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Japanese Game Preservation Society about to shut down...

C

cjs

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Seems as if the Japanese Game Preservation Society has run into financial troubles and may have to shut down. (I'm not sure what happens to their rather huge physical and digital archives if this happens.) There's an article discussing this on timextension.com that goes into a lot of good details. Particularly interesting, I found, was:

This point was raised numerous times. Being a Japanese organisation, the GPS is held hostage by antiquated and draconian Japanese laws. They have less freedom than the VGHF, which operates under more lenient US laws—for one thing, the VGHF can sometimes utilise the Internet Archive to make certain assets publicly accessible, which the GPS cannot. This throws up problems of expectation—Redon has shared tweets with Time Extension from a prominent member of the retro programming community, attacking the GPS and calling for its demise. They have many thousands of followers; you likely use their work already. We are not naming them. After their public outcry, the GPS servers suffered DDoS attacks.
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I guess some people will be happy, at least at first, if it goes away, though GPS is one of the few organisations working to get those laws changed.

It's worth mentioning, I think, that though their focus is on preserving games, there are a lot of good side-effects from this for people like me who are not gamers. For example, they have a fairly extensive archive of 1970s and 1980s Japanese computer magazines and, while they can't make scans available, they have been working on an index of them, which is useful to find articles that you can then look up in scans hosted outside of Japan, such as on Internet Archive. (GPS is not allowed to post to Internet Archive due to Japanese laws.)
 
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Seems like the simplest solution would be for non-Japanese archivists to download from them and then re-upload to archive.org, I imagine.
 
commodorejohn said:
Seems like the simplest solution would be for non-Japanese archivists to download from them and then re-upload to archive.org, I imagine.
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Download what? GPS can't make any of their scans, images etc. available to you for download for the same reason that they can't put them up on archive.org. It's a criminal offense, here in Japan. And yes, people have gone to prison for copyright violations.

This is very different from the U.S., because a) the Prosecutors Office being able to charge you even if nobody knows who the copyright owner is, as opposed to a copyright owner having to step up and spend money to file a civil suit, and b) even if you get off light, you still have a criminal record.
 
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