Everyone sharing that “87% of games are unavailable” study: this isn’t a time for doom about it. This is supporting information to broaden DMCA exemptions for US preservation institutions. Let’s use this to push for better regulations.
The Only Rotten Dollhart Webring
- They/Them
- www.twitch.tv/jebwrench
A hideous fruit, disgracing itself.
Allo-Aro
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in reply to @dog's post:
I mean sure but the thing is that preservation institutes, especially for games, need more expansion than people think. A lot of these places you can only play if you're on site for instance
Like we need digital libraries for this stuff but also that's not just a DMCA thing, but also an infrastructure thing
and a copyright thing in general.
tbh we're just seeing what happened to early film happen again, but this time we have the tools to avoid it and are only stopped by the idea that companies can own culture rather than just get limited rights to sell it for a time so people can eat under capitalism.
Hi I wrote the study, can speak to this first-hand. There is interest in developing the tech infrastructure for this (check out EaaSI!), but also hesitation because the use cases are so unclear. We don't have a lot of institutions building game collections because it's not easy to work with them. It's a constant chicken-egg situation, and we think this might be a place to make a meaningful dent.
That's good! Though I do have some concerns. Notably, EaaSI felt notably latency-heavy from what I tested, to the point where it felt like there was a full half-second behind my mouse input and response at times, which I think would be a pretty big problem for games
Another notable concern I have is what happens as time moves on, notably with things like advancements in storage tech. I can't help but feel that the transition to CDs as a known quantity is going to lead to bandwidth cost/management issues, which is one of the things I think will be one of the big problems
But most of all, and this is the most important I think:
The EaaSI demo applet on their website doesn't have Minesweeper
Yeah, it's not the only solution, but it's a start! I think if this gets approved, there's room for, say, grant development of secure in-browser emulations building on the WebAssembly/JS ports the Internet Archive has been supporting. Lots of possible options, but ones that can't really be explored at all right now.