Did a vigilante ROM leaker go too far to “preserve” a lost Atari ROM?

April 26, 2019 7:27 AM

[W]hat started as a rare-game reveal has turned into a credible "heist" tale, perpetrated by an alleged MAME vigilante, no less. Betteridge's Law may still apply, but someone appears to have gone rogue to release the first-ever ROM image of the ultra-rare Akka Arrh ("Also Known As Another Ralston Hally") arcade game, of which only two or three exist.
posted by Etrigan (73 comments total)

"It wasn't their board that was dumped, but [they] were pretty upset when the ROMs were released, given the rarity of the machine."

I gotta be honest, I kinda give zero fucks how they feel about it? This is basically some collectors being angry that a super rare thing they collected might (gasp!) be experienced by some other people because a digital copy that harmed nobody was made. Their being upset is purely because they liked the fact that they got to gatekeep this and keep everyone else from it. Fuck that kind of collector.
posted by tocts at 7:32 AM on April 26, 2019 [75 favorites]

This has all the trappings of an operation instigated by Hubertus Bigend.
posted by SonInLawOfSam at 7:43 AM on April 26, 2019 [15 favorites]

Colonel Mustard in the Arcade Room with a ROM Duplicator.
posted by parki at 7:53 AM on April 26, 2019 [11 favorites]

You wouldn't download a car...
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:53 AM on April 26, 2019 [10 favorites]

because a digital copy that harmed nobody was made [emphasis mine]

There is a copyright holder for that information. That copyright holder is not the collectors, true, but *someone* holds that copyright, and they likely CAN argue harm.
posted by hanov3r at 7:56 AM on April 26, 2019

hanov3r, I find it difficult to believe that the copyright holders of an unreleased game written 40 years ago will suffer any harm. Don't believe the self-serving lies of copyright maximalists.
posted by ElKevbo at 7:59 AM on April 26, 2019 [67 favorites]

They can argue it all they want, and I will continue to say nobody was harmed. I honestly don't give a shit about copyrights for 40+ year old works that functionally would be gone if not for people bothering to copy them. They're as good as abandoned, and our culture is all the richer for not letting them die just to satisfy our absurd IP laws.
posted by tocts at 8:00 AM on April 26, 2019 [41 favorites]

Agreed. That's why I think much of the current copyright structure is bunk.

This is something that exists as a physical game, only produced as 3 prototypes, and those were released THIRTY SEVEN years ago. Clearly, the copyright holder hasn't been waiting for the right time to capitalize on this game, they thought it wasn't profitable. The only reason it's valuable is because of its scarcity, and that value is to the collectors who own the physical machines.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:02 AM on April 26, 2019 [12 favorites]

I had a hard time figuring out who would own the rights today (Atari having been split and then various parts sold off to various companies, etc etc over the years), but given that archive.org's Internet Arcade is hosting 38 Atari arcade games, I don't think the right's holder will care.
posted by timdiggerm at 8:03 AM on April 26, 2019 [5 favorites]

The harm alleged here isn't to the copyright holder. It's to the rarity of the item, to the collector. Having the ROM ripped makes the game less rare; now instead of only 3 machines to play it on, there are zillions. OTOH I don't agree with this argument, I'm more with Kyle Orland when they editorialize "It has yet to be proven whether the MAME release will even reduce the collectible value of what are still some extremely rare prototype cabinets."

Mostly I'm just really glad this bit of game history is now preserved. So much of the legal details of arcade game collecting are shady.. it's not clear all that stuff AtariScott dumpster dove was legally acquired, for instance. And goodness knows ROM downloading and MAME are on shaky legal grounds. But the end result is that these valuable cultural artifacts are preserved and that seems like the greater good.
posted by Nelson at 8:16 AM on April 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

The harm alleged here isn't to the copyright holder. It's to the rarity of the item, to the collector. Having the ROM ripped makes the game less rare; now instead of only 3 machines to play it on, there are zillions.

Indeed, the only conceivable actual harm is to rent seekers. Which is a feature not a bug as far as I'm concerned. Fuck em.
posted by howfar at 8:20 AM on April 26, 2019 [25 favorites]

The harm alleged here isn't to the copyright holder. It's to the rarity of the item, to the collector. Having the ROM ripped makes the game less rare; now instead of only 3 machines to play it on, there are zillions.

