Pieza de audio de mi comunicación en la sexta edición de WIPS, el seminario sobre derechos de propiedad intelectual de la Universidad de Szeged.
Video of my communication for the Sixth Workshop on Intellectual Property Rights in Szeged (WIPS): Cultural Heritage and Videogames: IP Aspects of the Preservation of Software as Intangible Heritage – The Case of Spain
Videogames are nowadays part of the offer for our entertainment. Many aspects of this sector are, also, part of the popular culture. Some v. g. IPs are as valuable as cinema, television, and literature ones.
However, in the seventies and the eighties the situation was different. On the one side, computers were an expensive product. In the other hand, videogames were perceived as toys and their selling was oriented to children. Entertainment software was not considered part of the great culture but disposable goods. Despite this, we can find in countries like the United Kingdom or Spain examples of youngsters that founded software companies that are part of the history of videogames. Titles like Manic Miner, programmers like the Stamper brothers and marks like Ocean Software were well known.
In the case of Spain, the eighties are marked as the “golden age of videogames industry”. Computers like Spectrum and Amstrad series were very popular and there was also place for Commodore or MSX. Between 1984 and 1992 many companies competed for controlling the Spanish market but having little success exporting their products abroad. The end of the long-extended hegemony of the 8 bits formats also supposed the rapid decline of the sector and the finale of a glorious period never repeated.
Time passed and some of the children who lived this period became adults. They began to revendicate, using the arising Internet, the story of the 8 bits videogames: forums, blogs, podcasts, vlogs… and returned them the present times, now under the seal of being, not only part of the culture, but also part of the cultural heritage. In 2021, the Spanish National Library asked the gamer community for helping it to conservate more than six hundred titles.
In this paper we are going to travel back in time and analyse, from the legal point of view, the different ways used to create videogames and how the lack of interest in the sector was the way to create some titles, using some IP infringements. After that, we will return to present times to study the legal problems that concepts like remakes or abandonware can have, in the process of conservation of the ”gaming cultural heritage”.
La comunicación en YouTube: https://youtu.be/4bOnhIJZUtY