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EmuParadise has removed its entire library of retro game ROMs and ISOs


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So my side is really: Do what you like. Buy what you can. Download if you want. Just don't lie about it. It makes you look silly, and potentially de-legitimizes any real effort to preserve things for historical purposes by watering down the public perception of things that are vital to preserve, vs. nonsense consumer items you have a personal nostalgic attachment to.

But you also don't have a practical, legal solution to the problem. Have you ever tried to play a 30 year old game in 30 year old hardware? It's a crap shoot. Half of my floppies from the 80s are not readable, and they were all stored in a cool, dry dark place in cases designed for the purpose, as was the hardware. There's no guarantee that the 30 year old games bought off ebay would be any better.

 

The other fact about copyright law is that it has changed drastically over the years, almost always in favor of the copyright holder thanks to lobbying by big corporations that are only concerned about preserving a relative handful of IP (like Mickey Mouse) from the public domain. Under the old copyright laws, most games from the 80s would be public domain by now, as they should be because as you state the market for them is too small for anyone to have a commercial interest in selling most of them.

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But you also don't have a practical, legal solution to the problem. Have you ever tried to play a 30 year old game in 30 year old hardware? It's a crap shoot. Half of my floppies from the 80s are not readable, and they were all stored in a cool, dry dark place in cases designed for the purpose, as was the hardware. There's no guarantee that the 30 year old games bought off ebay would be any better.

 

The other fact about copyright law is that it has changed drastically over the years, almost always in favor of the copyright holder thanks to lobbying by big corporations that are only concerned about preserving a relative handful of IP (like Mickey Mouse) from the public domain. Under the old copyright laws, most games from the 80s would be public domain by now, as they should be because as you state the market for them is too small for anyone to have a commercial interest in selling most of them.

I don't need a practical legal solution because It's not important. Your old computer games don't work because the magnetic floppys degraded. Oh well.

 

I have several 30 year old consoles. They all work just fine. I own hundreds of carts for them. In all that time I've had one cart that was bad/dead. In fact - it can be argued that 30 year old consoles were built to last much better than current gen consoles which get red/yellow/bsods and die under normal use way too quickly.

 

You can argue copyright law all you want. I really don't care. No one is being "hurt" by existing copyright laws. You personal nostalgia whims aren't important.

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I don't need a practical legal solution because It's not important. Your old computer games don't work because the magnetic floppys degraded. Oh well.

 

I have several 30 year old consoles. They all work just fine. I own hundreds of carts for them. In all that time I've had one cart that was bad/dead. In fact - it can be argued that 30 year old consoles were built to last much better than current gen consoles which get red/yellow/bsods and die under normal use way too quickly.

 

You can argue copyright law all you want. I really don't care. No one is being "hurt" by existing copyright laws. You personal nostalgia whims aren't important.

And creators aren't being hurt either if they aren't selling their games anymore. How much does the creator get from that second-hand Ebay sale you advocate as an alternative? exactly ZERO. Copyright holders would love to shut down second-hand markets if they could get away with it too.

 

But thanks for admitting you don't have a desire to see a practical solution to this, I'll keep that in mind when weighing your opinion from now on.

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And creators aren't being hurt either if they aren't selling their games anymore. How much does the creator get from that second-hand Ebay sale you advocate as an alternative? exactly ZERO. Copyright holders would love to shut down second-hand markets if they could get away with it too.

 

But thanks for admitting you don't have a desire to see a practical solution to this, I'll keep that in mind when weighing your opinion from now on.

theres no need for a practical solution because there isn't a real problem. These people don't owe you or me anything.

 

Threatening to boycott a company because they are preventing you from stealing their copyrighted work is about as far down the rabbit hole as you can go.

 

That's like a burglar suing the homeowner for hospital bills when the homeowner catches them and throws them out of the house and they get a scrape on the knee. It's silly.

Edited by John Stamos Mullet
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theres no need for a practical solution because there isn't a real problem. These people don't owe you or me anything.

 

Threatening to boycott a company because they are preventing you from stealing their copyrighted work is about as far down the rabbit hole as you can go.

 

That's like a burglar suing the homeowner for hospital bills when the homeowner catches them and throws them out of the house and they get a scrape on the knee. It's silly.

