RetroGaming

Piracy isn't piracy when it's no longer sold.

Yep. A lot of streaming services recently have been taking shows and films off the service and burry them as a tax write off. In my world if they write it off they should have to put it in public domain. If they can still sue people who copy it then it obviously has value to the rights owner still.

Unfortunately I'm not expecting those laws to ever change for the better.

Emulators are not illegal, where did you get that from?

We need a use-it-or-lose-it clause for all copyrights. If the rights holder is not making a good faith effort to sell copies, they should forfeit their copyright entirely and the work in question goes straight to the public domain. 5 years is generous, I'd make the grace period 6 months.

Emulators are not illegal. ROMs are illegal if you didn’t rip it yourself. If you did rip it yourself it’s a gray area. See https://youtu.be/yj9Gk84jRiE

I think that these rules are unnecessarily over-complicating the problem. IMO, the best solution would be to amend copyright legislation to include a similar clause to the one found in the 'fair dealing' exemption of many Commonwealth countries - i.e "Can the work or adaptation be obtained within a reasonable time at an ordinary commercial price?" If not, copying the game is not an infringing act.

This strikes me as weird and unnecessarily convoluted. IMO the best solution would be to limit corporate held copyrights to 10 years after first publication or 15 years after creation, whichever is sooner, and limit individually held copyrights to the life of the creator. After that's up, the work becomes public domain, and people can freely post it without repercussions, meaning the masses will handle archival and distribution essentially without prompting. Simple, with very few loopholes as far as I can see.

Or limit copyright terms to ~20 years and repeal Section 1201 (together with 512 for good measure). That would cover far more than just old games.

This is only going to get worse with modern games. Always online to servers that won't exist. Digital only copies you won't be able to download.

Not only should the firmware be made available, I think if you are taking servers offline you should be required to release the source code.

I can still play my N64 and PS3 games with physical copies, but many on PS4 are basically unplayable without the day one patch at least

Ubisoft has made it clear, "Well, if you want to play Assasins Creed, or Farcry, we expect you to play the new ones".

Well, in both cases, the new ones are ass and I want to play the old ones, that I paid for.

As others have said on here, once the product is no longer supported, I feel the rights to that software should pass to the community.

I write code for a living, and when I'm done, the client owns that software. I hand over all the source code as part of close out. If they want me to maintain it, fine. If the want to go with someone else, its theirs to do with as they please.

This kind of thing (and e-waste in general) is why I think we need radical laws about unsupported hardware in general.

Agreed. Out of market for over a 10 years? The game is made public and preserved in a government library that is available to the public as a service.

You can actually blame Disney for much of this.

Well, humanity did make a HUGE amount of mistakes worse than current copyright, to be honest. That one’s an abomination, but we’re generally really good at ruining stuff.

Shovelware still deserves to be accessible IMHO. Someone out there has fond memories of some shovelware DS game and wants to give it a shot again.

Sure, but one person's shovelware is another person's cherished childhood. We should preserve what's been created as much as reasonably possible, simply for the record.

There’s likely a lot of “shovelware” in that figure

one man's trash is another man's treasure

This is a new trend thanks to so many products requiring web services to function. Back in the day the only thing that made products inaccessible was the fact they were not produced.

Nowadays a lot of stuff is just a useless brick purely because an unnecessary web endpoint has been shut down. Especially video games.

The difference here is that the data exists still and can be played via emulators still. However, it violates copyright laws to do so. It has nothing to do with “time destroying all works” (at least not yet)

Ah, classic Confucius.