And this is an interest society should take steps to protect...why, exactly?
posted by praemunire at 8:21 AM on April 26, 2019 [14 favorites]

I will laugh so hard if it turns out to be the actual copyright holder who anonymously released the ROM.
posted by automatronic at 8:23 AM on April 26, 2019 [16 favorites]

"Sit down on the toilet before reading this or else you will shit your pants" is how all press releases should start. Pure poetry.

Anyway, I give exactly zero fucks about the "collectors" in this whole tale, and I don't think they have a moral leg to stand on. After all, their precious machines were literally stolen from Atari's trash; that's the only reason why they exist. Atari Corporate—i.e. the legitimate copyright holder, if we're being shitty legalists—probably wanted that IP destroyed from the universe for all time. (Atari, and other game companies, tend to do that a lot. Stealing from game companies' trash piles, or employees failing to destroy stuff when ordered to do, so is fairly common. And I'm glad it happens! But if you're going to be a moral-legalist scumbag, consider the glass house you're standing in before picking up that rock.) So: they're already in possession of what's technically stolen property, both IP and probably also literal physical property, and they've got the gall to whine when someone copied part of it, at no physical loss to them? Cry me a river, assholes.

Complaining about that is like one step up from calling 911 because someone robbed you on your way out the door of the bank you just robbed. Except even that involves actual physical loss, not to mention violence, so I legitimately have more sympathy for it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:23 AM on April 26, 2019 [16 favorites]

("Also Known As Another Ralston Hally")

I believe this was actually in honor of Leonard James Akka Arrh, hereditary leader of the tribes of Capella, who received his unusual (for a Capellan) name in honor of Captain James T. Kirk and Dr. Leonard McCoy of the USS Enterprise after they saved his life and that of his mother after his father was assassinated as part of a Klingon-backed coup attempt.

(A later, successful, coup would force Akka Arrh into exile and he came to the Federation as a refugee. He eventually joined Starfleet, ultimately rising to the rank of Fleet Admiral and being appointed Fleet Commander of Starfleet Command.)
posted by Naberius at 8:25 AM on April 26, 2019

the only conceivable actual harm is to rent seekers... Fuck em.

For gamers to be free, they must seize control of the means of entertainment!
posted by Nelson at 8:27 AM on April 26, 2019 [10 favorites]

The arguments I’m reading strike me as “the ends justify the means”. While I agree the cabinet owners should release the ROM data, we can’t force them to do so.

Surreptitiously downloading the data when you’re supposed to be doing something else strikes me as a pretty serious violation of trust.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 8:27 AM on April 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Keep it locked away from the grubby proles except for special conventions? How noble.

I’ve as much sympathy for these collectors as I would if someone leaked the unique Wu Tang album that Shkreli bought for $2M. Let me play the (exclusive! one of a kind!) world’s tiniest violin for them.

I enjoy retrocomputing, a similar hobby. I love it and I want other people to love it too. Hoarding and teasing may stroke the ego but it prevents the thing you love from bringing that same joy to other people.
posted by Monochrome at 8:30 AM on April 26, 2019 [5 favorites]

God damn, this rules. I love a good sneak

In 1990, us nerds played cyberpunk video games simulating data heists from ultrawealthy megacorps. In 2020, cyberpunks renact video game data heists from ultrawealthy nerds.

It's karma, man.
posted by pwnguin at 8:34 AM on April 26, 2019 [16 favorites]

Yeah, copyright wasn't ever supposed to last this long.

And it was specifically not supposed to be this way because of situations exactly like this in which collectors and rent seekers try to profit from someone else's work entirely, putting history and archiving at risk because some selfish "collector" skipped the part about sharing your toys in kindergarten.

This is not the sort of bullshit that copyright was intended to protect.

I'm definitely on team sneaky rom dump. I would absolutely love to see the legal copyright holders release it to the public domain with their full blessing. Hell, they should re-issue the cabinets, or even just plans or kits.
posted by loquacious at 8:36 AM on April 26, 2019 [10 favorites]

ultimately rising to the rank of Fleet Admiral and being appointed Fleet Commander of Starfleet Command

I could've sworn that Admiral Akka Arrh was from a different franchise.
posted by sysinfo at 8:45 AM on April 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Do the threats of prosecution ring hollow for anyone? As the ArsTechnica article points out, dumping ROMs takes labor and time (the logic boards have to be partially disassembled) and, basically, even if the collector didn't have video evidence of it happening, he has plenty of circumstantial evidence to pin the action on a single individual.

