DMCA Exemption Campaign Would Let Fans Run Abandoned Games 157
An anonymous reader writes: Games that rely on remote servers became the norm many years ago, and as those games age, it's becoming more and more common for the publisher to shut them down when they're no longer popular. This is a huge problem for the remaining fans of the games, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forbids the kind of hacks and DRM circumvention required for the players to host their own servers. Fortunately, the EFF and law student Kendra Albert are on the case. They've asked the Copyright Office for an exemption in the case of players who want to keep abandoned games alive. It's another important step in efforts to whittle away at overreaching copyright laws.
Don't do it (Score:5, Insightful)
Better idea: let people get really pissed at our current state of intellectual property laws. Preferably before the next Micky Mouse Shall Never Enter the Public Domain Copyright Extension Act.
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Trademarks on names of characters from PD works (Score:2)
Even then I think they usually think that the rights to Snow White are owned by Disney.
In some cases, Disney has acquired exclusive rights under trademark law to sell toys based on adaptations of public domain works. For example, Disney owns PINOCCHIO® in the "dolls" category [uspto.gov], despite the fact that copyright in Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio expired in 1940 and would have expired in 1960 even under today's extended copyright terms.
just s crutch (Score:2)
This type of exemption is just a crutch that can be rescinded any time it comes up for review. We need congress to codify it into law to be permenant.
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yeah should be simple enough to make it so that you should be able to access the content in the intended fashion if the company shuts down servers...
or better yet, how about making it into a law that if you own the game and data content, you can hack it to connect to where-ever. fuck their in-app payment locks.
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If company hosts content on its own servers, and it shuts down servers. company loses all rights to any IP related to the product unless they allow people to run their own server. (which would allow people to run their own servers)
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They will just keep one server going and charge $999.99/month to access it. They will consider the minimal cost worth it because they want people to buy new games and sequels to classics, not carry on playing them.
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Lol.. its not false. You said basically the same thing but with more words. What is needed is to have it codified into law so it takes an act of congress to undo rather than expiring.
Counter-productive (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't legitimize the DMCA further by asking for "exceptions", the argument should be that things like remote servers and always-connected DRM are illegal violations of a consumer's property rights.
Re:Counter-productive (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a little confused by your argument. Copy "rights" are entirely invented by copyright law. DMCA is also copyright law. Consumers have no innate "right" to intellectual "property", just as producers have no innate right - only virtual rights granted by law. I'm not thrilled with the DMCA, but I do recognize that it's not really any different than letting people stake a claim on an idea/recording/etc for 90+ years.
I think this is a very pragmatic move which improves our situation.
Re:Counter-productive (Score:5, Interesting)
> producers have no innate right - only virtual rights granted by law.
To quote Terry Pratchett's book, the Hogfather:
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
Intellectual property, the power of knowledge, can be considered as valid as any other concept. And it has history and law behind it.
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Fair enough, but as an ideology it has some major flaws and inconsistencies. I've never heard anyone base an ideology around government-enforced virtual property. It would certainly make for interesting reading.
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Civilization is an emergent property.
AC
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This must be from an American perspective. The history of copyright law is, compared to other types of law, so short that it really doesn't have much history.
If copyright laws had history, we would have lost a lot more works of authors from antiquitity to, say, Mozart, than we actually did. Had the concept of copyright existed 2000 years ago, building up culture (for lack of a better word) would have been impossible.
Also, copyright laws should promote the sciences a
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Recorded copyright law goes back to the 1700's in England, printing privileges date back to the 1400's in Venice. That's roughly 500 years of precedent. Or are you somehow saying that laws more recent than that lack validity?
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The 1700's are about a few thousand years after authors started producing works in writing, and about a really, really long time after the first cave paintings (which, under todays copyright laws, would absolutely qualify as protected works). So, copyright laws are a recent phenomenon compared to the type of activity they apply to.
Printing privileges were more about using a certain
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> Really short when compared to more mature laws, e.g. laws against theft and murder.
Does being thousands of years old really make a law mature, wise, or appropriate today? Or somehow "innate", which was part of The Mighty Yar's original point about copyright? Then oh, my, let's ignore the last 150 years of US law and centuries of various country's laws and return to Old Testament slavery law from Exodus, at the core of all the Hebrew originated faiths:
Exodus 21:20-21 If a ma
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I'm pretty thoroughly married to the libertarian ideology of "Life, Liberty, and the (somewhat squishy) Persuit of Happiness" as the only innate rights. Libertarian ideals themselves are not much older than copyright, so I don't put much weight on ancient history when it comes to legitimacy. Another - probably more universal - example is the philosophy of science. Very new, but far more successful than any previous attempt to describe the natural world.
