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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

They also got an exemption for modifying of abandoned games whose activation systems are long since gone, as well as extending/clarifying the jailbreaking exemption.

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I actually worked on this part of the exemption. It was granted in two parts. First, fans may now reverse engineer and host servers for games that are no longer hosted online. Metal Gear Solid 4 is a perfect example, but there are plenty of others. This is now legal, and considered fair use. MMO's are exempted, and defined as games where the world is persistent reguardless of number of players connected (IE, is the game played in rounds, or is state reset in the world often... more than once a month, for example). It was a crude way to define the differences, but MMO's were a sticking point, so we have to come back to them later.

Second, museums and archives are now permitted to circumvent copy protection in the pursuit of preservation. This means that huge stores of old games that are otherwise unavailable are now legally preservable by institutions like Stanford, The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, and Archive.org. Of note is the fact that the Atari ST catalog of software was preserved on pirate disks, and we've yet to find any other way to save some of those pieces of software, aside from just preserving the pirate disks. This does not mean these titles can be redistributed, only that they can be modified for the sake of preservation.

Additionally, this means museums can preserve devices that circumvent copy protection, such as floppy-to-SNES devices, which we have a few of at the MADE. Modded XBoxes can now also be preserved in an institution.

The bits that help museums means a great deal for preservation of digital assets as a whole. This was a lot of work to get done, so a huge thanks goes out to the EFF, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Archive.org for all their hard work to get this done!

> This does not mean these titles can be redistributed, only that they can be modified for the sake of preservation.

But once the copyright expires on the disks, they may then be redistributed?

Then they would enter public domain. Copyright, however, lasts a very, very long time. Longer than the history of computing.

It sounds like archivists could image the disks and transport those across mediums, in the interest of archival, as long as they didn't distribute them, though. Am I mistaken?

You are correct. We can now do just about anything we want short of redistribution or commercialization.

Nearly nothing has entered the public domain in the U.S. in decades, and likely nearly nothing ever will again.

There was that time in the 70's when you had to re-up your Copyright, and a lot of stuff fell out, like Night of the Living Dead.

Night of the Living Dead failed to ever have copyright protection due to lack of a copyright notice or registration, not from a need for renewal. Renewal became automatic in 1964, and registration or notice became optional in 1989. (And in 1976 it became possible to register for up to 5 years after publication, to allow for fixing mistakes like with Night of the Living Dead.)

Theoretically yes, but I don't really expect to see copyright on any, even the oldest, software expiring during my lifetime.

Hi VonGuard,

> and considered fair use

The 1201 exemption process doesn't adjudicate whether things are fair use in a way that's binding on courts, although the Copyright Office does believe that it has to express some opinion about that the uses it approves are noninfringing. But a court doesn't have to agree with that substantive question: if someone sued you for running the server they could argue that it's not a fair use, and the court that they sue you in isn't bound to agree that the Copyright Office was right to view it as noninfringing (or that this is true in the particular circumstances).

Thanks for the clarification Schoen.

this is huge! thanks for all the hard work to everyone involved.

If I understood the ruling correctly, all exemptions are technically only binding for three years, after which they have to be renewed. So in the (hopefully) hypothetical case that the librarian would not renew the excemption for archives, would that make all exibits stored on grounds of the exemption suddenly illegal? If yes, this doesn't seem like a very practical solution to me.

I get that MMOs are very different to regular games, but I wonder how that applies in this context - why would an MMO company strongly object to their abandonware being revived while a regular multiplayer company tolerates it?

That seems like great news for GOG.

>> They also got an exemption for modifying of abandoned games whose activation systems are long since gone

That sounds to me like it would allow you to patch a game you already owned, but not to copy and sell that game. How does it help GOG?

The only thing that comes to my mind is that now it may make commercial sense for GOG to ask publishers for rights to sell games that require activation systems / servers that are no longer maintained.

But if you're selling it with the blessing of the owner, what was stopping you from asking "oh, we also need to patch the game so it will run - I assume you don't mind?"

For GOG to sell a game at all already requires that they explicitly cut a deal with the game owner. Fixing the game to run on a modern computer is a trivial part of that deal (and something they already do with their whole inventory).

You're right.

Not enough coffee this morning.

It could however mean that GOG doesn't need any terms for how to achieve it, allowing them to have patches created and updated for use on arbitary systems without asking for permission, once they already have permission for redistribution.

So if they got permission to sell a version that can run on Windows, then they could later on patch it to make it run on Linux and other systems as well.

GOG buys rights to distribute the original works for pennies on the dollar, the exemption EFF got is that you are allowed to reverse engineer and distribute software which can be used to run games that you own for systems that are no longer available, as well as transfer the games from their original media to modern ones in order to preserve them.

It doesn't not however give people the license to sell those games commercially doesn't matter if they are "abandonware" or not.

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