Interestingly, this rash of DMCA takedown requests is apparently related to the Garry's Mod DMCA strikes from a while back. Apparently, copyright protection companies have started using some kind of automated AI service to mass flag and DMCA hosters of infringing material. This is why it's all so haphazard and the emails full of spelling errors
It also seems like many of the Internet Archive links in the r/Roms megathread have been DMCA'd. for example all the PS1 links. There's still others but it still sucks
I know what's going to happen, this shit is going to get taken off the anglo western internet and you're going to be forced to use yandex to find pirated material. I mean it's not the end of the world if it's still available but it's going to be more annoying to find it.
ROM sites have always been illegal, video game publishers just haven't bothered to do much about them outside of some very specific cases. If the thing about AI is accurate, I think it's just a case where publishers, or rather the companies they've hired, have finally figured out a way to scan the internet and spam DMCA takedown notices using cheap automated tools without needing to pay employees to do it for them, lowering the threshold significantly. I expect a lot more shit like this and the Garry's Mod Steam Workshop takedowns in the future
They wouldn't need AI to automate this lol if that was really the issue then mass DMCA would have happened 10 years ago. Either way sucks all this to protect IP they refuse to sell hoarding a pile of nothing.
I'm waiting for the day microshit starts distributing stuff to remove roms directly from your PC
I recommend switching over to the myr* links in the r/roms mega for the time being.
I also recommend buying a 4TB hard drive and grabbing anything you think you'd plausibly play or care about.
Tooling around these takedowns seems to be rapidly getting "better" and it wouldn't surprise me to find out initiatives like this getting increased funding as they're a way to deploy AI to make it look like you're meaningfully doing something to "protect" revenue
I believe the "perfect" use case for these tools would be hentai sites considering just how much porn of copyrighted characters there is. Like it'd take years to manually copyright strike hundreds of thousands of smutty Samus or Link .jpgs but an AI could probably do it in a few days