I'm wondering whether the owner of the machine is having difficulty finding something to accuse the purported technician of; he can't make any claims regarding intellectual property because he doesn't own the rights, and if the technician was told to go into the warehouse and fix whatever needs fixing, the tech was more or less at liberty to open up any machine he saw a reason to.
posted by at by at 9:26 AM on April 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

1) fuck a copyright
2) can they get that wu-tang album next
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 9:53 AM on April 26, 2019 [12 favorites]

Tangent: I remember reading a story about a guy who collected old Blues 78's. He had some rare and one of a kind recordings. He wanted to digitize the collection, but could not, because the copyright holders said he couldn't. The irony was that the copyright holders did not have the records or masters. So, I think, he put on free public record playing events where everyone could hear the music. Probably a post on Mefi 12 or so years ago.

Good post. Much appreciated.
posted by zerobyproxy at 10:08 AM on April 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

Every serious collector I've ever known works on their own games. 99.9% of the time that's how they got into the hobby in the first place.

For someone to have a massive collection of extreme value, hire an outside tech, and not know who was working on what and when and where? That really sounds like bullshit to me.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:08 AM on April 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

The harm alleged here isn't to the copyright holder. It's to the rarity of the item, to the collector. Having the ROM ripped makes the game less rare; now instead of only 3 machines to play it on, there are zillions.

All this fuss could perfectly well make the original cabinets more famous, more interesting, more expensive, and more liquid.
posted by Western Infidels at 10:14 AM on April 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

The arguments I’m reading strike me as “the ends justify the means”.

They really aren't, though.

Fundamentally, there's two things going on here:

First, as has been pointed out, copyright was never supposed to protect this kind of behavior. In fact, copyright is entirely supposed to be about avoiding this kind of behavior; the portion of the US constitution that even deals with it states that Congress has the right, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" -- the key word being limited.

The entire purpose of copyright was so that creators could be reasonably compensated, but also required to eventually contribute their works to our collective culture. That our laws have been completely fucked over in the years since by rent seekers doesn't change that that's what they're supposed to be for.

Second, it kinda doesn't even matter regarding copyright, because also as has been pointed out, nobody who has one of these machines has a leg to stand on. If the actual owners of these machines knew people were pulling them from the trash, they would have put them through an industrial shredder before disposing of them. I would argue that destroying the history of an art form like that (even a commercialized art form) is pretty shitty, but at least the creators would have some tiny standing.

So, what we actually have here is a lot closer to the recently discussed auction of a baby T-Rex skeleton -- granted, maybe of less overall impact, but a difference only in scale, not kind. There's people who (I think rightfully) view these artifacts as being things that should be available to historians and to scientists and frankly just to anyone with an interest, and there's other people who think it's cool to basically stonewall everyone else so they can feel like a big important person because they're the only one who can access them.

And I would argue that, while the T-Rex might be more important in terms of science, this bullshit collector hoarding is worse morally because it's not like they have to even give up the physical item to share it. While it takes time, dumping the roms is non-destructive and allows the best of both worlds -- you can keep owning that original item, but others can understand how it worked, experience what it was like, etc. There's literally no reason to try to stop people from having the roms except that you want to feel superior to everyone else by stopping them from having them.
posted by tocts at 10:18 AM on April 26, 2019 [15 favorites]

All this fuss could perfectly well make the original cabinets more famous, more interesting, more expensive, and more liquid.

Yeah, that's another valid point. You can play Tempest on a zillion emulators any time you want but a real cabinet in pristine shape with a working color vector monitor (they're prone to lots of problems and impossible to buy new anymore) and original weighted spinner/controller is extremely valuable. And that's not going to change.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:41 AM on April 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm trying to figure out in what moral system it's OK to copy ROMs for common obsolete games like Space Invaders but not OK to copy ROMs for ultra-rare obsolete games like Akka Arrh. I'm not having much luck. They're both the same copyright violation; they're both the same pragmatic end-run around an artificial scarcity that has long since served its purpose. There's no particular reason to think this is the first ROM that had been imaged without the board-owner's knowledge or consent, even.

