Emulation is the most sincere form of flattery : retro videogames, rom distribution and copyright

The Internet has made it possible for amateur game creators to collaborate on projects irrespective of geographical location. The success of projects such as Minecraft, and even CounterStrike, demonstrates that ‘indie’ developers can create entertainment products just as popular and successful as mainstream developers with huge budgets. However, many individuals instead are more interested in the old than the new – reliving past experiences through the playing of old videogames that are no longer commercially sold. Through the creation of emulators, and the ripping of ROM images (data that allows for the playing of an emulated videogame, such as Super Mario Bros. on the Super Nintendo), games with nostalgic value can be easily distributed, played and replayed. In addition, this allows for the preservation of legacy content that may otherwise be consigned to the ‘dustbin of history’. However, irrespective of the effort and ingenuity that goes into the creation of emulation software, and the effort involved in ripping ROM data to make old games playable, are these pursuits entirely legal? The purpose of this paper is to consider the compatibility of such projects with pre-existing norms of intellectual property law, comparing and contrasting the approaches of US and EU IP regimes in their handling of emulators and ROMS. The paper will analyse the issue under pre-existing legislation and with regard to relevant case law, seeking to draw conclusions on whether the existing regimes in copyright law are compatible and satisfactorily balance the right of videogame publishers to seek fair remuneration for their work with the desire by enthusiasts to preserve and relive a form of creative culture

Changing Trains at Wigan: Digital Preservation and the Future of Scholarship

This paper examines the impact of the emerging digital landscape on long term access to material created in digital form and its use for research; it examines challenges, risks and expectations.

Model-Driven Cyber Range Training: A Cyber Security Assurance Perspective

Security demands are increasing for all types of organisations, due to the ever-closer integration of computing infrastructures and smart devices into all aspects of the organisational operations. Consequently, the need for security-aware employees in every role of an organisation increases in accordance. Cyber Range training emerges as a promising solution, allowing employees to train in both realistic environments and scenarios and gaining hands-on experience in security aspects of varied complexity, depending on their role and level of expertise. To that end, this work introduces a model-driven approach for Cyber Range training that facilitates the generation of tailor-made training scenarios based on a comprehensive model-based description of the organisation and its security posture. Additionally, our approach facilitates the auto- mated deployment of such training environments, tailored to each defined scenario, through simulation and emulation means. To further highlight the usability of the proposed approach, this work also presents scenarios focusing on phishing threats, with increasing level of complexity and difficulty

Representation through deliberation-The European case

This article shows that the main pattern of European democratization has unfolded along the lines of an EU organized as a multilevel system of representative parliamentary government and not as a system of deliberative governance as the transnationalists propound. But the multilevel EU has developed a structure of representation that is theoretically challenging. In order to come to grips with this we present an institutional variant of deliberative theory, which understands democracy as the combination of a principle of justification and an organizational form. It comes with the following explanatory mechanisms: claimsmaking, justification and learning which in the EU also program institutional copying and emulation mechanisms. We show that the EU has established an incomplete system of representative democracy steeped in a distinct representation-deliberation interface, which has emerged through a particular and distinct configuration of democratization mechanisms

Video game preservation in the UK: a survey of records management practices

Video games are a cultural phenomenon; a medium like no other that has become one of the largest entertainment sectors in the world. While the UK boasts an enviable games development heritage, it risks losing a major part of its cultural output through an inability to preserve the games that are created by the country’s independent games developers. The issues go deeper than bit rot and other problems that affect all digital media; loss of context, copyright and legal issues, and the throwaway culture of the ‘next’ game all hinder the ability of fans and academics to preserve video games and make them accessible in the future. This study looked at the current attitudes towards preservation in the UK’s independent (‘indie’) video games industry by examining current record-keeping practices and analysing the views of games developers. The results show that there is an interest in preserving games, and possibly a desire to do so, but issues of piracy and cost prevent the industry from undertaking preservation work internally, and from allowing others to assume such responsibility. The recommendation made by this paper is not simply for preservation professionals and enthusiasts to collaborate with the industry, but to do so by advocating the commercial benefits that preservation may offer to the industry

Planets: Integrated Services for Digital Preservation

The Planets Project is developing services and technology to address core challenges in digital preservation. This article introduces the motivation for this work, describes the extensible technical architecture and places the Planets approach into the context of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. It also provides a scenario demonstrating Planets’ usefulness in solving real-life digital preservation problems and an overview of the project’s progress to date