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Your quote doesn't fit your statement. The quote implies that there is no such thing as rightness. And the GP was implying that there is no such thing as rights. This is clearly true. You have no rights you cannot defend, or that nobody else will defend on your behalf. And thus, the GP's statement is entirely accurate. There is no natural right to prevent copies. That's an artificial right granted by governments for the purpose of profit. The original copyright law was enacted at Alexandria. They had the ri
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> The quote implies that there is no such thing as rightness.
The Hogfather quote is a bit deeper than that, I think. It implies that many human beliefs and policies have no physical basis, but we use them and call them "real" anyway. The very concept of "rights" is itself one of those beliefs and policies, so it's very difficult for them to be "innate". Their being "innate" does not make them more real, in this case, than mercy or justice.
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Of course they could watch movies. They would not be able to "own" them, or have any rights over them whatsoever.
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Yeah, I'm not sure where we are disagreeing?
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I repeatedly said the opposite, that voiding copyright law would not in any way effect ownership law. And that in teh absence of copyright the default state is everyone owns the IP, not that no one does.
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I was trying to be clear that I was referring to virtual rights, but it is a hard concept to discuss when straightforward terms have been co-opted for another purpose. To be clear, when I said that consumers have no innate right to intellectual property, I meant the pretend "property" created by copyright law - not the physical media that it resides on.
I was objecting to "Shadow of Eternity's" implication that the DMCA infringes on a fundamental right. It does, but in exactly the same way as other intellect
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Wouldn't this be easily solved by game companies?
All they have to do is move the servers to point to some low powered/outdated server that times out and otherwise makes playing extremely unpleasant.
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The DMCA is US law. How exactly is it not already legitimized?
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The DMCA is US law. How exactly is it not already legitimized?
Lots of laws are illegal. And a whole lot of laws are illegitimate (technically legal but bought by a special interest group despite how democracy is supposed to work).
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Unconstitutional laws are not laws, and it's not especially hard to mount a whole variety of solid constitutional challenges to the DMCA.
What's difficult is for individuals to do so with standing, since their opponent in the manner ends up needing to be either a media company, with a multi-million dollar warchest, or the federal government, with a bottomless one. Both those scenarios are very good at preventing the rightful party from winning.
What is your constitutional argument against DMCA? (Score:2)
Unconstitutional laws are not laws
Constitutional is whatever nine men and women in black robes say it is.
and it's not especially hard to mount a whole variety of solid constitutional challenges to the DMCA.
The Supreme Court already upheld reextension of a copyright term as constitutional (Eldred v. Ashcroft) and restoration of copyright in works that have entered the public domain as constitutional (Golan v. Holder). What makes you think the DMCA will be any easier? And if you invalidate the whole DMCA, don't you also invalidate the safe harbor for online service providers against claims of contributory infringement (17 USC 512) that was e
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By granting formalized exemptions and exceptions you start to tear away the logical legal blocks that make the law legitimate. When the exceptions and exemptions become unmaintainable or too confusing the law would require a redesign essentially. Poking holes in the law leads to eventually the dissolution of the law and a replacement law put in place, hopefully one that is more agreeable.
Maybe not so useful... (Score:1)
All this will do is at best stop the companies from filing DMCA take downs on the fans; it will in no way obligate the company to release their internal software for the servers which ran the game.
Re:Maybe not so useful... (Score:5, Interesting)
All this will do is at best stop the companies from filing DMCA take downs on the fans; it will in no way obligate the company to release their internal software for the servers which ran the game.
That's not a bug, that's a feature. They don't lose their copyright just because they stop running a server. This is just an exemption that wouldn't let them sue gamers for DMCA violations when they reverse engineer their own servers.
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But they should if one were to take seriously all that is said about the reasons why we have copyright and how it should serve the good of the society as a whole.
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But they should if one were to take seriously all that is said about the reasons why we have copyright and how it should serve the good of the society as a whole.
Perhaps, but I think that's a little extreme. I am, rather, in favor of a more reasonable copyright term. (I would not have upheld the current copyright term if I were on the Supreme Court, since "life of the author" is not a determinate time.) But even then, if they never publish the source code, copyright doesn't come into it. All you could do is copy the game binary, so you would still have to reverse engineer a game server. That's the problem with the DMCA. It reaches over traditional copyright boundari
Games still sold new after online is shut down (Score:2)
Unless you bought the game, new, and they turned the server off in a couple of months, I don't think you'll have a leg to stand on.