But most people would write one of those off as a victimless crime while the other really can inspire feelings of betrayal and violation. I can sort of see that, emotionally speaking. Human feelings about ownership and territory don't map well to intellectual property, do they?

Do the owners of these rare games adhere to strict copyright orthodoxy in other ways? Do they eschew MAME and other emulators? I'm under the impression the arcade business itself was kind of chock-a-block with bootlegs and mods and clones and knockoffs and conversions and gray areas, that even if you collected actual cabinets and hardware you'd probably accidentally become some degree of data pirate unless you were careful.
posted by Western Infidels at 10:48 AM on April 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

The owners of the machines have zero copyright in them. You don't acquire a copyright in something just by acquiring a physical instance of it. If anyone's copyright is being violated, it's the original game company's.
posted by praemunire at 10:57 AM on April 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

I have actually played one of the as-of-yet-undumped games -- The Last Apostle Puppet Show, by Homedata. An arcade in Ocean City, NJ had one back in 1989. There are alternate versions of it in MAME (Chinese Exorcist, Reikai Doushi) but not one with that specific title screen.

Of course, I have no idea if the _arcade_ is still there, let alone the game...
posted by delfin at 12:16 PM on April 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

If the alleged thief had accidentally fried one or more of the ROMs during their surreptitious data heist, they would have caused real damage. That they got away with it doesn’t undo the reckless action they took.

The fact is ownership of private property is a thing. And there needs to be a pretty compelling reason to appropriate it for public use. Simply being a rare game that you want to play doesn’t rise to that level.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 12:40 PM on April 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

So we've progressed from "the owners were harmed" to "the owners may have theoretically been harmed in a situation I just made up". Nice.

Simply being a rare game that you want to play doesn’t rise to that level.

There's 3 known copies in existence, owned by people who are content to lock them from all humanity in a vault. Making a copy does not in any way deprive the owner of their property. If that's not a textbook case of justified "appropriation", I don't know what is.
posted by tocts at 1:04 PM on April 26, 2019 [8 favorites]

Rich people, almost to a person, are assholes. That's how you get rich. I run a hobby site which tracks old items, and the number of times a person who buys one of those items has written me that because they happen to now own $item that they own all of the information ever gathered on $item and I therefore need to remove it from my database...well, it's in the dozens of times.

The idea is laughable, though I suppose maybe not if you're as dumb as a lot of rich people seem to be.

If I somehow own an author's handwritten first draft of a novel, do I own all of the words written on the pages of it? No, no I do not. I don't get to demand all people who own a copy of the published book throw them out because I now own the original.*

I'd argue the same is very true about arcade game cabinets vs. the writing inside of them, in the form of chips and magnetic storage and what-not.

Also, fuck how stupid the concept of copyright has become, seemingly everywhere.

* At least until the dude who owns the frozen head of the author comes along
posted by maxwelton at 1:13 PM on April 26, 2019 [10 favorites]

So we've progressed from "the owners were harmed" to "the owners may have theoretically been harmed in a situation I just made up".

If you hire me to fix your computer and I copy some of your files without your authorization, are you unharmed if it turns out they were just rare Atari ROM warez you downloaded from the internet?
posted by straight at 1:35 PM on April 26, 2019

If the alleged thief had accidentally fried one or more of the ROMs during their surreptitious data heist, they would have caused real damage.

The EEPROMS themselves only have a limited lifespan, and they have exceeded it. Those machines are dying as they sit there.

Most likely, this wasn't a heist at all, but a leak of an already produced backup of the ROM.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 1:44 PM on April 26, 2019 [10 favorites]

If you hire me to fix your computer and I copy some of your files without your authorization, are you unharmed if it turns out they were just rare Atari ROM warez you downloaded from the internet?

Let's watch those goalposts hit mach 1!

But to answer: no, you have not really been harmed in this case. I'm sure that if you hired me to fix your computer and I copied from your computer a locally cached copy of Google's landing page, you could find a statute under which I could be charged. That doesn't mean it's morally wrong, and whether it's technically against the law is not the same question as whether it having happened has harmed you.
posted by tocts at 1:54 PM on April 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

I'm not talking about what you copy, but just the act of putting a thumb drive or whatever in one of my computers without permission.

