Itunes... just not

Anyone know the logistics/legality of making an I-tunes type client for old video games.

Put liscenses on line and check out old games on a system. The system makes sure only how many liscenses are checked out etc.

It might not be practical for large games, but it could be a slighly more legal alternative for roms and emulated games.

Any thoughts?

-MBirchmeier

Random guess based on nothing in particular: Don’t bother unless you like to talk to lawyers, and eventually get screwed up the, er, don’t waste your time.

Two issues:

1) Will the games run? If you're selling it, you'd have to make sure it's going to work on a modern windows XP box. Look into using something like DOSemu or MAME.

2) Legality? Can you get the rights from long-dead companies? Doubt it. Although, a lot of authors are quite happy to let their old games out, they tend not to own the copyright.

The legal question is not the game IP rights from long dead companies, but using the "I-tunes type" client. Apple is very much on top of squashing people who attempt to use anything that can be even marginally construed as being like anything they might possibly own rights to. In this way, Apple is much more predatory than Microsoft.

By the way, the Mac is a very close-sourced system, no matter how much the underlaying OS is based on BSD.

Why? It's just a web interface. Things like winamp, steam, etc have one. Just make sure it doesn't *look* like iTunes.

I think JBottero has a point, unless I'm going to deal with a lot of lawyers it's not really worth it, and I have no plans to do so.

As for the copywrites I was going to use the existing ones. It would have been the electronic equivilant of throwing all your old games into a bin, and in return get to check out games and run them on your machine. As long as there were more copies checkec in than checked out you could check it out.

Thinking about it though I'd probablly have to validate all user liscenses and make sure they were obtained legally and additionally make sure there was not easy way to 'steal' the games checked out, which wouldn't exactly be simple.

Either way it was an idea that I hadn't exactly thought out and probablly isn't a good idea overall.

-MBirchmeier

Sure, yes, of course. But than it's not "i-tunes like", is it. That's the main issue, I see. In a day and age when people patent thumb wheels on tune players, it's hard to do anything as a little guy.