That has happened. Often I have bought a game new in original shrink wrap at a big box store, put it in, and come home to a message to the effect "This software title is no longer in service."
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I wonder at what point copyright and trademark enforcement diverged, in that if a company fails to defend its trademarks (or even monetise them), they lose the right of claim on it?
Term "intellectual property" is a seductive mirage (Score:2)
I wonder at what point copyright and trademark enforcement diverged
Copyright and trademark law have different origins. They never fully converged in the first place. The fact that there's some sort of unified "intellectual property" to diverge in the first place is a lie of the industry [gnu.org]. In any case, copyright and patent law do have the equitable defense of estoppel by laches [wikipedia.org], which is sort of analogous to genericization of trademark but not nearly as broad in scope.
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aha... I learned something new today :) Actually, I sort of knew about laches but couldn't remember what it was called. Having used it a couple times, too. I must be going senile.
By Statesman's cape! (Score:3)
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"Nope, sorry, we needed the disk space and bandwidth for $other_thing, it was deleted over a year ago. Developer machines and such were all replaced twice since the last checkout/build and we're not even sure we can get it to compile for $os anymore due to outdated libs and such.
Here's a coupon good for free shipping for any downloadable content for $suckiest_game_ever that you purchase in the next 42 minutes. Now go away."
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When I wrote the above, with tongue firmly in cheek, I was thinking more along the lines of the libc5 vs glibc issues we had 15 years ago, or dependencies on other old libraries
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Gamers are stupid (Score:1, Insightful)
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So what major PC and mobile games published in the past five years don't require "this sort of remote server authentication" for installation and use?
How long does Steam's offline mode last? (Score:2)
I thought Steam games required renewal of the cached receipt every 30 days or so. Did this change? If so, when?
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Thank you. I've revised my list of arguments used by console peasants [pineight.com] to include Mr. Goffin's clarification.
How often would this work? (Score:2)
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Sometimes to access a site, you need to connect to a proxy. Every piece of software that connects to the next has to assume it needs to be routed through a proxy. The reverse engineers can write a small proxy which reroutes those particular addresses to something else.
Still I find it hard to believe that IP's hard code IPs. They are prone to change.
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Generally they dont hard-code IP addresses, just domain names.
And when it comes to the server clones I have seen before (e.g. the GameSpy clones made after the shutdown of that service) people either hacked the clients to point to the new domain names or used hosts files or proxies to intercept requests and point them at the new locations.
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I am not a programmer for any of the giant game companies, so I might be missing out on something here. I expected that the games called back to the producer's servers by hard-coded names or IPs; this would make it rather difficult for fans to set up their own servers
Not only are you not a programmer, but you're also not an IT professional, obviously. It's not difficult to create dummy IPs, nor to patch games to use different servers. However, using hardcoded IPs is relatively rare. Most games use name resolution like the rest of us.
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And even once you get that figured out, there is then the matter of gett
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That is a rather harsh assumption you just made, there
Actually, I don't necessarily believe it. I said it for effect, because seriously, it's okay to think about these things before posting.
Have you tried to access a hosts file (or anything similar to it) on a gaming system? Sure it's no problem on a PC but have altering that on a Sony or Microsoft console doesn't necessarily seem to be as easy.
Yeah, but the solution is pretty simple: a gateway running on another machine.
And even once you get that figured out, there is then the matter of getting your friends to do the same. Online multiplayer isn't much of an accomplishment if there is only one player.
Yes, that's certainly the limiting factor. However, people are still playing most of the old games for which a competing server was developed.
Anyway, this isn't mostly about console gaming, this is mostly about PC gaming, since most of the abandoned games with alternate server implementations are
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A hosts file or a gateway running on another machine won't help if your replacement server has a public key not trusted by the private CA hardcoded into the game.
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A hosts file or a gateway running on another machine won't help if your replacement server has a public key not trusted by the private CA hardcoded into the game.
This is true. In that case you will need a patched game executable which skips the key check. On the 360 you can use Microsoft's own USB to SATA cable to access your storage. I don't know about any of the other platforms, but this is mostly only an issue for dead or relatively dead platforms like Xbox and 360 anyway. My understanding is that all of those have been blown wide open at this point.
