I found a cool website where you can play original, full versions of arcade video games from the 80’s…FREE. Theres about 200 different games…Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Punch Out, Ms. Pac Mac…Etc., Etc.,. It’s a blast. But I want to make sure this is on the up & up. Any way to find out? I won’t post the website unless the Mods say it’s alright.
Let’s have a link and i will let you know if it’ll fly or not.
Probably not, unless said games are actually just knock-offs of the original games. You’re probably going to have to fire off an email to the site’s owner or look for a FAQ on the site. Chances are, you’re not going to be able to get a straight answer, though.
That is a huge gray area. It is called “abandonware” and somebody somewhere might own the rights to it but it is so old that they aren’t willing to spend the money to sue because they don’t want to invest any money fighting something that won’t earn much money for themselves. Sometimes the companies that produced it don’t even exist anymore so there is no one to get the rights from even if they tried and there is no one left to sue the person that makes the game available.
Many times people reverse-engineer things like Pac-Man and that seems to be Ok even when it is a level for level copy. Maybe people sat down and recreated the games basically from scratch for use on the web. Maybe they took the source and did some modern day translation through another program. Copyright law simply cannot keep up with modern technology since much of it is based on case law and that is a very slow process even if it is initiated in the first place.
That said, I seriously doubt these things are “illegal” for you to use. The website itself would be the only real target and you would think that even 1 out of 200 games would do something if it were worth pursuing. It isn’t as if anyone would ever track down individual players to an open games website.
I’ve seen such sites. They use a java-based emulator to run ROM images from the server. Definitely illegal, but in that unenforcable way.
Does abandonware have an actual legal meaning or is it just a fancy way of saying that it is infringement, but the rights holders will not bother pursuing it?
In any case, based on the titles in the OP, I don’t think the rights for these games have been abandoned. Many of them are being used in current comercial products.
The usual disclaimer on those websites (said with a wink and a grin) is that you can only play them if you own the original ROMs and the circuit board, otherwise it’s illegal. You’ll find that MAME has the same disclaimer on it. It allows you to emulate the game off the original ROMs, and just like with CDs fair use allows you to possess a copy (although emulated games are software, not hardware, but same same).
It’s quasi-legal, like (yes, I’m going to say it) file sharing. However, since you don’t actually possess a copy by playing the game in Java you don’t have much risk from a liability standpoint, and none at all if you actually do own the games.
Most of the old games are legitimate abandonware, but franchises like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man still earn money for their trademark owners, so games like those are a bit dicier to comment on.
Wait a minute. There is a paragraph on the home page that says:
The section “arcade” on this site offers you the
chance to play the great 80’s classics.
These old arcade games are gaining a new lease
of life thanks to an emulator that restores them
to how they were upon their release.
Hate to sound paranoid, but I just don’t want to have some piece of shit lawyer (isn’t that all of them?:D;)) Knocking on my door telling me Atari is suing me because I’ve been playing a 26 year old version of one of their games on my coffee break.
Even if the company no longer exists, someone still owns the rights. When a company ceases to exist, all of its assets are sold to pay creditors as much as possible. If a specific game isn’t listed as one of the assets, it’ll be included under the heading of “all other miscellaneous assets”, or some such. So it’s possible that whoever currently owns the rights to a particular game doesn’t even know or care, but legally, unless the copyright expires (which will take a long time, for any computer game) or the owner (whoever that might be) deliberately releases them to the public domain, someone legally owns the rights to the game.
Until recently StarRoms.com was selling legal downloads of Atari ROMs for use in emulators. I bought Tempest, Missile Command, Centipede and Battle Zone a couple of years ago. I think they cost about $10-$12 total.
If the lawyers do anything, they’ll go after the site and not the users. Don’t worry about it. It’s way too tedious to track down the users for anyone to bother and even then, I’m sure if it’s actually infringement on your part.
That the site also features emulation of Nintendo ROMs is probably more of an issue. I haven’t heard of Atari doing anything, but I know Nintendo has gone after such sites before, but it was always the site and not the users.
In my opinion, the real problem is that after tasting the web version for a month, you’ll want to set something up at home for big screen multiplayer arcade action. It’s gateway piracy, man.
As far as I know, the latter. Though sometimes the copyright owner actually allowed the game to be released for free. This generally happens when the copyright is owned by an individual who likes the idea of his 15-20 yo game being still played. I’ve seen some instances when a company did the same because they intended to release a new version of the game long after the first one hence expected to renew interest in its long-forgotten product. But apart from these very rare exceptions, companies generally refuse to release the rights in the public domain, and sometimes to even tell whether they own the copyrights or not. Objectively, they would have no particular interest in doing so, so it’s not surprising.
So, generally, yes, it is infringement that the companies don’t bother pursuing because the game hasn’t be sold for a long time, and sometimes because they don’t even know they own the copyrights (they have bought a company that had bought a company that…etc…). It seems, though, that some companies sometimes do demand abandonwares to be removed from sites.
Also, sites where you can download abandonwares have more or less strict policies. Some offer only games that have been released into the public domain(rare), some remove games if they’re still sold by someone, somewhere (say, by a company specialized in buying and selling old games), some will offer any game that isn’t sold anymore in the regular retail market, some will remove games only if someone actually complain, some will have games that really aren’t abandonwares at all.
clairobscur is correct’ “abandonware” is just a word invented for “illegal copyright infringement that has almost no change of being prosecuted.” It is nonetheless illegal, but like stated upthread, the chance of an individual user facing consequences for his infringement is vanishingly small. But be clear – it’s unquestionably infringing. Every copyrightable work registered since the 60’s or earlier is still under copyright unless the rightholders have knowingly put the work in the P.D.
–Cliffy
My Nephews have been using the following link for a couple of years now and they like it a lot. Lots of nice games. http://www.candystand.com/games.do?category=arcade
The website the OP is talking about is
www.shockrave.com
PFFF, shockWave.com, sry
No it isn’t
Wrong on both counts.
Surbey. Since the OP nicely did NOT link to the site in question BECAUSE IT PROBABLY WAS ILLEGALLY VIOLATING copyrights, I"d appreciate it if you and others would NOT try to link to such places.
samclem General Questions Moderator
Despite the fact that Nintendo does not actually hold the copyright on most of the games manufactured for its consoles. A friend who ran an emulation site in the nineties received an e-mail from Nintendo asking him to remove all the roms owned by the company. He responded that he certainly would. But, while he could remember which games were owned by Capcom, which by Data East, etc he couldn’t remember which games were owned by Nintendo. If the lawyer would kindly tell him which games Nintendo held the rights to, they would be removed. Nintendo never responded.
Re Abandonware
IMO The term covers a lot of ground. Some of it is just ‘this is illegal but nobody will come after me’. A lot of the files are ‘games you really liked that are almost impossible to find.’. At least two game creators saw their creations available free for download on Underdogs, were touched that people still wanted their games, and include a link to the site on their homepages. Finally, their are some games whose owner cannot be found.
Yeah, but third-party developers give licensing fees to Nintendo to be able to make a game on its consoles. Wouldn’t Nintendo be able to make a fuss because those ROMs came from their cartridges?