That probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to retro gaming enthusiasts, but those outside the gaming community might not even know there is a problem…
Piracy is the only way to preserve most retro video games.
If the game is complete abandonware, and not sold on any digital storefronts, is it even still piracy?
That’s really the only time it’s ethical to pirate. The rest is just stealing.
Piracy isn’t about preservation. Piracy doesn’t create the roms. It’s the dudes with rom dump devices who do that. And making archival copies isn’t necessarily piracy.
But yes, piracy is the only practical way for new customers to access older content that is no longer sold.
sadly with the increasing DRM protections, the legality of it isn’t as clear anymore. Breaking a protected standard is still illegal, which in my opinion is really stupid because if it was for archival purposes from something you own, I feel it should be in the same category as self repair/right to repair acts.
Is there no sort of common property library of video games?
I feel like after 20 years a video game should become common property for people to download and enjoy for free.
Best I can do is 70 years.
70 years after the death of the author or 120 years, whichever is less. We can thank Disney for that one.
Who is the author of a video game, however? It’s a collaborative effort of hundreds of people, sometimes.
But I thought the Mickey mouse protection act has only served to increase the diversity, well-being and development of artists everywhere!
Right?
Or is the reality that Disney and Warner can just buy all the art rights, sitting on those for the next hundred years in an endless cycle of power and wealth consolidation?
Nobody saw that coming at all.
Right?
I’m pretty sure the system has been severely skewed unfavorably for normal people.
For a lot of academics, the preservation of knowledge is super fascinating.
That said I don’t think there is anything exceptional about video games in the larger scheme of things. Media, like cassettes and VHS will also suffer from this issue. If you’re a Star Wars fan here’s a random example. There is apparently a stockpile of Star Wars books turned into audiobooks accessible only for the disabled and blind. This stock is stored in some Congress library. That fact always interested me.
The situation for scientific research is similar. A lot of computational work done in the 60s-80s is lost because the media was not backed up or preserved. So thousands of scientific papers are not easily reproducible. I remember looking into a famous paper about climate change models published in the 70s. They recently asked the author if he still had the codes that generated that model and he basically said “heck no”. So all that knowledge is lost. We’ll never have an exact duplication of that important work from the 70s.
Same goes for a lot of the internet in the 90s. Some of it was backed up but a surprising amount is lost. Projects like the Internet Archive are so important for humanity’s preservation of data.
So yeah, the video game situation is interesting but in the grand scheme of things in the early tech era, it’s normal. A lot has been preserved via roms.
Humanity’s existed for hundreds of thousands of years without any kind of permanent medium, and we still do. It’s only in the very recent history of extreme archival that we’ve come to think that information should last forever.
Houses, cities, peoples, cultures, public works, countries, knowledge, technologies, languages - all that we are is ephemeral, and we’ll continue on
Who wants to admit that there are a whole hell of a lot of bad classic games?
“Pirates” are actually “Archivists”, saving digital information for future generations to enjoy. Really, I’m not a selfish data hoarder, I’m preserving history!