Nonsense. It's a perfectly legitimate response to the situation.

 

I don't so much care about someone's random ability to play a given game via ROM as I am with something much more important: preservation. A lot of these games wouldn't even exist anymore (particularly super rare carts, obscure arcade titles etc) if it were not for the efforts of people programming emulators, dumping and preserving ROMs, and all of that. It looks like Nintendo even downloaded their own games from a couple of ROM sites before dropping the hammer. Because, you know, they didn't bother to preserve them.

 

Is it within the rights of the copyright holder to do what Nintendo did? Yes. Is it right? No. It's tone deaf, selfish, and ultimately harmful to the long term preservation of digital history. It's not about us wanting to play games. It's about people being able to see them 75 years from now. It's just like the movies. Whole swaths of known films from the 20s, 30s and 40s don't exist because no one preserved them. Gonna be the same deal here.

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Well, depending on where you live you can be liable for injury caused by you to that burglar. We don't all live in the USA or have "Castle doctrine" in effect. Same as copyright infringement being criminal. Many country regard this as a civil offense not a criminal one. Case in point, in Canada it was until a couple of years ago illegal for me to make you a copy of a cd I own, but perfectly legal for you to borrow my CD and make yourself a copy. The music/movie industry petitionned the gov and the only solution they could find was adding a tax on blank media to compensate the music/movie industry as they wouldn't be able to criminalize all of the people doing it. The National Library in Montreal is probably the biggest piracy hub in the country where tables upon tables of people all equiped with laptop spend hours ripping music and movies... Hey, you can even reserve the titles you want in advance!

 

Thirdly, you're parotting the hard core collectors/speculators point of view. In the end you see roms as a loss of an artificially inflated sales on ebay and thus a loss of revenu and unfair competition for speculators.

 

There is a solutions to this problems. Companies dumps their roms on Steam or another such service with DRM preventing trading or resale. An other one will be a big used game price correction which will happen when the present speculators try to cash in and innondate the market.

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There is a solutions to this problems. Companies dumps their roms on Steam or another such service with DRM preventing trading or resale. An other one will be a big used game price correction which will happen when the present speculators try to cash in and innondate the market.

And Gog runs a service like this. I've bought old PC games that I already owned a second time off of GoG so that I could run them in an emulator without needing the CD in the drive. I know Stamos thinks we are all nothing but filthy pirates looking for MUH FREE STUFF. But I really do buy re-releases when I'm given the option.

 

The problem with GoG is it only covers PC games though.

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Well, depending on where you live you can be liable for injury caused by you to that burglar. We don't all live in the USA or have "Castle doctrine" in effect. Same as copyright infringement being criminal. Many country regard this as a civil offense not a criminal one. Case in point, in Canada it was until a couple of years ago illegal for me to make you a copy of a cd I own, but perfectly legal for you to borrow my CD and make yourself a copy. The music/movie industry petitionned the gov and the only solution they could find was adding a tax on blank media to compensate the music/movie industry as they wouldn't be able to criminalize all of the people doing it. The National Library in Montreal is probably the biggest piracy hub in the country where tables upon tables of people all equiped with laptop spend hours ripping music and movies... Hey, you can even reserve the titles you want in advance!

 

Thirdly, you're parotting the hard core collectors/speculators point of view. In the end you see roms as a loss of an artificially inflated sales on ebay and thus a loss of revenu and unfair competition for speculators.

 

There is a solutions to this problems. Companies dumps their roms on Steam or another such service with DRM preventing trading or resale. An other one will be a big used game price correction which will happen when the present speculators try to cash in and innondate the market.

No, I'm not parroting anything. I'm not a collector. I find the ridiculous prices on ebay to be outrageous. I don't care if you have roms. I have roms.

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Sooner than later? These sites have only existed for 20+ years now!

 

 

I don't know about that, I checked a few free rom sites last night out of curiosity and the download links produce 404 errors, or the download link is gone completely. I didn't find one that worked at any of the major sites that the search engines know about.

