A big step towards legal Emulation!


EvilDragon

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Over at www.zophar.net I found the following news.
This looks like a great and major step for all old-school gamers :)

20:10: Gamasutra has reported that the DMCA might exempt games for older systems! In order to view the article, it requires a registration process, so here's the text in full thanks to etumor:
"In response to a filing by Brewster Kahle of The Internet Archive, Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons, and others, the Librarian of Congress granted exemptions from copyright protection measures in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to obsolete videogames. The exemption applies to games that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, and it determines a format obsolete ?if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.?

According to the original filing, the exemption was proposed in order to migrate degraded and obsolete works to modern storage systems, and enable ?archiving, future scholarship, and commentary.?
Thanks to everyone who told us about this!
 
Brilliant... bets on that the follow up to this is a law that makes all emuylation of systems that ARE readily available completely illegal, though... :(
 
Hope not... although you might be surprised at just how stupid some of the decrees that people come out with are. Still, it is a brilliant step in principal :D
 
Well, I just found out that it's not THAT big step.

It's legal to crack and copy obsolete software packages (PC Dongle protected programs, NES cartridges, etc.) what you legally OWN!

So it's not illegal anymore to play a ROM on an emulator that you OWN on a real cartrigde, but only when the hardware is no more manufactured.

What's great about it: You can't make emulators illegal anymore ;)
 
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