"There is no ideological difference between our service and that of any common video rental store," the Console Classix site says. In essence, Ethridge and Console Classix have simply digitized the process of serially loaning out a physical game cartridge to anyone who wants to use it, one person at a time. In other words, if there are four Console Classix users currently playing the site's four copies of Fester's Quest for the NES, other users have to wait until one of those players is done to loan it out themselves. We allow you to access our ROMs, but we don't distribute them." This ensures that we are never using more copies of a game than we own that would be copyright infringement. This is the conceit that Ethridge says makes it all legal, as summed up in an archived notice from 2007: "Once a user has selected a game, our server locks that image so that no one else can use it. "After that, we contacted a law firm that specialized in copyright law to help us keep the hounds at bay." "We talked to a lawyer before we even filed the paperwork to found the business," Ethridge told Ars in a recent interview. What's more, site founder Aaron Ethridge says he's confident he's safe from the kinds of legal threats that have brought down ROM sites in the past. When it comes to providing simple, convenient access to a wide selection of classic games quickly and cheaply, Console Classix seems like a Spotify-style holy grail.
A free subscription tier lets users play games from the NES and earlier hardware, while complete access costs just $6 a month or $60 a year.
Since 2001, Console Classix has marketed itself as "the only emulation service that is 100 percent legal!" The site, and its associated Windows app, offers nearly instant access to thousands of emulated games from the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision era up through the Nintendo 64 and Game Boy Advance. What if such a library already exists? In fact, it has for 17 years.
As attorney Michael Lee put it in a recent blog post, "this is classic infringement there is no defense to this, at all." But as Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi tweeted, "there is no alternative BUT piracy for, like, 99 percent of video game history" due to "the completely abysmal job the video game industry has done keeping its games available."īut what if there might be a middle ground that could thread the needle between the legality of original cartridges and the convenience of emulated ROMs? What if an online lending library, temporarily loaning out copies of ROMs tied to individual original cartridges, could satisfy the letter of the law and the interests of game preservation at the same time? Further Reading Lawsuit threat shuts down ROM downloads on major emulation siteįrom a legal standpoint, it's hard to defend sites that revolve around unlimited downloads of copyrighted games.