Wednesday, May 9, 2007

He's back!

Finals are done, I'm on summer break, and work has started.

I've got lots of stuff on my mind to post, so I'm going to break them down into a couple of posts that should hit the site throughout this evening.

The first thought stems from the Sony PSP I bought a few days ago. It's wonderful. I do have one particular problem with it; it's not so much an issue with the system itself.

The rant should begin with an explanation. I have a problem with our country's current intellectual property laws. I don't like DRM (digital rights management) or the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. That being said (and all music, movie, and software related arguments aside), I would love to play old-school and homebrew games on my PSP.

The current laws are set up to allow anyone with a legitimate hard copy of a video game to own one soft copy for backup purposes. Reasonable...if it were easy to utilize or create those backups. There are ways to obtain emulators and get them to work with the PSP, but it is tedious and borderline illegal.

I understand holding the rights to older games that are being (or certainly warrant) remade (Final Fantasy series, Megaman series...etc). Those games, despite their age, are still making money for those companies. However, titles like Mickey Mania barely made money while they were out, but are still a blast to play. Why hold onto the rights for games like that?

That being said, I actually own copies of the games I would like to play on the PSP...so I should be allowed to make/obtain soft copies...but changing my PSP to be able to do so could permanently damage the system and make it unusable. How in the world does Sony benefit from my not being able to modify this console as I see fit when I stay well within my legal rights?

Emulation is a wonderful way to preserve the classic games and keep "old school" gameplay alive. I wish the big game companies would wake up and think about whether or not older games are really making them that much money anymore...

On a more fun note, there is a website that keeps track of thousands of older games that are now in public domain for one reason or another. Check out The Underdogs for more info.

That's post one...not terribly well-written or thought-out, but it's something...more to come after I get back from my run...

Peace out.

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