Ratty said:
Oh, yeah? Who will stop me? The ghost of the defunct company? I could climb on top of the Eiffel tower and shout about all the abandonware games I "pirated", and other than a potential public disturbance charge, not a damn thing would happen to me, legally speaking. Why? Because nobody cares. Because there is nobody around to enforce that copyright. Because there is nobody around to profit from that copyright. Because if I hadn't downloaded those games from abandonware sites, I wouldn't have been able to obtain them at all.
It's about standards. You're either a decent person and admit you're illegally downloading software copies (whether or not you can procure them legally is irrelevant) or you're an ass and continue to consider yourself entitled to games.
Remember, games aren't a necessity.
Fair enough, though technically that means MoO2 is not abandonware at all. By definition, abandonware titles are not available legally, or their availability is very limited.
Which invalidates your entire rant in the first place, rodent. ;P
You missed my point by a parsec. My point is that the "safe and trusted" GOG is peddling scene releases. That presumably means that Razor 1911, DEViANCE, Fairlight and RELOADED should also be counted among safe and trusted sources, not to mention various abandonware sites like Abandonia and HotU, which are certainly a notch or two above the aforementioned groups in terms of legitimacy. Which begs the question - why consider GOG safer or more trustworthy than other abandonware providers?
Let's see: because they have the IP owner's permission and get the files for release from them? Because they check their releases for any malware? Not to mention that the only thing that was used was the modified .exe. All there is to it.
Really, you must have a lot of bad faith to assume that just because GOG used a crack to defeat the Securom on Arcanum's executable (to which they are entitled, by the way), that means the entire release comes from a torrent.
Besides, GOG is funded by the biggest publisher in Poland. It's not a stretch to assume that they have, y'know, anti-virus and anti-malware scanners to make sure nothing bad gets released.
In most cases there is nobody around to give the permission. In the remainder, the parties which technically own the copyright refrain from sending cease & desist letters because they have no intention, perhaps even no ability, to exploit the digital product in question. If anything, the fiasco with GOG distributing scene releases indicates that these companies have no one on hand who would be able to recompile the executables without copy protection or for new system architectures, and may not even possess the original source code at all. It is therefore dubious if any of these games would ever be played by anyone again if it weren't for the efforts of the abandonware scene.
Nice hyperbole. There's no fiasco. The mechanism for defeating DRM is now known. Is it a big deal? No. The companies in question already have the right to publish modified .exes from their games, as software reverse engineering is illegal and any modified copies automatically become the property of the IP owner (or rather, don't stop belonging to him).
Also, you're overestimating the abandonware scene. Really, if writing a crack for a game was that hard, there wouldn't be half the number of cracks floating around on the Internet.
Like I said. Flawed. Dysfunctional.
But it works.
Now if you excuse me, I'm going to enjoy my dirt cheap, one-click-to-play GOGames.