Certificate pinning defeats hosts redirection (Score:2)
Hard-coded names are easy - you make some entries in your hosts file.
Applying the well-known APK workaround doesn't work when the application sees that the certificate doesn't match the certificate that the application expects [owasp.org].
Already legal? (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought reverse engineering the server protocol was perfectly legal. Samba/CIFS and Bitkeeper are two protocols for which this was an example.
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Not necessarily in practice [wikipedia.org]
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... and not developed in the USA.
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The general practice of reverse-engineering is treated differently across different areas of law; prohibited under some, allowed under others. It's not accurate to say that it's 'perfectly legal' by any means. Circumvention of technological access control systems is generally prohibited under the DMCA, so hacking any game server software (or any other type of software for that matter) that acts to securely manage access to copyrighted works violates the DMCA.
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The difference is that Samba and Bitkeeper don't use the online servers as part of their anti-piracy solution in the way most of the games do. Its not the reverse engineering of the server protocols as such that's illegal, its the fact that these server clones let you play with pirated copies.
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The alternative server may not discriminate between pirated and legit games, but it doesn't have to.
It does have to. Did you miss the verdict in the bnetd case?
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What happens if the company refuses to release the server binary program for fear that competitors may reverse engineer their game? Do the companies have a chance to say no? After all, it's an abandoned game, therefore there are only a few hundred players that are interested in playing the game.
They should have a choice to refuse releasing the server code as they may have a successful game that's based on the old, abandoned game.
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I'm ok with that, as long as they also have to refund anyone that owns a copy of their game and still wants to play it.
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IMHO, they should have that right, but the way they say no is keep a server running the code and accessible to the users. If there's only 100 users, it wouldn't take many resources to keep a VM running the server somewhere. Alternatively, they could buy back the licensed clients.
Copyright should have a use it or lose it provision.
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Instead of the company going through that hassle, why can't these 100 users find another game?! Few users means this game is not that much fun anymore. This is just a super lame excuse to trick/force companies to share their code for nothing/free.
That's bullshit. The code belongs to the copyright holder to do as he/she sees fit during the copyrighted phase,
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Maybe they like this particular game? I'd love the chance to play City of Heroes or Earth&Beyond again. I wouldn't mind paying for that opportunity, either.
Few users means this game is not that much fun anymore.
Dictating what other people have to consider "fun" is ridiculous. This is just a super lame excuse to trick/force companies to share their code for nothing/free.
They could keep a server runn
Starting your own with BJ&H is also infringing (Score:2)
why can't these 100 users find another game?
Because the developers of the games that are shut off sue the developers of too-similar games for copyright infringement. For example, Tetris DS has been shut down, and The Tetris Company has successfully sued cloners.
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Because they like that game AND they paid for it. Shutting down the server is just a super lame excuse to trick/force them to buy another game.
Copyright is a grant from the public domain for a limited time to promote the useful arts and sciences ONLY. That is, to make more works available. Using it to make something unavailable is the ultimate in abuses and absolutely should cause loss of the copyright. I would go so far as to actually require the release of the source once the term is up (it should probabl
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In theory, yes. In practice, the DMCA can be used to squash interoperable implementations. Look at bnetd [wikipedia.org], for example. Despite it being a completely separate implementation of the protocol, Blizzard used the DMCA to successfully sue the project maintainers.
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It is, depending on your jurisdiction, but there can be copyright issues. For example, if encryption is used then the encryption keys are protected by copyright. Maybe you can hack the game to change the keys, but if not you can't include the developer's keys in your server without violating their copyright.
Some games console manufacturers did a similar thing. The console checks for a particular string, say "Produced by or under licence from Sega", in the ROM. If it isn't there the game won't run. If someon
Sega v. Accolade (Score:2)
Some games console manufacturers did a similar thing. The console checks for a particular string, say "Produced by or under licence from Sega", in the ROM. If it isn't there the game won't run. If someone puts it there without getting a licence they can be sued for copyright infringement
The console maker can sue but won't necessarily win. In the United States, for example, copying a "magic string" of this sort is not infringement per Sega v. Accolade and Lexmark v. Static Control Components. If a publisher of an original game adds the magic string without permission from the console maker, is sued in the United States for copyright infringement by the console maker, and has a lawyer aware of these cases, he will likely defeat the console maker the same way that Accolade defeated Sega.
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That's why Sega put the "by it under licence from Sega" bit in. Makes it not just about copyright.