I'm with people who say this heist (if it happened) is great. But only because I think the ends justify the means, not because I think there's nothing wrong with messing around with other people's stuff this way.
posted by straight at 2:24 PM on April 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

owned by people who are content to lock them from all humanity in a vault

That's a terribly unfair accusation, per the article:

But Akka Arrh's few owners haven't hoarded the rare game completely to themselves. The cabinets are occasionally set out for free play at conventions like California Extreme, which provide the only public opportunities to experience the game.

Last half of the last sentence links to this YouTube video of one of the machines at CAX 2012.
posted by hanov3r at 2:26 PM on April 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

The fact is ownership of private property is a thing. And there needs to be a pretty compelling reason to appropriate it for public use.

Lots of terrible and unjust things are things. In fact every terrible thing is a thing. Thingness is pretty much ubiquitous, in fact.

I mean, if you think the grossly overextended intellectual property rights supposedly infringed here actually benefit society, or that ignoring them has real negative effects, then by all means make that argument. I don't think it's sufficient just to assert that we should respect private property, particularly in the context of a thread where a number of people have written cogently about the deeply corrosive effects of treating "intellectual property" rights as legally and ethically akin to property rights in land and chattels.
posted by howfar at 2:31 PM on April 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

That's a terribly unfair accusation

As mentioned above, these games are functionally dying as they sit. They will not last. Making a copy of the ROMs gives them a chance to live on, even after the hardware dies. That the owners take them out occasionally at conventions does not make them less shitty for not just doing the straightforward thing and letting a copy be made, and I have no problem saying that the fact that they haven't does in fact indicate that they're more interested in hoarding them and then receiving adulation for occasionally bringing them out in public than they are in actually letting the rest of the world experience them.

This would be like if there was a previously undiscovered work from a great artist that someone owned, occasionally showed at small, controlled venues, but vehemently refused to let anyone take an archival photograph of, let alone study. Is it better than literally showing it to nobody ever? Sure. It'd still be a dick move.
posted by tocts at 2:32 PM on April 26, 2019 [15 favorites]

Plus the little detail that a personal computer is nothing like an arcade cabinet: nobody stores their email or taxes or personal photos on an arcade cabinet for one thing.
posted by Pyry at 2:41 PM on April 26, 2019 [7 favorites]

If I were devious, I think I would have done it myself, made a big fake cry about how horrrrrrrible it is our shit was stolen, thus causing interest, and thus... a market size is increased, more people may be willing to pay for this now that they are aware it exists.

OH LOOK I HAVE ONE TO SELL RIGHT HERE! (I doubt they did this, but I could see something like it).
posted by symbioid at 4:00 PM on April 26, 2019

Imagine if a rich guy had the only copy of the sheet music for a lost work of Mozart, and the guy who tunes his piano took pictures of it and posted them online. Does the rich guy deserve to have the only known copy in existence? Was taking a picture of it an act of theft? Was the rich guy harmed in any way by this act? Does it matter that Mozart's music is in the public domain and this arcade game was not?

I think the answer to all these questions is no, but the fact the answer is actually yes says more about what's wrong with how we as a society treat property than my personal beliefs regarding copyright.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:49 PM on April 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

Your scenario is pretty much exactly why so many museums have rules against photography. The works of art are no longer under copyright because of their age, so one way they protect their exclusive ownership of the work is to prevent high quality photos. They claim this protects their (non-profit) business because it means they can still make money selling reproduction, loaning the works out for traveling shows, etc. Other people in the art world are appalled at such venality and feel the art should be shared widely. There's no consensus.

A particularly clever hack / art project highlighting what museums do is an unauthorized 3d scan of Nefertiti, a bust held quite jealously by the Neues Museum in Berlin.
posted by Nelson at 5:25 PM on April 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Folks, I really, really don’t understand why this is so hard. You can’t take something or - in this case - mess with something that you don’t own. This has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with not touching other people’s stuff.

posted by Big Al 8000 at 5:49 PM on April 26, 2019

It's only simple to you because you're determined to make it so. For example, there is literally no way the chain of custody of these machines did not involve technical theft at some point. Prioritizing their very dubious claim of ownership over the public good is ridiculous.
posted by tocts at 5:58 PM on April 26, 2019 [13 favorites]

Plus the little detail that a personal computer is nothing like an arcade cabinet: nobody stores their email or taxes or personal photos on an arcade cabinet for one thing.

