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Retro game repository EmuParadise says it's finished distributing ROMs
Nintendo has had enough of pirates and the websites that enable them, like EmuParadise. After shutting down a handful of sites and a Game Boy Advance emulator on GitHub in July, the publisher has seemingly done the work to convince EmuParadise to shut down. This massive online library of downloadable old games started 18 years ago, and up until this moment it hosted nearly complete libraries of games for various consoles that you could download and play on emulators.
Playing ROMs, as these game files are often referred to as, on an emulator exists in a legal gray area, but distributing these copyrighted works for download on the internet is obviously and clearly illegal. But Nintendo and other publishers have mostly avoided investing resources in tracking down and enforcing its legal right in many of these cases over the last couple of decades. For Nintendo, however, something has changed, and it is cracking down. And EmuParadise has confirmed that it is going to do what it must to avoid facing legal action.
"We will continue to be passionate retro gamers and will keep doing cool stuff around retro games, but you won't be able to get your games from here for now," reads an EmuParadise blog post. "Where we go with this is up to us and up to you."
Also at Kotaku and TechCrunch.
Previously: Nintendo Sues ROM Sites
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Thursday August 09 2018, @11:41AM (18 children)
Shame to see them feel this way about it, as they are most likely sentencing the work to oblivion. The fan base isn't big enough to warrant the costs of marketing.
Guess we don't see it like an old painting. Geez, that thing's a hundred years old... lets burn it and get something newer.
No, we can't keep everything we ever made. Not near enough room for it. Nor enough time to even look at it all. But if someone cares enough about it to keep it, then do so. When no one cares about it anymore, its trash. Let it go. Back to the dust it came from.
It was a fan base that was keeping those old games alive by keeping emulators and means to keep the game running.
Its not like it was a big moneymaker for anyone anymore. Its like an old movie star. Whose old celluloid films are deemed to decomposition, and memory of the star deemed as trash, not worth keeping. Not much longer, and its nothing more than a pile of dust; destination: dumpster.
I do not have a dog in this fight... I never was much into playing videogames. But I do enjoy listening to some of the old 1920's big band music, as well as some of the classical stuff that is so old I would have to actually look it up in what century that stuff was composed. I guess if I had never heard Mozart, or Bach, it would not have made much difference, but I am happy their work survived thanks to dedicated musicians who could recreate the works from reading splotches of ink on paper.
Eventually, it will die out anyway, just as we are unaware of a lot of the music of the ancients. Whether or not Nintendo, Congress, and other wearers-of-the-suit-and-tie deem copyright as a justification of removing the work from existence.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:55PM (15 children)
I wouldn't sweat it. There's always that piratical-themed site if you want roms. They won't be neatly organized or searchable but who cares when you can just grab a batch of 10K roms and delete the ones you don't want later?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:23PM (1 child)
10K roms x $20 ea. x 1M users = $200B revenue lost to whine about and push the agenda forward
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @11:08AM
Yeah, there's a flaw in this thinking. I had the opportunity to buy and play old games on a nintendo device. They wanted $15 or more from memory. I was thinking '$15? You have got to be kidding". I plunked $100 or so down for a mini nes and mini snes and enjoy them greatly. But, pay $15 for old old old games? Wow. No. Just, no.
Look, if it was $5 I may have played some games.
Especially since they are tied to the console. The console dies your games die.
Also, I've been spoiled. I really like playing old games in a SNES emulator. Being able to save status anywhere, restore, reply is just awesome.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:26PM (8 children)
My thoughts as well. In fact, now seems like a good time to go grab a rom collection or two. I don't think deleting any of them is even necessary, since it's not like disk space is a premium compared to the size of a rom. Might as well keep the whole collection intact and available to share with anybody else who wants a copy. It's the best way to preserve art history (ergh... ok, 99% of them can be permanently buried in a hole in the ground and nothing of value would be lost... until that happens and then suddenly everybody has to have a copy--c'est la vie) from corporate Vaults.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:42PM (7 children)
TPB will likely go the way of Napster once the pens get to wagging.
It won't stop things... just drive it underground... even more obscurity and encryption, as well as cause a lot more people to learn to do things this way.... which actually might be a good thing if more and more people are forced to do things really obscurely... steganography, and encryption to hide their doings from "the man". Trying to hide the transfer of an old obsolete videogame, no less. Oh, the men of the suit don't know how easy they had it when most of us communicated in plaintext.
With all this copyright crap, they are driving the whole world into all sorts of communication obscurity, damn near impossible to monitor. Most of it not to hide an overthrow of the government or terrorist crap... nah, it was to hide the transfer of a song!
Ok...start encrypting everything!
At least that way, the suit-men won't even be aware of whats going on.
It will be like several places I have visited, where suit-guy is running around the place commanding "English Only! English Only!", while most of the workforce is communicating amongst themselves in Spanish. And its driving the suit-guy nuts because he does not know what they are saying.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:03PM
> Ok...start encrypting everything!
