Classic Game Emulation Made Legal?

Some recent additions made by the Library of Congress to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act appear to add an exemption making the emulation of obsolete and unavailable hardware legal:

(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered 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.

My question is: does this merely apply to the hardware itself, or does it also open up the games?

For example, under this exemption, is it legal to distribute game ROMs for an obsolete and no longer manufactured system?

it says video games right in the first line so im assuming YEs it covers the games as well....which is good.....i think emulation for the older games is great....i can understand them getting upset about someone making a PS2 emulator now.....but..to get all pissy about some guy downloading the original mega man rom is just out and out stupid......if it bugs you so much make the gahdamn game avaliable on the next gen hardware

My thoughts exactly. Well, my thoughts plus lots of ........

I had around 800 nes, snes, ps1, genisis, and turbographix16 games at one time. they were about 80% like the o.g. games.

About damn time. Though for the "games are art" crowd it begs the question if this undermines the goal of making it so games are protected by the same copyright laws that keep books and music protected for practically forever. Or does it? I guess I'm asking.

I am torn between the GAA crowd and my fascination with John Carmack

Well I guess an argument that could be made is that text and audio can trivially be transferred from one "platform" to another; not so for obscure hardware. If it weren't for the efforts of people like the MAME team, a lot of this IP would be relegated to the digital dustbin... because aside from a few "best of" titles, it wouldn't be financially viable to pay people to do what the MAME team does. So by protecting the emu communities' interests we're keeping this stuff around for posterity.

BTW congrats on your 666th post. [edit: whoops it says 668, my eyesight is going]

[Edited on Dec 03, 2003 by usagi_obake]

it sounds legal to me. last time i checked they quit making the atari and nes so i guess its cool to play them another way god i cant wait to get my mame machine built

[Edited on Dec 03, 2003 by williamj]

If it is legal to distribute them, then they would become "reasonably available in the commercial marketplace". What could be a more reasonable price than free download?

But once they're reasonably available, then the exemption no longer applies, so they would be illegal.

Clearly this situation is a Catch 22. I recommend getting a cat instead.

so my Atari emulator is now okey-dokey?

Maybe now I can finally get a playable version of Castlevania 3.

I'd say that the last part of the paragraph which I've marked rules out systems readily available from 2nd hand games shops and via eBay...I'd say anything from NES to present day is not obsolete under the wording of that act therefore the rights to the games should still be exercised by their owners.

[Edited on Dec 03, 2003 by WaTed]

But it says "is no longer manufactured **or** is no longer reasonably available". I take that to mean "if one of these two conditions is met..."

videogames want to be free for me!

Indeed, but you can hardly say that a platform is obsolete if it is actually currently manufactured yet not available in 'the commercial marketplace' (when one of the 2 conditions is again met) as the US legislators may determine that to mean 'the US commercial marketplace' and then via this interpretation the Japanese distributors of pre-release and/or obscure/home territory consoles would go completely insane at people stealing their intellectual property and being told it was OK to do so. The use of 'or' should obviously mean that only one condition is required to be met, but in this instance I'd say that it has to be a case of if one condition is not true (for instance NESs and other retro systems ARE still reasonably available in the commercial marketplace) you'd have a hard time defending copyright theft of the games for those systems, even if the legislation supposedly allowing it was badly worded...

what pisses me off even more than emulated games being "illegal" is the fact that companies are hesitant to release multiple classic games on one disc for current platforms. Namco offers its entire classic catalog for PS2 and more companies should follow their lead.

Unless anybody anywhere charged anything for it.

Once one turns pro, the jig us up for all -- an ironic reversal of the usual way of things. So it's a birthday party for everybody until that black day, then the whole scheme collapses in a swirl of self-referential paradoxes. Nature abhors something for nothing.

You don't really hate cats so, do you?