LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
Links: Abandonware Now Legal?
Posted by Steven Wu on Friday, October 31 @ 23:40:48 EST Copyright
Well, not quite. In the US Copyright Office's list of exemptions from the DMCA's anticircumvention measures, there is this tantalizing exemption:
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.
The impetus for this exemption was a campagn by Brewster Kahle to preserve old programs stored on deteriorating hardware and media.

The Copyright Office's exemptions prompted speculation about the possible legalization of abandonware. But that seems unlikely. The definition of abandonware is much broader than the rather narrow language of the exemption: given (1) the broad spread of Windows and, until XP, its dedication to backwards compatibility, and (2) the fact that abandonware is sometimes construed as liberally as "any software more than four years old that is no longer being sold or supported, most software generally considered abandonware today would not be exempt from the DMCA.

More importantly, copyright law still lies behind all of these exemptions. What this means is that you can no longer be sued under the DMCA for circumventing the copy protection on your own 5-1/4" disk or Super Famicon game cartridge in order to transfer the data to your computer--but copyright law probably still prohibits you from distributing that file to other people.

 
Related Links
· More about Copyright
· News by Steven Wu


Most read story about Copyright:
Top Ten New Copyright Crimes

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Re: Abandonware Now Legal? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Tuesday, November 04 @ 15:20:53 EST
Would this make the MAME claim that to use the ROM images you must own the original machines true?

MAME=multi arcade machine emulator. Armed with the ROM images from a game, MAME emulates the hardware to run original arcade games on PCs, Macs, and Unix boxes.

The critical question is, I think, are these games "reasonably unavailable" even if I've seen the likes of Ms PacMan still in use.


[ Reply to This ]


Re: Abandonware Now Legal? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, November 17 @ 09:23:44 EST
Your last paragraph has at least two mistakes in it. First, the Librarian's ruling has nothing to do with copy protection schemes - it is only about circumventing access control measures. Second, the Register of Copyright's memorandum states that it is unclear if 5 1/4" disks are obsolete, and opines that this would be a question of fact that would have to be addressed in a trial.


[ Reply to This ]


Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
Everything else copyright (c) 2002 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php

Page Generation: 0.202 Seconds