hey cool an abandonware bullshit debate. just what we need.

US Copyright Laws... LoL. Just shoot Disney heirs with all their lawyers and - 99% of the lobby will be destroyed.

sliderider wrote:

Someone sitting on a stack of original CD's and asking $20 for them is going to be sitting on them for a long time especially if they are bare CD's in an envelope or jewel case copies. I personally prefer big box copies with manuals and all the inserts and that's the only thing I will pay good money for.

But of course. Fortuantely, that is what CD Access is offering.

Gamecollector wrote:

US Copyright Laws... LoL. Just shoot Disney heirs with all their lawyers and - 99% of the lobby will be destroyed.

Disney's heirs have very little to do with it. If anything, it is Disney's corporate legacy that would have to be dealt with.

Also, you'd still have to deal with the RIAA and MPAA. (At least the ESA doesn't seem to be making the news much anymore.)

hey cool an abandonware bullshit debate. just what we need.

Sure thing. So obvious after all, right?

I`m just an occasional passerby here, but somehow every time I lurk about there seems to be a similar "discussion" floating about. Or better yet, a locked post like that Silent Service one. hey cool an all - but what bugs me is the sanctimonious vibe that seems to accompany these things. Sure, most boards have some sort of anti-aware/rom/piracy/salt`n pepper policy, but usually it`s enforced without assorted sneering.

So here`s a lil` rant for you to dissect/ignore, set off by the fact that somehow I find it ironic that this very board has so much hostility against these nasty abandonwaremongers. First of all, it seems rather obvious that current good fortunes of old soft sellers - from GOG thru Steam to assorted iPad collections - stem from the years of abandonware sites` popularity and the bunch of thieves that kept the hobby alive. It`s thanks to sites like worldofspectrum and unforgettable HOTU (All Raise!) that some people now make a good dollar out of these games.

Nobody in general public gave a toss about the subject for years before GOG arrived (and believe me, it`s no coincidence it did - more on that later) emulation was considered sad pastime for a bunch of nerds that enjoyed "outdated" gameplay and terrible pixelated gfx, and collectors with too much cash to burn. Ewww! Of course nothing could be hipper these days than sporting AkalabethApp on your portable, but hey. And rest assured, many of us criminals (yours truly included) went on and built a large part of GOG`s customer base, popularized certain DOS emulator, bought that Retrogamer issue #..., etc etc

Fun fact: if any of you GOG-lovers by some accident of fate would end up on a abandonware website these days (*shudder*) you would see that strange symbiosis occurred - links to games that they sell and used to be available for stealing are now...wow - redirected to GOG! Surely not?!
And yet. Never mind the GOG banners all over and various promotion announcements. All this while other titles that GOG didn`t claim yet are available for stealing still. Mind boggles, huh?

Another angle - I don`t want to go into broader piracy subject here, done to death etc - but staying with GOG: similar to them I grew up in Eastern Europe where up to the end of the Nineties 99% of soft was pirated. Not only games - big companies, government institutions and such were onto it. No law & no shops, you see. There was a kid or two you knew with rich dad who had an occasional legal copy - and a pile of illegal ones to boot (pun intended).

Terrible stuff, but hey, what`s this? The times have changed a bit. Bill`s system - previously available with help of a CD and few digits - is now licensed across the land. So is his pay to play scheme. Games are of course still pirated but they also sell quite a lot of legal ones too. How about award winning codeshops? Enjoyed that Arma, Stalker, The Witcher? Yessir, written by pirates. GOG? Take a wild guess. Which was
only more insulting when they tried that ill-informed "we know 100% they pirated it!" lawyer-letter sending campaign a while ago. Which of course backfired immediately and was quickly forgotten.
And its perhaps thanks to the popularity of piracy back then they have such a large customer base in Eastern Europe now. Nevermind no law/no shops - there`s still plenty of kids across the world that can`t afford stuff or have no credit card to register - so maybe sneering at them when they ask some questions here is not the nicest thing to do.