Nah, just Zerg them. Everyone, go download a bunch of ROMs!
(Score: 2) by AssCork on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:15PM (4 children)
Holy SHIT you must be new. Welcome (back) to the Internet!
So to get you up-to-speed, the Sweds tried to kill TPB, along with the US, the UK, most of China. Some even went as far as to seize domain names.
But TPB is still kicking.
(They were down for a few months once, which spawned the normal swarm of duplicate sites that LEOs have been chasing-down ever since)
Source: Google, Wikipedia, and a few other sites that popped-up since Napster was gut-checked by Lars.
Just popped-out of a tight spot. Came out mostly clean, too.
(Score: 3, Funny) by kazzie on Thursday August 09 2018, @08:10PM
Sweds: are they the the Swedish version of US federal agents?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday August 09 2018, @09:54PM (2 children)
One thing I do know is the USA will make one helluva mess out of another country if it takes a mind to.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @11:14AM (1 child)
Is this a subtle reference to the US ripping through NZ law to get Mega?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @09:09AM
That was a subtle reference to the USA doing a *lot* of things to foreign governments when they do not obey.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @11:11AM
There is an easy solution for that. If you are speaking in another language then it is deemed you are not working. If you were, you would be speaking in English so collaboration can happen in the office. Other language equals on a break or goofing off. Do it too much and expect your next review to have a black mark for time keeping.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:27PM (2 children)
Yeh... you are so right... its just a big whack a mole, keeping a lot of people busy trying to find people sharing an old obscure computer game - over a technicality over copyright.
I guess it makes high paid jobs for wearers of the suit, shakers of the hand, and law enforcement. For what? an obsolete work?
Sounds to me like funding the FBI to catch kids peeing in the pool.
I don't think the laws fomenting this lunacy should have ever been passed in the first place. But now that they are, we have to live with them. Unfortunately, there are not enough of us to bring up embarassing observations to the table while politicians are trying to make a good image for themselves in front of the voters.
The protection durations they had for patent/copyright originally were about right. Protection for a limited time in exchange for doing it. No one else gets paid decades for yesterday's work. As one commenter on an earlier post of mine had observed... he made a car, but he does not continue receiving royalty payments as long as that car is on the road. Nor does a bricklayer get royalties as long as the house he constructed stands.
Maybe we all better go up in front of Congress and shake the Congressional Hand to get law made so if anyone does anything, they get paid as long as the thing they made is being used.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:44PM (1 child)
Not for an obsolete work. For the future of Nintendo, and indirectly the future of intellectual property creators.
If you're playing some ROM-downloaded NES title from the 80s then you're not either: 1) buying a Nintendo Switch and the latest cartridges, or 2) paying for the company-authorized NES Classic [amazon.com] system. You're not making them money by DIYing from a ROM site. Nintendo owns the copyright and it's trivial to show they're damaged by such behavior.
You can hate the law and disagree with the reasons for it. You can break it. But it is the law and it's functioning as intended - just not the way that is desired by some.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @05:11AM
It's not trivial to show they've been harmed by the behavior. How many of those people would have bought a "new" copy of games from back then? That's what they'd have to prove to prove damages. Fortunately for them, congress opted to get copyright holders statutory damages so they wouldn't have to actually be damaged or be able to demonstrate having been damaged like you normally have to do during a civil suit.
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Thursday August 09 2018, @04:39PM
Searchable and organized? No problem at the size of these files. Every Atari 2600, 8 bit NES, and 16 bit SNES game ever made fits nicely on a 2gb SD card in my Wii with room to spare ;)
I think the reason roms chap Nintendo's ass is that they are still trying to sell some of these game. IIRC they call some classics "Virtual Console" games or something like that and still sell them through their store, to be played through their own approved emulator. That way you can pay again for content you already paid for in the 1980's, and pay again when the next console comes out... It's a perpetual revenue stream off of Zelda (1986) and SMB3 nostalgia.
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:56PM
Not sure I agree with that, for the most part the older ROMs are tiny when compared with the size of modern online storage. And given that these are digital assets we can duplicate them perfectly and preserve them from degrading almost indefinitely.
The real problem is Nintendo's greed and the need for them to ensure that their franchises are kept in order and in house. Now that they've seen the popularity of retro games, as in the SNES Classic, then you can be sure that many of their old titles will be available locked into their current platforms and for a super high retail price for us all to repurchase them again soon.
Vote with your wallet and stop funding Nintendo's greed; they should only be rewarded for innovation and not simply repetition and regurgitation.
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(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:27PM
"But I do enjoy listening to some of the old 1920's big band music"
I like the old blues: the 'one or two black guys with guitar and harmonica' blues, not the 'bigger band, jazzy' blues,
but the 'Gershwin big band' type thing is good, yeah. (Not a jazz fan unless it's old and simple)
But yeah: good music is good music, which is why Beethoven etc haven't disappeared.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---