*makes a note to build a PC into a broken 4-player X-Men cabinet*


Folks, I really, really don’t understand why this is so hard. You can’t take something or - in this case - mess with something that you don’t own. This has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with not touching other people’s stuff.

The idea that private property is sacrosanct above all other ideas and values is not so basic or self-evident as you think it is.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:43 PM on April 26, 2019 [15 favorites]

Folks, I really, really don’t understand why this is so hard. Private Property is theft. People who own things are bad. Taking their things is good. This person was doing the Lord's work.
posted by evilDoug at 7:36 PM on April 26, 2019 [8 favorites]

"Why do MAME vigilantes drink herbal tea?"
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 4:32 AM on April 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

You can’t take something or - in this case - mess with something that you don’t own.

"Mess with": a conveniently vague phrase when you can't articulate what wrong was actually done. Did the person damage, or even alter, the original cabinet? No. Did they deprive the owner of the use of the cabinet in any way? No. What they did was copy without permission some data that the cabinet-owner did not own. It doesn't even seem to me that this adds up to trespass to chattels, though I guess that will vary state by state. If the tech had only opened up the cabinet and inspected the interior, the owner probably wouldn't even have been angry. It's the copying the owner is angry about, and that they have no right to complain about.

The cabinet-owner's investment in artificial scarcity value is not my concern, nor his undoubted sense of being extra-special-cool.
posted by praemunire at 11:56 AM on April 27, 2019 [5 favorites]

You don't have to go so far as to go all proper tea is theft to realise that owners of rare, one of a kind art works do have a moral obligation to make them available to the rest of us, especially when that can be done by something as trivial as copying a ROM from a machine you yourself probably stole from the original makers.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:58 AM on April 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

Private Property is theft. People who own things are bad. Taking their things is good. This person was doing the Lord's work.

This but unironically.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:20 PM on April 27, 2019 [4 favorites]

"Mess with": a conveniently vague phrase when you can't articulate what wrong was actually done.

Well, if I understand the process correctly, you would h ave to remove each ROM, connect it to a reader, dupe the data on it, and then reinstall it on the board. On a machine this age, that would be, what - a couple dozen ROM chips, minimum? Now, each time they do that, there is a risk of breaking a lead, zapping with static electricity and frying the data, or doing something else that could irrevocably render the machine useless.

I’d be fucking pissed if someone did that on my Galaga cabinet, much less a prototype machine that is one of three existence.

Did the person damage, or even alter, the original cabinet? No. Did they deprive the owner of the use of the cabinet in any way? No.

So, if a person were to copy files off your computer, you’d be cool with that? Because there is no difference that I can see with what you’re advocating. If so, I’ll be over shortly—and don’t try to back out now.

The cabinet-owner's investment in artificial scarcity value is not my concern, nor his undoubted sense of being extra-special-cool.

Not only are they not my concern either, they’re largely irrelevant to the issue. If there is a larger good to the public at question, Joe Random arcade tech sure as hell isn't entitled to make that call on his own.

What I'm seeing is a lot of bullshit, after-the-fact, specious justifications (appeals to class resentment, insinuations without proof that the cabinets are stolen, arguments about excessive copyright protections) in order to satisfy what is largely neckbeard entitlement to play a video game.

Whatever.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 4:43 PM on April 28, 2019

owners of rare, one of a kind art works do have a moral obligation to make them available to the rest of us,

Which, as I stated in my first post, I agree is what should’ve been the case. If someone is unwilling, then they are acting selfishly.

But their selfish actions don’t then confer on us a moral right to take what we want because they won’t share.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 4:49 PM on April 28, 2019

Did the person damage, or even alter, the original cabinet? No. Did they deprive the owner of the use of the cabinet in any way? No.

So, if a person were to copy files off your computer, you’d be cool with that? Because there is no difference that I can see with what you’re advocating. If so, I’ll be over shortly—and don’t try to back out now.

That's a mighty convenient missing of the following sentence you've got there. Here it is again, in case you missed it.

Did they deprive the owner of the use of the cabinet in any way? No. What they did was copy without permission some data that the cabinet-owner did not own.

Unless of course you're asserting that the cabinet-possessor does in fact have rights in the ROM contents (©Atari) similar to the rights I have in the personal data on my computer?
posted by russm at 5:50 PM on April 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

On a machine this age, that would be, what - a couple dozen ROM chips, minimum? Now, each time they do that, there is a risk of breaking a lead, zapping with static electricity and frying the data, or doing something else that could irrevocably render the machine useless.

