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Why do you pay for abandonware?

Glop_dweller

Prophet
Joined
Sep 29, 2007
Messages
1,161
an implicit contract between the audience and the property holder.
You mention contracts in defense of piracy?

"Yeah they are"
I have them in my back yard; and one can buy the trees in garden centers and some hardware stores. You just have to live in the right part of the world.

Also... applying it to the above argument, the theft can be from the grocer who bought the peaches, and it's their shelf that is robbed instead of hopping a fence. The point is the same; it ignores the work involved, which justifies compensation, not theft.

_________

https://www.greenheartgames.com/201...lator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/

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Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
peaches aren't scarce, i have peaches

what are you the peach dweller

peaches are scarce. copies of books are not. make ideas expensive or otherwise inaccessible and people won't pay for them. simple as.

Remove incentive for people to create ideas that make the books you're reading and there won't be books anymore. Not good books at least.
Most of the best books ever written were either written when copyright laws were significantly shorter than they currently are or had no protection at all.
Try again.
 

Delterius

Arcane
Joined
Dec 12, 2012
Messages
15,956
Location
Entre a serra e o mar.
peaches aren't scarce, i have peaches

what are you the peach dweller

peaches are scarce. copies of books are not. make ideas expensive or otherwise inaccessible and people won't pay for them. simple as.

Remove incentive for people to create ideas that make the books you're reading and there won't be books anymore. Not good books at least.

i don't think that's really relevant. or even true.

make ideas expensive or otherwise inaccessible and people won't pay for them. that's what i said. the corollary is: make intangible goods accessible and reasonably priced and people are willing to pay for them. while i did claim that IP is bogus, I didn't call it useless. i even called it important. there's a lot of important little lies in modern society. it's in recognizing them as such that we know how far to push them.

where i think you're wrong is that financial compensation hasn't been a guarantor of quality in media. and also that people have been creating songs and telling stories outside of patronage since time immemorial. there's a lot of media out there that does not rely on IP laws to survive. there's loads more than doesn't rely on monetization at all.
 

mondblut

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
22,205
Location
Ingrija
But naturally, if any artist (or whoever owns the rights to the art) mailed us and presented evidence that they own the artwork in question and have the final say in how it is used themselves and that they don't want to see it used on the forums here, we'd take it down. No doubt about that.

Well, if GOG doesn't want me to play Pool of fucking Radiance without paying them and their partners "Schlomo Goldstein's Old IP Sold In Bulk, LLC" 5 bucks, they are welcome to mail me, too!
 

AndyS

Augur
Joined
Sep 11, 2013
Messages
395
This is the best take.

If dudes working at SSI in 98 get a check if I buy People's General, I'll buy the game. I'm not buying the game so the money can go to people who never had a hand in making the game.

I won't deny that it's piracy - considering that at this point it is being sold it means that there is a legal ownership of the license and legally to download it somewhere else is piracy. But ethically, it's absurd to make the argument that anyone is hurt if you don't buy a copy of this game and just play an abandonware copy of it.

As it is, I would have bought People's General three months ago when I was trying to get a working copy without a VM, but then I found a site online where you could download the original campaigns, with bells & whistles and new campaigns added.

Even more so, in many cases the original creators are happy to see their works "pirated". So many times I've read reviews or watched Youtube videos of old games and the original programmer will show up and act happy that people are actually still enjoying what they did back then. Can't remember more than one, maybe two cases of them going all "Where did you get this?! How are you playing it?! That's not for you!!!" Honestly, I think in many cases it's good to get stuff that isn't for sale legally because it just rubs the rights holders' noses in the fact that they're leaving money on the table by not getting their shit together and re-releasing something, like all those years when people would sell lovingly made box sets of the Batman TV show because the companies that owned it weren't getting anything done. And then they finally did release a pretty nice box set and a lot of those filthy pirates bought it because that's all they wanted in the first place.
 

mondblut

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
22,205
Location
Ingrija
I mean, I do undestand people who pirate old games (of course), and I do somewhat understand those who choose to give GOG some money when they "release" these games, whether because they are too lazy to set up dosbox, want to feel themselves upstanding and moral, or simply like seeing it on their virtual e-shelf in some stupid launcher client.

But acting all "YAY I CAN FINALLY PLAY IT AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!111"? What kind of a paypig cuck are you to react like that?!
 

EtcEtcEtc

Savant
Joined
Jan 16, 2017
Messages
402
peaches aren't scarce, i have peaches

what are you the peach dweller

peaches are scarce. copies of books are not. make ideas expensive or otherwise inaccessible and people won't pay for them. simple as.

Remove incentive for people to create ideas that make the books you're reading and there won't be books anymore. Not good books at least.
Most of the best books ever written were either written when copyright laws were significantly shorter than they currently are or had no protection at all.
Try again.

