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"Legal" used games ? like EOB1/2/3

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First post, by mrmike1949

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Is there such a thing? Most software is a "single user license" to USE the software; legally, you do NOT own it and cannot sell it.

I'm pretty sure that you can't find original shrink wrapped Eye of the Beholder games (for PC) on EBay or Amazon or anywhere else.

And as far as that goes, I have purchased all 3 games when they first came out.Of course the disks/manuals/etc are long gone to the great recycle bin in the sky.

But let's pretend that my disks where broken or just "lost" - what now?? Can I get the company to send me replacement disks?? HA! HA! HA! HA!

ROFL a whole f*ing bunch

As for a few suggestions that the "crack" is bad - seems unlikely to me (to be VERY polite about it): this game (EOB 1) is ~ 17 or 18 years old, and the ONLY copy protection was the need for the manual to provide "passwords". It's been a long time, but I think that EOB1 came on floppy disk, it would fit on 2 hd floppys- no "crack" needed.

Anyone that has the original disks/manual: does it say you can make backup copies of the disks??? If so, than I don't see any possible way for a downloaded version to go bad.

Regarding "Abandonware" : yeah this is somewhat a gray area, but most of these games are actually abandoned- the companies dead, any IP likely went to creditors. Wouldn't surprise me if Dell or HP owned some games rec'd via bankruptcy court. I really doubt that anyone will ever spend the money to "defend" these games - they'd have to show that they "lost money", "suffered damage" ; hard to do when maybe 10,000 people in the world are still playing these old games. How do you get shelf space at the game store with small of a potential market. And how much would you pay for Eye of the Beholder 20th anniversary issue?? It wold be a real stretch to have someone try to collect from the Dosbox group, since almost none of these games would even run without Dosbox or something similar, and the actual game downloads are WIDELY available.

I agree with the comment that common sense and the law often don't agree, but I'll still go with common sense

Mike K

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Reply 1 of 6, by MiniMax

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About selling "used" software:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctr … mputer_software

About how old software still has value:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Steam_titles (including old games such as Keen, Doom, Quake)

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Reply 4 of 6, by HunterZ

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Look, the moderators are taking issue with abandonware discussions not out of some kind of philosophical disagreement, but because we'd kind of like to keep this community going to help people out without having lawyers breathing down Snover's neck and potentially getting it shut down. Please try to respect this concern and stop making useless threads about it.

Reply 5 of 6, by mrmike1949

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bout selling "used" software:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale...r_software

straight from wikipedia:

"The first-sale doctrine as it relates to computer software is an area of legal confusion. Software publishers claim in their End User License Agreements (EULA) that their software is licensed, not sold, thus the first-sale doctrine does not apply to their works."

About how old software still has value:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com

This site has some older games,only 3 made before 1994 that I saw (2 in '92, and one from 1989). I noticed that the 1989 game had a grand total of 72 customer reviews - not selling too many downloads there. They only have 1 rpg game from 1994.

So why don't these sites sell the Eye of the Beholder games? Because there isn't enough interest/volume? Or is it because there is nobody to buy the ip from??? Nobody has the source code, the manual printers files, etc?? How long does something need to be abandoned to be considered legally abandoned? And that concept does exist, ref shipwreck salvage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Steam_titles (including old games such as Keen, Doom, Quake)

This site is VERY limited, as far as I can tell it has no games older than about 10 years, except maybe Keen. You can still buy some of these games retail (in the clearance bin to be sure)

In conclusion, I still think you're a little paranoid about abandoned software,
but I won't post any links to them, even though most of these sites have links to Dos

Mike K

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