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On the Formation of a Necessary Underground

thetransintransgenic:

transgamerthoughts:

Coming the same day as another piece that derides the ways in which social media endangers the critical ecosystem, the nature of this piece as somewhat ironic does not escape me. Indeed, this is the definition of reactionary but I hope it will be understood as a call for mobilization, preemptively done or not.

Let us look at the situation. The short version is that the ESA does not seem predisposed to provide the EFF an exemption from the DMCA’s Section 1201. If that sounds like a lot of jargon, it is. So let’s talk about some of it. First off, the DMCA. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a United States copyright law that exists mostly to criminalize circumvention of DRM and to strengthen the protection of copyrighted materials in digital spaces. Most casual individuals may be aware of this act because of DMCA takedown notices that often are filed in spaces like YouTube, where copyrighted material is disseminated digitally.

That’s not quite what’s going on here. The Entertainment Software Association is a group representing video game software publishers and companies. You may see why they’d feel they have a vested interest in lobbying against a copyright exemption. Not to be reductive but as an association representing the interest of primarily corporate entities, their interest rest in having said entities maintain sole rights to how their data is handled. But there’s a problem.

Older games are dying. In some cases, this is rather literal. Try pulling out Pokemon Gold or Silver and see if the time/date function is working. It’s been running ever since you got that game and by now? Well, the battery that keeps that function going is pretty much dead. Use that image in your head as we move on because that’s just a function that isn’t working. Some games, either through the gradual disappearance of the tools needed to play them or the servers necessary to maintain them either cannot be played or can rarely be played. Makes sense. You don’t have the hardware or the data structures in place, you can’t play a thing. So some games are dying out as the means to play them are falling into disrepair.

But that’s not all. There’s also data degradation. Solid state devices like EPROMS or flash drives keep data stored via electricity but those things aren’t perfectly insulated so the charge dissipates over time. On the same page, floppy discs or other storage methods (including hard disk drives) that use magnetism can lose some of their storage capacity for many reasons, often environmental ones. Humidity, for instance. 

Blah, blah, the point is that not even data storage devices are assured things for preserving pieces. I’m not much of a hacker. For older games, I can’t speak much to thing. I don’t know the degree to which, say, an NES ROM is subject to bit rot but I know EPROMS are more prone to it. Regardless, the point being made is that old data and therefore old games are at risk. If you’ve ever tried to boot up an old game and it’s looks all glitchy, that’s bit rot and you’ve got a bum cart.

So what’s the big deal? The big deal, as you might suspect, is much like the issue with film preservation. Old work that is important to the history of the medium is at risk for multiple reasons and while film might have something like the NFPF, games do not. So when the EFF asks for copyright exception, it’s basically so they can function as an ad hoc NFPF for games. But the ESA doesn’t want that exemption. In fact, it doesn’t even want museums to be making the tweaks needed to preserve games. They say it undermines video games as a whole, encouraging hacking and other illegalities.

As far as I know, there’s no say so one way or the other on the EFF’s request so I don’t want to panic but with the ESA functioning as a lobby to block the request, there’s problems. So what’s the solution?

Basically, a giant middle finger. No. Seriously. 

The internet provides various ways for people to maintain and keep hold of the data of games long since abandoned by producers. The acquisition and distribution of this data is imperative to keeping the history of the medium intact. One of the keys is emulation. Because the means to play games is not always available, emulation is a crucial workaround. Seen as the providence of pirates and hackers, it provides a very real solution to our problem. One which we should embrace and encourage when it comes to old games. It is an imperfect solution to a larger issue but one of the few appreciable, actionable things that can be done.

ROMs, ISO, even things as esoteric and specific as .GDIs need to be acquired, maintained, and passed around. More than that, the tools to play them need to be shared as well. What needs to occur is nothing more than the creation of a functional data underground for games. Curation achieved through the mass cooperation of enthusiasts in the digital age. Some such structures already exist but they are questionable at best. The solution needs to be more intricate. A dotted web of connections where we might share data the same way people passed around, copied, and shared concert recordings. Straight out digital bootlegging may very well be a necessity if is means undermining power structures that threaten the preservation of our art’s history.

Now, this is the extreme case but I make no bones about it. Should it need to be done, we will need to do it. And we can lay a foundation now simply by keeping hold of the data we do have and preserving the hardware/software we do have with care. That is the first step towards a functional, underground preservation system. 

 I have no conclusion here. Only a postulated scenario and what I believe we should do. If anything else, all the aforementioned data cannot be stored in one location, it needs to be widely disseminated. Preservation may very well need to be a sort of movement, comprised of various curators and specialists. And, you know, even if a copyright exemption is somehow granted I think this is a necessary development regardless. 

Accumulate, preserve, disseminate. 

I support this and also don’t know what to do, but these folks might be a good place to start looking/building off of/coordinating around:

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

(Jason Scott – one of their people – was/is the main push behind the Internet Archive bringing up all the old DOS and other old systems games in a js-based emulator.)

(via thetransintransgenic)

2 months ago · 78 notes · source: transgamerthoughts · .permalink

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