A few thoughts on the P2P jihad

[vsp]

Originally posted by Undertoad
I agree Jeep-man: if I made the rules, if an album or game goes out of print it should become legal to copy. If you can't even get it legally and nobody's seeking to make current money, it should be freely shareable. All those old game ROMs, all those old Procol Harum albums, shareable.

I agree, but I'll also play devil's advocate. First, concerning games...

There are a lot of "classics" compilations out there, some of which are actual emulators running the old ROMs themselves on console/handheld/PC hardware. (There are also recreations of old games (same appearance and feel, different code), and bastardized remakes of older games that share little beyond aesthetics and intellectual property. What they've done to the Frogger name, for instance, is frightening. But I digress.)

In the early days of DIY arcade emulation, clashes between commercial and hobbyist interests were common. For instance, the PSX release of <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/ps/puzzle/midwaypresentsarcadesghtmc2/index.html">Midway Collection 2</a> came only a month after MAME .28 had incorporated MCR I/II/III drivers, which emulated two major games from that collection (Spy Hunter and Tapper) and thirteen other Midway games from that era.

Digital Eclipse was largely responsible for the above PSX release, their followup to <a href="http://www.digitaleclipse.com/live/main/main.php?v=pr&id=53">Williams Arcade Classics</a> for MS-DOS and the <a href="http://www.digitaleclipse.com/live/main/main.php?v=pr&id=49">Digital Arcade series</a> for the Mac, _the_ undisputed catalysts for the entire arcade-emulation movement. This wasn't a case of some faceless company locking their games in a vault; this was a company that was working hard to bring back lost classics and make them playable in new environments, packaged with interviews and other extras. The games were unavailable and out-of-print before Digital Eclipse came along, but there were several commercial products in the works, and at least one of their staff members was a regular presence in the classic-games and emulation newsgroups, so the projects weren't guarded secrets. (This was a "seeking to make current and future money" situation.)

MAME was thus a serious kick in the ass for Digital Eclipse. Not only was their upcoming $49 product beaten to the market by a FREE emulator that played many of the same games, but a lot of games that they might've wanted to package as "Midway Collection 3" were also now freely available. It was unquestionable that Midway and Digital Eclipse had the legal rights to use the ROMs in such a manner, and that assorted ROM sites did not have distribution rights, but once the genie was out of the bottle...

Many people (myself included) went ahead and bought the PSX compilation, as a "thank you" to DE for releasing it at all. Many others looked at a $49 disc and a free download and made a reasonably obvious choice.

To their credit, DE didn't throw lawsuits around or abandon the genre; they're <a href="http://ps2.ign.com/articles/433/433090p1.html">still at it</a> today, repackaging old games for newer consoles. But the flamewars were legendary at the time, and I wonder how many compilations (DE's or others') were canned when someone said "Forget it, it's already out there for free, even though we still own the rights, so it won't sell the way it could've sold." It's easy to look at a game and say "it's out of print and abandoned," but can you _prove_ that the owner won't rerelease it or do something cool with it sometime in the indeterminate future?

And there's nothing new under the sun. Nowadays, emulations can surpass commercial apps in quality, such as with <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/pc/puzzle/williamspinballclassics/index.html">Williams Pinball Classics</a> being measurably inferior to the games' recreations in <a href="http://www.randydavis.com/vp/">Visual Pinball</a>. Since VP uses the original sound and rules ROMs from real pinball machines, the same standard as with Midway II above applies.

Now, there are also tens of thousands of ROMs out there that can more justifiably be considered "abandoned" -- companies have changed hands dozens of times or gone out of business, properties have been unused for decades, responses to inquiries about games go unanswered. The MAME folks have always firmly demanded that it remain open-source and that their code should never be sold with ROMs for any for-profit uses, and have shied away from emulating brand-new games. Yet how long is long enough to wait? (The one-year rule-of-thumb that applied for a while was a sham -- I honestly think that MAME was a major contributor in running SNK out of business. Who would pay $250 for a King of Fighters 2001 cart when it would be emulated perfectly in MAME a year later)?

Similar logic can be applied to music, especially if you replace "new consoles" with "new formats," as I'm sure replacements for CDs will be coming down the pike sometime within the next few years.

Keep in mind that even after all that ranting, I am on the side of the user -- I'd rather see fair-use provisions that are _too_ permissive than not permissive enough for currently-noncommercial works. The above are just some of the issues that tend to crop up...

[xoxoxoBruce]

What! You mean I can't go to the record store and buy Procol Harem Lp's any more?
How about an 8 track?