The person who is alleged to possibly have done this thing we don't even know really happened is someone so knowledgeable about these machines that they were intentionally left alone with tons of rare ones with the explicit mission from the owners to fix anything that might be wrong. Your repeated overblown concerns about how maybe somehow they might have broken something (which they did not) continue to be ridiculous.
posted by tocts at 6:01 PM on April 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

Unless of course you're asserting that the cabinet-possessor does in fact have rights in the ROM contents (©Atari) similar to the rights I have in the personal data on my computer?

*rolls eyes*. I didn’t know your collection of Phish concert recordings was so personal.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 7:14 PM on April 28, 2019

The person who is alleged to possibly have done this thing we don't even know really happened is someone so knowledgeable about these machines that they were intentionally left alone with tons of rare ones with the explicit mission from the owners to fix anything that might be wrong.

Aside the fact that your characterization assumes facts not in evidence, your description really gets to the heart of my objection with how this allegedly went down. If I trust you enough to work on my machines unsupervised, don’t violate that trust by doing things on/to machines that you don’t have any business touching.

Your repeated overblown concerns about how maybe somehow they might have broken something (which they did not) continue to be ridiculous.

No, my point isn’t that they might have broken something but rather that even a small risk isn’t their choice to begin with.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 7:45 PM on April 28, 2019

So, if a person were to copy files off your computer, you’d be cool with that?

It really depends on what those files are, doesn't it? That said, the other element here is that on a computer, the impersonal files are mixed in with the personal ones, and somebody would have to be snooping around to find any of them. If anyone wants a copy of most of what I've got on my computer, I'd be happy to give it to them. I'm less thrilled about the idea of someone browsing my files at random, but assuming the story about the repair tech is true, it's not like said person had to do a lot of snooping around in potentially personal data to locate the data in question. It's pretty obvious from the cabinet what's in there.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:35 AM on April 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

sysinfo: I could've sworn that Admiral Akka Arrh was from a different franchise.

Isn't Akka Arrh from the franchise with the little wizard boy?
posted by syzygy at 12:47 AM on April 29, 2019

my point isn’t that they might have broken something but rather that even a small risk isn’t their choice to begin with

If the law is unjust, and gives rise to injustice, it is our moral duty to break it. If people hoard, it is our responsibility to make them share.

Property rights are not fundamental or inviolable, and simply repeating your faith in them doesn't make your position into an argument. That you seem to regard intellectual property, which is less than 500 years old, and is by its very nature a limited and conditional right (because it's not really very much like a genuine property right at all), as having the same significance as property rights more generally also undermines the credibility of your position in my view.

It's not that people don't understand your position, it's that they disagree with a premise that you regard as self-evident. Do you think your belief is so strong because you've reasoned yourself into it, or because you live in a society where it benefits the powerful to have you hold it?
posted by howfar at 8:26 AM on April 29, 2019 [4 favorites]

It really depends on what those files are, doesn't it?

Perhaps a more apt analogy is duplicating a DVD. Yes, I would still have the DVD in the end but again the harm isn’t the copying per se (as I said, it isn’t about the copyright for me) but the fact that you feel entitled to take my stuff and use it (even temporarily) without my permission is the problem that I have.

I am not some libertarian private property absolutist who believes property rights are sacrosanct and taxes are theft but I do believe that having a fundamental understanding and respect for what is yours and what is mine is part of the social contract that we all need to follow.

There are reasonable cases that can be made for limiting what we own as the public and when it is acceptable to appropriate private property for public interest. I have really, really hard time seeing where an arcade game meets that standard.

The example above of the dinosaur fossil is a good example. I actually agree with the idea that fossils should be a public good that no individual should own. But I also think that doesn’t mean that landowners then have no say in when/how fossils are collected from their land and I sure as hell wouldn’t support individual fossil hunters deciding on their own.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 11:12 AM on April 29, 2019

Perhaps a more apt analogy is duplicating a DVD.

Well, duplicating an unreleased and possibly stolen DVD. Should the person currently possessing such a DVD have standing to sue for harm without documenting the chain of custody demonstrating it's not a stolen prototype?