Feel free to follow with usual "entitled"/"religion" lines. My favourite actually is the " ...they need to justify..." gambit. No sir, hardly. Couldn`t care less - if somebody fancies calling me a thief (nevermind a reformed one), he`s free to do so - matter of opinion. In this rotten world of ours it`s hardly comparable anyway. Just one thing I learned: point of view is influenced mostly by one`s standing in life. It`s easy to preach when your wallet`s fat - I wonder how many of you would remain righteous if the circumstances changed. Which does happen.

A question: does game copyright have expiration, or is it perpetual copyright like what Disney (the company, not the person) keeps having wet dream about?

Either way, there should be expiration time to game copyright. When the copyright expires, I think abandonwares become legal because those games become public domain.

CMIIW, but I believe the purpose of copyright is to encourage creative works, not to facilitate content industries to profit forever.

Which leads to further question: why the hell does gaming industry is so eager to hunt down abandonware sites? They don't profit from those titles anymore, so what's the deal? It's not like someone downloading Midwinter or Jagged Alliance will cause financial loss to Electronic Arts or Microsoft.

Unless if gaming industry doesn't want competition with older titles. Maybe they don't want the consumer replaying X-Com: UFO Defense or Secret Weapons of Luftwaffe, because they think it could threaten the sales of the next generic shooter they're going to release.

That's the only explanation I can think of. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Things being said, I like my game boxed, with complete manuals and documentations. I prefer to buy my games from ebay instead of downloading them from abandonware sites. But floppies gets degraded with time, and abandonware sites are handy when you find out the floppies you bought are plagued with bad sectors.

akeley wrote:

So here`s a lil` rant for you to dissect/ignore, set off by the fact that somehow I find it ironic that this very board has so much hostility against these nasty abandonwaremongers.

The fact of the matter is, there's a lot of old games whose value is considerably greater now that DOSBox is available to make them usable on newer computers, and it would be very bad indeed if DOSBox were to suddenly come under legal scrutiny as a tool for using illegally copied software.

Besides, the way that some crackers mucked up programs in the process of zipping them and distributing them makes it a frustrating experience to try and support them.

Nobody in general public gave a toss about the subject for years before GOG arrived (and believe me, it`s no coincidence it did - more on that later) emulation was considered sad pastime for a bunch of nerds that enjoyed "outdated" gameplay and terrible pixelated gfx, and collectors with too much cash to burn. Ewww!

Huh? The arrival of GOG largely coincided with the rise of DOSBox, and before DOSBox, "emulation" in general was a rather different thing.

Fun fact: if any of you GOG-lovers by some accident of fate would end up on a abandonware website these days (*shudder*) you would see that strange symbiosis occurred - links to games that they sell and used to be available for stealing are now...wow - redirected to GOG! Surely not?!

I can think of at least one site that has a whacking great GOG banner plastered all over it that still gleefully offers downloads for games that GOG is selling. I can think of another site that actually held a poll as to whether they should allow people to freely download GOG's DRM-free packages, with the results coming up 75% in favor.

I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make otherwise.

@akeley

You use the typical defense of all pirates and other thieves, "I can't afford it, therefore I will steal it" and that defense falls flat on all fronts. If there are kids who can't afford to buy software, then tough. I couldn't afford to buy every game I wanted when I was a kid, but I didn't resort to stealing to get them and if I could live without them, so can they. If you can't afford to be in the computer gaming hobby, then you need to find a cheaper hobby that you can afford to support. Poverty never justifies theft.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

A question: does game copyright have expiration, or is it perpetual copyright like what Disney (the company, not the person) keeps having wet dream about?

"Game" copyright is exactly the same as every other kind of copyright, as I understand it.

Either way, there should be expiration time to game copyright. When the copyright expires, I think abandonwares become legal because those games become public domain.

Copyrights do expire; they just take many decades to do so.

Which leads to further question: why the hell does gaming industry is so eager to hunt down abandonware sites?

