Jeez man, it can be cloned to a 100% identical copy. Give it up it will never happen, you will never stop software piracy. Never.

In 1983 I'd go to my friend's house and download pirated games from BBSes for the Apple II. I know a BBS isn't "the internet" but it seems to me it would at least qualify on technicalities.

clueless1 wrote:

In 1983 I'd go to my friend's house and download pirated games from BBSes for the Apple II. I know a BBS isn't "the internet" but it seems to me it would at least qualify on technicalities.

Well, if we're talking technicalities, piracy wasn't a crime until 1983 anyway as that was when the first patent for a piece of software was issued. So you might have been before the cutoff 😀

BBS sharing probably counts because it was the first publicly-accessible medium you could share data to multiple nodes simultaneously over a large distance. Copying media would have had to be performed via mail to achieve the same goal, and sent in multiple packages. I don't know when the term 'warez' was actually coined, but that would signify the cultural beginnings.

Some have said that the C64 in general was done in by piracy, as were promising game companies like Epyx – all long before the Internet.

brassicGamer wrote:

Well, if we're talking technicalities, piracy wasn't a crime until 1983 anyway as that was when the first patent for a piece of software was issued.

Piracy is a copyright violation, not a patent violation. Otherwise you'd be free to redistribute anything older than 1996, as patents cannot last more than 20 years.

They say the Amiga was destroyed by piracy.

Jorpho wrote:

Piracy is a copyright violation, not a patent violation. Otherwise you'd be free to redistribute anything older than 1996, as patents cannot last more than 20 years.

I thought that as I typed it - I should think about things I've read a bit more before I regurgitate them really. So I guess what would be more relevant is the Computer Software Copyright Act (1980) which finally recognised software as a literary work of sorts. Plus, companies got around such issues by selling 'licenses' to their products rather than the product itself, so there could be no confusion over ownership. It was the Copyright Act (1976) that won Apple their case against Franklin in 1982, however, after the latter copied the Apple ROM (which, it was argued, was not human-readable code and therefore not copyright-able). This eventually led to Phoenix and AMI making the first 3rd-party BIOSes for PCs to avoid IBM suing clone manufacturers.

It is fun to reflect on how piracy has changed throughout the years.

Back in the C64 days, people used to copy casettes with a dual-deck tape player.
Then came floppy discs in the late C64 days and the Amiga day's.
People just went to a friends house with a stack of empty disks.
Then came the day's of people importing QIC-80 tape's. (circa 1992/93)
Then came the CD burning era mixed with the rise of the internet.
Anyone here remembers these 10 disc cd-compilation of pirated software? (1998/00)

whats the purpose hereof?
unlike most of you, i will never agree that piracy is a bad thing; it is absolutely wrong to do it to current software, programmers want to live from what they do as well; but then we have weird situations where old software is blocking the road, either for society or other companies that want to use old technology, only because its commercial purpose from 5 years ago makes it a sanctity till today; if you dont care for your customers - you loose the right to the software - my 5 cents

brostenen wrote:

Anyone here remembers these 10 disc cd-compilation of pirated software? (1998/00)

I remember well the "Classic Fond: Best Games for IBM/PC" Russian pirated CD compilations. There were 60 CDs released between 1994 and 2000. Each CD contained a selection of games, focusing on the most popular / highly rated ones at the time. Most of the later games were careful, relatively high quality CD-rips (to save space and allow as many games as possible on the CD). There were readme files, screenshots, installer menus, etc. All in all, it was all very well organized and nicely presented, albeit illegal, because unlicensed. 😀

At some point the games gotten so big, that no CD-rip technique would allow any significant number of games to be crammed into a single disk, so they stopped making them. And possibly the increased awareness of piracy being illegal also had something to do with it. 😉

dr_st wrote:

At some point the games gotten so big, that no CD-rip technique would allow any significant number of games to be crammed into a single disk, so they stopped making them. And possibly the increased awareness of piracy being illegal also had something to do with it. 😉

The market had changed. Companies like Фаргус (their Fallout 2 localisation is still considered the best of all by some people including me, even though there is a legal locatization, which came out in late 2000s) could not do a good job and compete any more. Broadband internet damaged revenue a lot, and, as if that alone was not enough, "companies" that made a quick buck selling sh*t appeared. Instead of doing a good job, they downloaded a pirated release, threw all the text into automatic translation engines and burned the product on DVDs right away. I read a story once from a person who was into this, they "localized" Fable: The Lost Chapters from scratch to first shipment over a single night. "Honest" pirates could not compete with them, since by the time a quality pirated localization arrived, the cream was already skimmed, people were either waiting fo a legal localization, or already enjoying the horrors of PROMT.

Errius wrote:

They say the Amiga was destroyed by piracy.

They can say all they like, but it wont change the fact that Amiga was done in by dumb corporate decisions.

dr_st wrote:

I remember well the "Classic Fond: Best Games for IBM/PC" Russian pirated CD compilations. There were 60 CDs released between 1994 and 2000. Each CD contained a selection of games, focusing on the most popular / highly rated ones at the time.

I'm a collector. Today some games from those "classic fond" compilations are easier to find while original copies are nearly impossible. And I have to say thankyou to "classic fond" (russian) and "twilight" (dutch) compilations if I discovered some golden underdogs I would've never knew otherwise.

Commodore did not die, because of piracy. And the Amiga are still in use, though the number of users are very few these day's.
Commodore died because of bad corporate decitions, not knowing the market, and pushing crazy idea's of that time.
They used time and money (they could not afford), to start projects, only to make it vaporware just before they were ready.
If only they would have listened to their devellopers, such as Dave Haynie, they would have survived.
In fact, the devellopers and enginers, all tried their best to save that company. Trying to discredit the board from within.
In the end, the house of cards just fell. Because of lack of innovation. Just look at the PC. In wich years did it thrive?
Well... It thrived just after Commodore fell, in a time were the various owner's of the Amiga technology only re-released the 1200.
Consumers looked at how PC technology went ahead, and looked at the Amiga, were everything seemed to have stalled.