Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on June 02, 2004 10:47 PM
There are a couple of things anyone really interested in these things should consider. The first is keeping in touch with your national representatives about rolling back copyright extensions. This is not as much of a David and Goliath issue as it seems, and there is a real possibility of bi-partisan approach, because neither party is particularly strongly identified with this issue. The problem is only the industry exercises its voice. They keep jacking up the copyright terms and there just isn't enough public interest or response, so Disney and its ilk can buy themselves cart blanche for a pittance. Okay, end rant.
Less political, even under a pretty limited copyright term these things would still be restricted. A useful project for the MAME community would be to get people investigating who has the actual copyright to specific games and publish contact info for that organization if they are not available in legal formats like http://www.starroms.com/ - people should be willing to pay a reasonable price for these, and I think starroms offers that. If enough people wrote saying they wanted X game available to buy I think they would listen. People who are sitting on dead copyrights of info that is already available illegally need to keep hearing the message that making the information available legally is the ONLY sane way to defend their intellectual property. You can't stop copyright violation completely, especially in the digital age, but making information legally available for a reasonable price provides 1)a preferred avenue for people like me who want to respect copyrights even if I don't agree with all the legalisms of how they're applied and 2)eliminates the argument that it's okay to copy X because it's the only way it's available. When there are businesses doing the work of selling specific data downloads for money it is just flat-out stupid not to make all the information available.
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Posted by: Anonymous Coward on June 02, 2004 10:47 PMLess political, even under a pretty limited copyright term these things would still be restricted. A useful project for the MAME community would be to get people investigating who has the actual copyright to specific games and publish contact info for that organization if they are not available in legal formats like http://www.starroms.com/ - people should be willing to pay a reasonable price for these, and I think starroms offers that. If enough people wrote saying they wanted X game available to buy I think they would listen. People who are sitting on dead copyrights of info that is already available illegally need to keep hearing the message that making the information available legally is the ONLY sane way to defend their intellectual property. You can't stop copyright violation completely, especially in the digital age, but making information legally available for a reasonable price provides 1)a preferred avenue for people like me who want to respect copyrights even if I don't agree with all the legalisms of how they're applied and 2)eliminates the argument that it's okay to copy X because it's the only way it's available. When there are businesses doing the work of selling specific data downloads for money it is just flat-out stupid not to make all the information available.
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