Are they? There was a huge kerfuffle around ten years ago, but I haven't heard of anyone getting a nasty letter from the ESA in a long time. (In fact, I have the impression that the ESA is kind of irrelevant now.)

It's not like someone downloading Midwinter or Jagged Alliance will cause financial loss to Electronic Arts or Microsoft.

In theory, someone downloading Jagged Alliance is accordingly not buying the original game from GOG, or downloading the fancy new remake that just came out a little while ago, so yes, by some twisted logic, such a download is causing a financial loss.

Unless if gaming industry doesn't want competition with older titles. Maybe they don't want the consumer replaying X-Com: UFO Defense or Secret Weapons of Luftwaffe, because they think it could threaten the sales of the next generic shooter they're going to release.

That sounds reasonable too.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

A question: does game copyright have expiration, or is it perpetual copyright like what Disney (the company, not the person) kee […]
Show full quote

A question: does game copyright have expiration, or is it perpetual copyright like what Disney (the company, not the person) keeps having wet dream about?

Either way, there should be expiration time to game copyright. When the copyright expires, I think abandonwares become legal because those games become public domain.

CMIIW, but I believe the purpose of copyright is to encourage creative works, not to facilitate content industries to profit forever.

Which leads to further question: why the hell does gaming industry is so eager to hunt down abandonware sites? They don't profit from those titles anymore, so what's the deal? It's not like someone downloading Midwinter or Jagged Alliance will cause financial loss to Electronic Arts or Microsoft.

Unless if gaming industry doesn't want competition with older titles. Maybe they don't want the consumer replaying X-Com: UFO Defense or Secret Weapons of Luftwaffe, because they think it could threaten the sales of the next generic shooter they're going to release.

That's the only explanation I can think of. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Things being said, I like my game boxed, with complete manuals and documentations. I prefer to buy my games from ebay instead of downloading them from abandonware sites. But floppies gets degraded with time, and abandonware sites are handy when you find out the floppies you bought are plagued with bad sectors.

Terms of copyright currently run over 70 years which means that no computer program, video game console game or arcade machine ROM has fallen into the public domain due to copyright expiring. Some copyright holders have released their rights to the public domain or as freeware (there is a slight difference between the two, public domain means nobody holds the rights because the last owner terminated them when he released his work into the public domain while freeware means it is distributed for free, but the copyright holder retains ownership of the code) but those are vastly in the minority. Some copyrights are difficult to trace due to buyouts, mergers, or companies going out of business but even in those cases the copyright does not automatically terminate. Someone still owns them, whether they realize it or not and distributing their material without consent is still illegal.

Akeley, what is the point you try to make? Writing a big pile of words doesn't help any cause if they don't make sense...

Dominus wrote:

Akeley, what is the point you try to make? Writing a big pile of words doesn't help any cause if they don't make sense...

He's using the poverty justifies theft defense. If you can't afford to buy a game, then it is ok to just steal it. I wish that defense actually worked because I like driving fast, so that means I would be able to just take whatever ultra expensive, exotic car I wanted solely on the basis of not being able to afford it.

I think he's somewhat confused. There was a time when getting really old games legally was kind of a fuss. Sure there were several retailers like Sold Out and CD Access but buying online was still something not a lot of people were ready to do. A lot of games however couldn't be found anywhere. Maybe they would popup on ebay for some ridiculous price, but you generally couldn't get them legally.

And this is where abandonware came in. Sites like HOTU where really noble, they would only upload games that they knew would not harm anyone financially. They would also include links where you could buy specific games (HOTU always had CD Access links!). So in this regard, these sites preserved video games (although a lot of these were CD Rips, but that's another story!). Of course there were a ton of other "abandonware" sites that uploaded every single game they could find and would justify that by saying something really stupid like "these games belong to gamers", "they're too old, they shouldn't be selling them, but instead giving them out for free"... Most people adopted this attitude and came here asking for help on how to run such games on DOSBox. That's why most people on this board are a bit aggressive towards anything abandonware.