Nintendo was shutting down emulation sites left and right back in 2004-05 ish. They even had a legal disclaimer on their site about how ALL console emulation was illegal. Not surprisingly, they toned down their rhetoric about emulation in 2006 after the Virtual Console was announced, porting licensed emulated games. iNES headers and all... :P

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I don't mind if copyrights last forever. Really, I don't. If Disney & Nintendo want to keep Steamboat Willie & Super Mario Bros locked away till doomsday, I'm ok with that. Their property; their right.

 

I do believe we need some way to legally deal with abandoned intellectual property. There are already laws dealing with abandoned real & personal property in most regions. In that regard the US's older copyright laws were better; if no one renewed the copyright after 28 years the work passed into the public domain.

 

Creators have been arguing for longer copyrights for over 100 years; Mark Twain said the public domain only benefited publishers. But creators didn't have the political clout needed to actually lengthen copyright terms till the 70's. The landscape changed; in Tawin's day creators were individules, publishers were companies, bigger & more powerful than any single person. By the 70's most creators were large companies who could lobby for longer copyright terms. So companies have both kept copyrights short & lengthened copyrights. That may change again; Google successfully argued that their book search engine was fair use, even if it can show users entire articles from a publication.

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4. Romsites that were illegally distributing roms they don't have the rights to are not preserving anything. They are monetizing properties illegally. period. - FACT.

 

Not all sites make money off "free downloads".

 

 

There is no legal precedent governing the public distribution of, or legal defining of "abandonware".

 

Yes there is lol. LACHES!

 

"Elements of laches include knowledge of a claim, unreasonable delay, neglect, which taken together hurt the opponent."

 

https://www.lexisnexis.com/LegalNewsRoom/estate-elder/b/estate-elder-blog/posts/doctrine-of-laches-means-you-are-quot-out-of-time-quot

 

 

Abandoning IP would be considered neglect. Not preserving your IP is neglect. Once you fail to maintain your IP it legally kind of turns into public domain.

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...

Yes there is lol. LACHES!

 

"Elements of laches include knowledge of a claim, unreasonable delay, neglect, which taken together hurt the opponent."

 

https://www.lexisnexis.com/LegalNewsRoom/estate-elder/b/estate-elder-blog/posts/doctrine-of-laches-means-you-are-quot-out-of-time-quot

 

 

Abandoning IP would be considered neglect. Not preserving your IP is neglect. Once you fail to maintain your IP it legally kind of turns into public domain.

That is not what is meant by neglect here. Here it is neglecting to act on your claim in a timely matter. Neglecting to maintain your property does not mean you lose ownership.

 

...

 

I do believe we need some way to legally deal with abandoned intellectual property. There are already laws dealing with abandoned real & personal property in most regions. In that regard the US's older copyright laws were better; if no one renewed the copyright after 28 years the work passed into the public domain.

 

...

There is a way in Canada.

https://cb-cda.gc.ca/unlocatable-introuvables/BRO-2016-08-23-EN.html

This is helpfull for publishing. It's not necessary for personal use.

.

Edited by mr_me
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Yeah it's stuff like this that REALLY makes me dislike Nintendo as a corporation many-a-times. The presence of these kinds of sights is one of the few ways most people who don't have hundreds/thousands of disposable income can play some of the obscure games that have been lost to the sands of time. Not everyone has room in their home for an original arcade cabinet, either, let alone the shipping and freight costs that come with such a purchase.

 

I understand Nintendo wants to protect their IP, but exerting this kind of pressure also in a way is them forcibly speaking on behalf of other companies, some of whom aren't even active anymore, or aren't platform holders, and don't have much a reason to touch some of these games ever again for commercial re-releases either digitally or physically. It reeks of a sense of entitlement and arrogance, a sort of false pride, not to mention it yet again kind of dicks around w/ their fans considering Virtual Console is practically a non-starter on the Switch atm.

 

Also yes I understand Nintendo didn't *actually* issue a cease-and-desist to Emu, but the fact is they've been on a rip of recent doing this to other sites so that would naturally instill a sense of trepidation to other sites such as Emu, knowing there's a 90% chance they'd be next in line. If anything, I wouldn't mind these sort of sites simply removing all Nintendo-published content off their archives anymore, and probably also remove downloads for games that tend to see regular re-releases gen-over-gen in well-known anthologies, which'd include IP like Sonic and King of Fighters, etc.