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Sega's TMSS was forcing developers of unlicensed games to falsely identify their games as licensed, yet Accolade won in court even on Lanham Act (trademark or passing-off) claims.
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That message didn't appear until the Dreamcast. It was a reaction to their loss to Accolade.
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"PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD." in the Dreamcast was exactly the same wording that had been used in Genesis TMSS.
Law Student? (Score:2)
Why does it take a student to do this...? No actual lawyers willing to take this case on pro bono?
Pro-Sonny Bono (Score:2)
No actual lawyers willing to take this case on pro bono?
I don't think many lawyers who supported the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act would support limiting anti-circumvention rights under copyright.
(Oh, you meant the other kind of bono.)
People Who Don't Get Over Those Old Games... (Score:5, Interesting)
CONTRACT! (Score:1)
Contracts work both ways.
I believe Sony has already run into this problem.
All it takes is one class action suit (for the value of the purchase price of the game per plaintiff) against the current copyright holder to make it too expensive for any company to shut down the servers. Yes, it will take free legal services to do it, but they seem to be available.
In the cases where no one shows up
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make them sit up and take notice: the original retail price of the game - each game summed - and multiplied against the number of class plaintiffs.
So instead of basing the suit on just one title or title class and ten plaintiffs, name TEN titles and claim ten times ten times the retail.
You're straight from small claims to supreme court with the stroke of a pen.
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People aren't free to vote with their feet (Score:2)
How many immigrants could your country absorb?
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Why exempt MMOs that have been abaondoned? (Score:2)
There are several MMOs that no longer have servers at all, ie. being essentially abandoned. Do those worlds not deserve to be preserved for posterity or for game enthusiasts?
Exempting MMOs across the board from this process seems short-sighted.
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If the alternative is said abandoned house is left to become a massive health/fire hazard because no one is legally allowed to touch it and the rightful owners refuse either maintain it, tear it down or sell it, sure. Go ahead and live in that abandoned house.
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If the alternative is said abandoned house is left to become a massive health/fire hazard because no one is legally allowed to touch it and the rightful owners refuse either maintain it, tear it down or sell it, sure. Go ahead and live in that abandoned house.
That's exactly what I keep telling the cops!
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Some countries do have what amounts to squatter's rights in that if you occupy and otherwise unoccupied dwelling for a long enough duration you can claim it as a residency and the actual owner will not be able to evict you.
Do these countries happen to be countries overrun by war?
Enormous parts of European cities were emptied of citizens that were stuffed into camps and vanished
or simply displaced by destruction and war. Some laws were crafted to legalize the good,
bad and ugly parts of this chaos.
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No, that's abandonment. If the property owner abandons the property such that it becomes a health and safety hazard for the neighborhood (not to mention a property value destroying eyesore), then there is a risk that a squatter will come in, properly maintain the property, and gain rights to it.
That law exists in many places in the U.S. as well.
We have similar laws to cover other sorts of property as well.
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I think that's right, most squatter's rights mandate that the squatter must be properly maintaining the property.
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Western European law from medieval times all the way to the Napoleonic code has been based, in part, on Roman law concepts based on the Emperor Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis. Since Western Europe isn't exactly made up of third world countries, I'd take issue with your assertion.
Both Roman civil law and English common law have their strengths and weaknesses, but both are systems that have been used successfully for centuries which suggests that they are hardly a root cause of civilization decay.
France was first world and had Roman law (Score:2)
You can tell which countries have [a legal structure closer to English common law or to Roman law] just by seeing which ones never made it into the first world.
The two sides in World War III (1947–1991; also called the Cold War) were the "first world", led by western Europe and the United States of America, and the "second world" [wikipedia.org], led by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. France was a founding member of NATO, putting it squarely within the first world, and French law is based on Roman law.
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Now only if they'd let me live in this here abandoned house. Perrect!
That's a poor analogy. This isn't a request for a blanket copyright exemption for abandonware. This is a request for a DMCA exception that lets people who already legally own a copy of a game to continue playing it by circumventing DRM and running their own servers.
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Yep,
It's more like the local government granting that the community can take the title for an abandoned house the owner no longer keeps in good order and fix it up on the condition they never sell or rent it.
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Actually it's more like you bought a house and now the water company stopped treating water and pumping it to the house. The fact that you own a house without running water makes your property useless for the desired purpose of being a residence. In this case the law forbids you from digging a well and treating water yourself to make your property useful again.