Jorpho wrote:

"Game" copyright is exactly the same as every other kind of copyright, as I understand it. […]
Show full quote

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

A question: does game copyright have expiration, or is it perpetual copyright like what Disney (the company, not the person) keeps having wet dream about?

"Game" copyright is exactly the same as every other kind of copyright, as I understand it.

Either way, there should be expiration time to game copyright. When the copyright expires, I think abandonwares become legal because those games become public domain.

Copyrights do expire; they just take many decades to do so.

I'm not talking in literal term though. Currently, there is no such thing is perpetual copyright, but since the US keeps extending their copyright term, not to mention content industry will be likely to keep extending in the future, it seems we're practically having perpetual copyright.

Nonetheless, I think computer software copyright should expire faster, let say, ten years or so. My reasoning is as follows:

(1) the hardware to properly run the content expires faster. For example, how easy can you find an Amiga floppy drive today? A 286 PC? A motherboard that can support Windows 98?

(2) unlike their movie and music counterparts, gaming industry seems to be less interested in repackaging old content in new media. Let's take a look at music for comparison: the original Swing Easy album (Frank Sinatra) originally came in vinyl format, but the CD format can be easily found and bought. In the contrary, only very few games are remastered in new format. So your only options are: a) try to find the floppy version on ebay, and pray the floppies are in good readable condition, or, b) look for the game in abandonware sites.

Thus, if computer software copyright expiration are made faster, then one can preserve the software (transferring from floppy to zip file, changing the format to make it runnable on modern machines, etc) without having to worry about breaking copyright law.

Take a look at Ultima 6, for example. Electronic Arts no longer sells them Electronic Arts no longer profit from them. It is not like recording industry, where record labels are still re-mastering and selling old contents like Frank Sinatra or James Brown albums. However, if someone tries to preserve the game, he/she would break the copyright law. Unless, of course, if software copyright expiration is made faster than their music/movie counterparts.

Jorpho wrote:

Unless if gaming industry doesn't want competition with older titles. Maybe they don't want the consumer replaying X-Com: UFO Defense or Secret Weapons of Luftwaffe, because they think it could threaten the sales of the next generic shooter they're going to release.

That sounds reasonable too.

Well, I believe the spirit of copyright law is to encourage more creative works, not to provide corporate welfare to content industry by facilitating them to lawfully prevent inter-product competition.

F2bnp wrote:

I think he's somewhat confused. There was a time when getting really old games legally was kind of a fuss. Sure there were several retailers like Sold Out and CD Access but buying online was still something not a lot of people were ready to do. A lot of games however couldn't be found anywhere. Maybe they would popup on ebay for some ridiculous price, but you generally couldn't get them legally.

And this is where abandonware came in. Sites like HOTU where really noble, they would only upload games that they knew would not harm anyone financially. They would also include links where you could buy specific games (HOTU always had CD Access links!). So in this regard, these sites preserved video games (although a lot of these were CD Rips, but that's another story!). Of course there were a ton of other "abandonware" sites that uploaded every single game they could find and would justify that by saying something really stupid like "these games belong to gamers", "they're too old, they shouldn't be selling them, but instead giving them out for free"... Most people adopted this attitude and came here asking for help on how to run such games on DOSBox. That's why most people on this board are a bit aggressive towards anything abandonware.

Completely agree with your point. And if software copyright expiration is made shorter, then abandonware sites no longer break the law. They become a completely legit library/museum instead of outlaw sites. 😀

Abandonware used to mean games lost to humanity, and that transmutated as eternal september came and had more entitlement for older games.

Trixter would facepalm at what his established term has turned to as a new 'good faith' excuse for warez.

Wait, Trixter is the one who came up with the term? Wow, never knew that 😜

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Take a look at Ultima 6, for example. Electronic Arts no longer sells them Electronic Arts no longer profit from them.