 

But as long as companies like Nintendo continue to do this kind of crap, it means less chances for younger gamers getting into the retro scene to play some otherwise amazing games that have only been growing more and more obscure as time passes on, meaning they'll just end up playing the same stuff over, and over, and over, and over again. There's SOOOO much more to retro gaming besides Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man etc. but the harder it is for regular people to easily access some of those rarer, lesser-known gems in ways that don't cost them a month's rent or more (especially considering 9/10 times the companies releasing retro games just keep picking the same 5% of games endlessly), the more things risk becoming completely monotonized and...boring.

 

At the very least, knowing how slow Nintendo's being w/ Virtual Console plus causing stuff like this to happen w/ Emu, has turned me off from investing in a Switch for the foreseeable future. Guess it'll be exclusively PC gaming for me for now.

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That is not what is meant by neglect here. Here it is neglecting to act on your claim in a timely matter. Neglecting to maintain your property does not mean you lose ownership.

 

Dude lol, if you don't even open a claim (in a reasonable amount of time) to begin with you are abandoning your IP. Whether you want to call it neglect or not doesn't change the principle of the law.

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Dude lol, if you don't even open a claim (in a reasonable amount of time) to begin with you are abandoning your IP. Whether you want to call it neglect or not doesn't change the principle of the law.

 

Okay but if a judge agrees with you in one case, they can still make a claim on someone else in another case because they are still the copyright owner.

Edited by mr_me
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I just wish all companies with a library like Nintendo or Sega had a Steam-level service to provide their old content. Nintendo in particular abandoned the Virtual Console because I suppose they want to sell the Minis. In 2018, there's really no excuse to not have a Steam-level distribution platform. It is, and should be, the standard. Nintendo's online platforms have always lagged, but people shouldn't make excuses. I know this doesn't seem to have to do with ROMs and the like, but perhaps me switching primarily to PC gaming in recent years and looking at what console manufacturers have just sort of confuses me.

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Dude lol, if you don't even open a claim (in a reasonable amount of time) to begin with you are abandoning your IP. Whether you want to call it neglect or not doesn't change the principle of the law.

It's easier if you don't use the phrase "IP" when talking about the rules, as it just confuses things; the rules vary widely depending on the type of IP.

 

Copyright is automatically attached when you create a work, and it doesn't matter if you sell the work, or keep it in your basement. As a consequence, copyright abandonment is something you must actively do. ie. you must announce that your art is in the public domain, or else it's assumed to be protected.

 

Trademarks are the IP type that must be vigorously defended. If you are found to have abandoned a trademark for 3+ years, it's up for grabs.

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Nintendo was shutting down emulation sites left and right back in 2004-05 ish. They even had a legal disclaimer on their site about how ALL console emulation was illegal. Not surprisingly, they toned down their rhetoric about emulation in 2006 after the Virtual Console was announced, porting licensed emulated games. iNES headers and all... :P

Very true, I forgot about the iNES headers. I had a hand in that back in the day, very interesting how they're setup. Would not be surprised if something they used if it were unedited was something I tinkered with which would be somewhat amusing. It is cute their page doesn't talk about how illegal emulation is anymore, just more targeting the games which is the right thing at least instead of just lying about it to scare people.

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Okay but if a judge agrees with you in one case, they can still make a claim on someone else in another case because they are still the copyright owner.

 

 

We are talking video games here that have been online for over a decade now. These games have been available and sold in so many different forms that in many cases any claim against anyone would likely be tossed out because of what has already happened. If one person is found not guilty that basically means everyone is not guilty.

 

Unless I am not understanding what you are getting at. Yeah they are still the copyright owners but reasonable time is what is important here and lets face it besides a very few instances not many copyright owners have acted diligently on their copyrighted work at all.

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If a copyright owner suddenly becomes active after thirty years, they might not be successful with a claim against something that happened ten years ago. They can certainly file another claim on someone else with something that is happening now and get a positive ruling. There is no delay/neglect arguement in the second case. The latches thing is similar to a statute of limitations.

Edited by mr_me
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