Dostovesky didn't have to worry about people copying his work in mass quantities and uploading them to a global network that could distribute said work in seconds to millions on millions of people.

Conan Doyle didn't have to worry about people taking Sherlock Holmes and oversaturating the market with hundreds and hundreds of Sherlock Holmes fanfiction where Holmes fucked Watson in the duke chute.

The incentive to create these works wasn't damaged by a lack of copyright law at the time.

Times change. Saying that because it was that way before it applies now is fallacious.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
Dostovesky didn't have to worry about people copying his work in mass quantities and uploading them to a global network that could distribute said work in seconds to millions on millions of people.

Conan Doyle didn't have to worry about people taking Sherlock Holmes and oversaturating the market with hundreds and hundreds of Sherlock Holmes fanfiction where Holmes fucked Watson in the duke chute.

The incentive to create these works wasn't damaged by a lack of copyright law at the time.

Times change. Saying that because it was that way before it applies now is fallacious.
I sure am glad that billion dollar corporations like Disney exist to tell us that the times have changed and we need to adapt.
It's not like they built their empire on directly adapting ideas from public domain works or something haha.

Conan Doyle didn't have to worry about people taking Sherlock Holmes and oversaturating the market with hundreds and hundreds of Sherlock Holmes fanfiction where Holmes fucked Watson in the duke chute.
The idea that fanfiction inherently devalues your work is hilarious.

There are exactly two types of people who defend ridiculous IP laws:
Multi-billion dollar corporations, and
People who produce nothing of value but think their work is much more original than it actually is
 

EtcEtcEtc

Savant
Joined
Jan 16, 2017
Messages
402
There are exactly two types of people who defend ridiculous IP laws:
Multi-billion dollar corporations, and
People who produce nothing of value but think their work is much more original than it actually is

No one is defending ridiculous IP laws - I agreed with your initial take on the sale of PG at GOG - a company shouldn't be able to own intellectual property of something it had absolutely no hand in creating and then receive payment for it as if they had simply because they bought the rights to the property.

That doesn't mean there's not room in the middle where IP is valid.

The only absolutist I'm seeing here is you
 

Glop_dweller

Prophet
Joined
Sep 29, 2007
Messages
1,161
This is irrelevant. A lost sale doesn't matter, it is that the user is undeserving of the product, simply because they would elect to steal it rather than pay the honest price for it. Their access to it is an afront; simple as that.

If you don't want someone to "steal" your copyrighted work, then the answer is simple: Don't share it and keep it to yourself.
Alas this part is true, and all incentive to improve society suffers from it. So... with no protection for one's work, invention, and talent... One never shares it except to their own loss; when some undeserving bastard steals it.

Case in point, when a photographer visits a craft market and photographs art, design work, sculpture, and later sells those images as clip art; where the only value in it comes from the artists, who went unpaid.

I've seen art markets where people will take photos of the art at detail enough to print copies at home. Prompting artists with any sense to tape prices, or watermarks over the work to prevent this piracy.
 
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Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
Remove incentive for people to create ideas that make the books you're reading and there won't be books anymore. Not good books at least.
I find this notion deeply implausible. Consider that copyright is a relatively recent innovation. And yet, in the world of music, most of the best music was created back when there was no such thing. In fact, music piracy was invented by one of the greatest musicians. The first recorded music pirate was Mozart.
 

Narushima

Cipher
Joined
Jun 14, 2019
Messages
2,035
vast majority also already comes with dosbox/scummvm properly set out of the box
The thing is, GOG doesn't even do the setup properly most of the time.
They often use the wrong graphic mode for DOS games. It's easy to modify, but overall I've found that the versions from eXodos run better, and it's even more convenient and complete than GOG.
 

Humbaba

Arcane
Joined
Aug 12, 2021
Messages
2,939
Location
SADAT HQ
Seems like the preliminary answer is: "Yeah probably but who gives a shit", which is a sentiment I can get behind.
 

Modron

Arcane
Joined
May 5, 2012
Messages
9,931
The Battle Brothers people did something similar albeit didn't make the game unwinnable but instead made it so you could only recruit people with the Thief background in the pirated release.

Yes downloading abandonware is piracy but it's definitely not amoral because in many cases piracy is the only thing keeping some games existing e.g.: The Omega Syndrome and Prelude to Darkness (before the recent source code release). Since there isn't some big government funded agency preserving games like films it falls to the masses to do so.
 

Viata

Arcane
Joined
Nov 11, 2014
Messages
9,885
Location
Water Play Catarinense
Since there isn't some big government funded agency preserving games like films it falls to the masses to do so.
Fuck them too. Locking those things in some drawer and never let people touch it again is not different from some fatass collector buying everything and never playing any of them.
 

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