But what I find more fascinating is the possibility that a collector dumped the ROM, sold the cabinet, waited long enough for other people to have access, and then released it. And in a few months from now, you can buy it back at a discount. Do collectors insist on terms like 'no releasing dumped ROMs?' when transacting? Would a buyer bring a suit alleging harm knowing they were probably receiving stolen property?
posted by pwnguin at 12:35 PM on April 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

If the law is unjust, and gives rise to injustice, it is our moral duty to break it. If people hoard, it is our responsibility to make them share.

Sure. But just like property rights aren’t sacrosanct, what is being hoarded matters. An arcade game is not food, shelter or medicine. The historical interest in a video game does not override the rights of the person who owns the cabinet. The fact that the hoarding in question is for a piece of entertainment and not something of public necessity is a big strike against your moral argument for taking.

Property rights are not fundamental or inviolable, and simply repeating your faith in them doesn't make your position into an argument.

See above.

That you seem to regard intellectual property, which is less than 500 years old, and is by its very nature a limited and conditional right (because it's not really very much like a genuine property right at all), as having the same significance as property rights more generally also undermines the credibility of your position in my view.

Where have I said that? In fact, I believe I’ve said that copyright to the game is irrelevant. But since people insist on bringing it up, let’s think about what the copyright means in this instance. The owners of the existing cabinets have no copyright, so they have no place to control if or how the code is distributed - my argument is they do have a right to say no to using their machine to get the code. You have no overriding right to possession of the code.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 12:58 PM on April 29, 2019

In our glorious future socialist utopia, you'll just get a court order forcing hoarders to allow access to rare media in private hands for documentation and copying purposes so that the public can benefit. They'll count themselves lucky the original wasn't expropriated and move on with their lives.

In the meantime, well, life finds a way.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:16 PM on April 29, 2019 [2 favorites]

Well, duplicating an unreleased and possibly stolen DVD.

The insinuation that the cabinets were stolen is a bad faith argument that needs to die.

Unless someone can demonstrate they were, in fact, stolen can we just drop it already?
posted by Big Al 8000 at 1:35 PM on April 29, 2019

Well...they certainly weren't obtained with due respect to the property rights of their lawful owners, were they? These games are not licenced for home use, and any play is presumably an infringement of the intellectual property rights of their manufacturers.

Defending the property rights of receivers of ill-gotten goods seems like a pretty apt metaphor for modern capitalism.
posted by howfar at 1:39 PM on April 29, 2019 [5 favorites]

Unless someone can demonstrate they were, in fact, stolen can we just drop it already?

Gee, what does the original article say about this?

Oh wait:

The existing test-market prototypes were at some point rescued from the refuse of Atari's warehouses—likely during or after the company's spectacular crash—and over the years made their way to the hands of some extremely private arcade-cabinet collectors.

Emphasis mine. "Rescued". Yeah. OK.

They were stolen, either by an employee who thought nobody would care, or by someone digging through the trash. That you continue to talk about how important the rights of property owners are while refusing to acknowledge that the owners you're so keen to defend are in possession of stolen property is the argument that needs to die.
posted by tocts at 2:09 PM on April 29, 2019 [5 favorites]

They were stolen, either by an employee who thought nobody would care, or by someone digging through the trash.

Now I know you’re yanking my chain, because not only is that not evidence of theft, it barely supports your speculation that a crime could have occurred.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 4:20 PM on April 29, 2019

It's certainly clear that they didn't obtain them legally from the company in a transaction, so I really am not sure why you are harping on this, Big Al 8000. If they put them in dumpsters and placed them on a public street, it might not be *illegal* either, but they were awfully bulky machines for that kind of disposal, municipalities will tolerate a dumpster maybe but not a warehouse's contents, and dumpster diving on private property? That's theft. The extreme likelihood is that warehouse employees, seeing the end of their jobs coming, exfiltrated anything of value. Which I've got no problem with, really, same as I am untroubled by the ROM being dumped, if it was.
posted by tavella at 4:36 PM on April 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

It seems weird to me that they got some random guy to work on their super rare special arcade cabinet. Don’t ppl like this have very specific relationships with techs they know and trust?
posted by gucci mane at 8:29 AM on April 30, 2019

The historical interest in a video game does not override the rights of the person who owns the cabinet.

Sure it does.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:25 AM on May 4, 2019 [2 favorites]