Except now GOG is selling that one. If the copyright had expired, it would be unlikely that anyone would be interested in buying it from GOG. (Of course, GOG does provide a handy installer and an assurance that the package is well put together, but it's debatable if that would be worth six bucks if the game was legally available for free.)

As far as Amiga software is concerned, if copyrights there had expired long ago, it would deny Cloanto its little economic niche.

Technology is truly changing all the time. Before DOSBox, an operation like GOG would have been nearly unthinkable as a business. Who knows what might come next?

Jorpho wrote:

Except now GOG is selling that one. If the copyright had expired, it would be unlikely that anyone would be interested in buyin […]
Show full quote

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Take a look at Ultima 6, for example. Electronic Arts no longer sells them Electronic Arts no longer profit from them.

Except now GOG is selling that one. If the copyright had expired, it would be unlikely that anyone would be interested in buying it from GOG. (Of course, GOG does provide a handy installer and an assurance that the package is well put together, but it's debatable if that would be worth six bucks if the game was legally available for free.)

As far as Amiga software is concerned, if copyrights there had expired long ago, it would deny Cloanto its little economic niche.

Technology is truly changing all the time. Before DOSBox, an operation like GOG would have been nearly unthinkable as a business. Who knows what might come next?

Not worth $6? Have you seen what boxed copies of Ultima games go for on ebay?

You misread his post. It's about whether it anyone would buy it for six dollars on GOG (which includes u5 and the free u4) if u6 were available for free. That the original games and boxes are worth much more is something else entitely...

Dominus wrote:

You misread his post. It's about whether it anyone would buy it for six dollars on GOG (which includes u5 and the free u4) if u6 were available for free. That the original games and boxes are worth much more is something else entitely...

Every game GOG sells is already available for free on the abandonware sites, but GOG still manages to survive so apparently some people out there think it's worth paying for a legal download than a free pirate download.

Also, the point of my post was that when someone new comes to the hobby and wants to buy a copy of a vintage game they usually get sticker shock when they see the prices for original, physical copies of some of the games and GOG is a less expensive alternative for those people that allows them to stay on the right side of the law while still getting to play the games they wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. New people coming into vintage gaming don't seem to appreciate the fact that we never had services like GOG and Steam offering discount pricing on games in the early days. We had to pay full price for everything which limited the number of games we could own. They also have game shops today that allow them to buy a game, play it through, then bring it back for credit towards another game. We didn't have any of that years ago, either, so their gaming dollars go much farther than ours did and still they have the nerve to complain about games costing too much and using that as a justification for resorting to piracy? Give me a damn break. Every complaint anyone ever had about pricing or availability has been addressed and still they illegally copy games. Gamers never had it as good as they do now, they just don't appreciate it.

I agree with sliderider on that one, although you probably didn't get Jorpho's comment at all!
Jorpho said that theoretically, if U6 was out for free (and that is legally free, not "abandonware" free) no one would probably give 6$ from GOG just to have a nice installer and ready to go setup.

I tend to disagree though. Most people love not to tinker stuff and have games ready for them. That's why they buy consoles to play games! So, if they want to play an old game, they're not gonna mess with DOSBox. In fact, most people I've introduced DOSBox to think I'm doing some sort of hacking into their system when they see me type stuff xD. Another friend of mine, didn't know he could drag and drop stuff on the executable. So, the GOG installers really appeal to them. I also find them helpful for some pesky Win9x games that work really fine with GOG or games with multiple CD-ROMS. GOG also helped me out when I wanted to play Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich, since that game incorporated the Starforce copy protection system, which will not run at all on Windows 7, so my original copy was useless 🙁. GOG removed Starforce and the game works mighty fine without it!

Gamers today have it real easy indeed. I remember downloading games from HOTU when I was wee little and I had to learn how to use DOS, setup my sound card... ScummVM really helped out when playing Lucasarts games, VDMSound was THE shit and then came DOSBox! Getting the games was one thing, but making some games even run was a frickin' nightmare!