation is a powerful means of piracy that has done irreparable damage to the intellectual property rights of game developers.
That's some serious mental gymnastics, man.
It's not mental gymnastics to say that the people who use emulation can be divided into groups who would have and who would not have otherwise paid for a game. There is damage done, despite all the people who only use emulation ethically.
Even the people who only pirate games that are no longer for sale could end up withholding money from the industry because their gaming needs are met by the quasi-piracy.
You can disagree with him, but smugly pretending he doesn't have a point is disingenuous.
By the same arguments:
People who live can also be divided into groups who would have and who would not have paid for a game. There is damage done, despite all the people who only live ethically.
Even the people who do something else (than buying a game that can't be bought) could end up withholding money from the industry because their gaming needs are met by something else.
That's not an argument for why "something else" is bad.
It's ridiculous.
Nope sorry. There is no data that supports that. We are mostly talking about emulation to play games that are no longer playable that are considered abandonware. Copyright was meant to be a short limit so an organization or individual can profit and then the work gets put into the public domain. There is no god given right to maximize profits beyond 5 or 10 years a most. The whole 95 year thing is a sham meant to prevent creative works from entering into the public domain.
old games became the domain of the pirates, so people started thinking of games the same way we were thinking of MP3s in the Napster days, where it’s just like “music’s free now, who cares?”
Does it really take mental gymnastics to read the above quotation that way?
The part you cut from the quote actually gives it the opposite meaning: emulation was demonized so only the people who were okay with piracy considered it.
Going from that to "emulation caused irreparable harm to developers" takes some chutzpah.