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New Front In The Copyright-War: Abandon-Ware
Ventilator writes: "The New York Times (free login required) features an interesting story about out-of-print games and the copyright issues for dedicated Web sites. It also discusses the benefits for game developers if they would make those old games available to the public. "
This is incorrect. "Alexander's Ragtime Band," for instance, slipped into the public domain in the early '90's when the publisher forgot to renew its copyright. There was an article in Billboard around the time with hilarious quotes from music publishers about what a horrible mistake this was.
Errr. So, I want Foo&Bar's new CD. I'm going to their concert tonight. I'll take a gun and blow their heads off. Now their works are in the public domain.
You'd have to be pretty dedicated to the idea of free music if you were willing to take a murder charge or two. Ohh... that Stallman! I'll get him... it's time that Emacs got out of under the thumb of those FSF dorks. [joking!]
This is exactly what the various content cartels (RIAA, SPA, MPAA, BSA, etc etc) don't want to happen! A thriving trade in high-quality "abandoned" content (be it games, music, movies or whatever) would, in their view, cut into the profits of their ever-more-expensive-to-make "original" content.
Think I'm kidding? The major movie studies are literally allowing thousands of reels of film to rot in non-climate-controlled archives, so that when they finally slip into the public domain, it will be physically impossible for people to make copies to distribute.
Or look at Hasbro/Atari's recent lawsuits against makers of shareware clones of their "classic" videogames -- wouldn't wany any of the kids downloading a free version of Frogger when we can extract $40 from them for our brand-new, 3D-accellerated, completely-not-fun version!
The ugly truth here is that the content cartels (please don't call them producers) have, for all intents and purposes, completely obliterated the very concept of the public domain in the US legal code for now. The only thing that will change that is a massive legal challenge on basic constitutional grounds, and I can't think of any entity that could afford it, and I shudder to think which way the Rhenquist supreme court might rule on the matter.
Mark my words -- in a decade, we will all be content pirates by necessity.
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If you have the skills to write a GPL app that people actually want, you probably have a day job that pays well, and can easilly swing the hundred bucks per five years to keep your "prestige" project under your name...
:)
Though it could be a problem for students (high school + college). Yeah $100 is reasonable... but still... quite a bit of money as far as I'm concerned.
and if you don't, the FSF or some other patron would probably be willing to pick up the tab, just for the benifit of the community.
Though FSF would probably only be interested in GPLed programs, which would be a problem for BSD/MIT projects.
Of course, you would be out of luck if your code was redundant and/or useless and you worked at McDonalds for a living... but isn't that the idea? To preserve copy[right,left] of viable products while letting everything else fall into public domain?
IIRC, the point of copyright was to encourage people to write stuff and let them make a profit from their works (for a limited time - something Congress seems to have forgotten about). And the viability of me as a worker (which detirmines how much money I have) and the viability of my code, seem somewhat unrelated, at least in some cases. What if I'm given to periods of extreme depression, and I can't work much of the time. But when I do, I hack up wonderful code that I give to everyone to use. Should my work go into the public domain just because I am unable (for whatever reason) to hold a steady job? Note that this question is purely hypothetical - well, mostly.
Though you'd have problems getting it to work with code anyway. For instance, let's say I have a program foo 1.0, and it's copyrighted 2000. Then I add some really cool features and create foo 1.1, which is copyrighted 2001. Even if I don't pay the fee, anyone who wants to use the cool features has to use my copyrighted code. Just make small changes/additions to the code every few years and the more recent versions will never go into the public domain.
Not the mention the fact that even if all these ROMs and old computer games went into the public domain, we still wouldn't have the code. The company has it and has absolutly no reason to take it out of the big underground vault where they're keeping it. The binaries will be available and in the public domain, but the source will still be secret (if still "public domain").
What an absurd cliche anyway. Can you really think of no situations where the ends did justify the means? Most of the citezens of the US of A certainly believe that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (means) were justified by the ending of the Pacific War (ends). I believe the counter-cliche is "You gotta break some eggs to make an omellete".
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
But unlike most games mentioned in the NYT article, Zork is still for sale. I picked up something like 20 text adventures from Activision at CompUSA for USD 19,95, put on one CD for the express purpose of making the old stuff available to the connaisseur. I still saw the thing on the shelves last fall.
Next stop: Open Source, so I can build them to run natively!
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Also, older games are a lot more accessible. I tried playing Smash Bros. on the N64 and it's complete mayhem. Shapes and sounds and so forth. I can't even understand the controller. I am 20 years old, not past my prime by any standards, but after 5 years or so of being "out of the loop" in gaming terms, I'm completely lost. But I really enjoy playing some of the older games, whether Nintendo or Atari or whatnot.
Another point, games used to be way more creative. Games today can be easily classified into a few categories. But Nintendo had games (Wall Street Kid and Downtown Cross Country Race or whatever) that were completely unlike any others. I'll often times start up a ROM and be amazed at the originality in gameplay and interface, not to mention graphics and music. Oh, don't even get me started on the beautiful music.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I know exactly what you are talking about. For years I've been hoping that Ultima 7 (and Serpent Isle) would be open sourced, in hope that someday someone would be able to extend it and customize it. A few times my hopes were raised whenever I heard that Origin was thinking about it. I use to frequent the ultima dragon's newsgroup and was told that the source to Serpent Isle had been "lost." I'm not sure about Ultima 7. Anyway, I have always hoped that those 2 games, quite easily two of the best games ever, would come out into the open and allow customization. I follow the Exult carefully and am quick to download the newest changes. In fact, as I'm sure many of you do, I kept my old 486 solely for the purpose of playing Ultimas.
I'm a gamer - I love the old arcade/2600/Commodore 64 classics, but that's not *all* I play. But I do enjoy the older games from time to time - it reminds me of my childhood, and believe it or not, some of those old games are still fun (gasp! SHOCK!)
Should be get rid of all literature that's not on the NYTimes best seller list? Or burn all film that's over 20 years old? Hell no.
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>Why?
:-) should be getting money for nothing?
The Act of Copyright exists to allow people to purchase authentic works. It has been mutated today into an act that allows publishers to make money from their art (which I haven't any problem with). The idea of copyrights expiring means that once the company has milked an idea for what it is reasonably worth (and trust me, Super Mario Brothers ain't worth even $5 anymore, I bought mine for $2!), the copyright would expire and allow anyone, including the poor, access to the works.
Why should we all have access to copywritten works, some might ask? The answer is simple: To preserve education and history. If copyrights take 100 years to expire right now, then ALL companies have to do to cover their mistakes is not release their stuff for the 100 years. There aren't many formats out there that will last 100 years. CDs get laser rot (if they are built poorly... they have to be built DAMN good to last 100 years), the magnetism of disks changes, film rots, arcade machines break, contacts on ROM cartridges wear out, etc.
If a company can cover their mistakes through copyright, they can rewrite their history. Sounds scary, no?
If copyright expires at the end of the useful selling period of an item, then the last few sold are still in good shape, and soon copies would exist (legally) ensuring that history is served. There is NO reason why a company needs to keep copyrights on computer games longer than 10 years, IMHO. Tell me ONE company that is still burning ROMS for new Nintendo cartridges of a 10 year old game. If you can't, you likely won't find a company doing it for any other system -- Nintendo was pretty much the most popular console 10 years ago.
>How is a book that was written 50 years ago any less relevant today than when it was first published?
How relevant a work is doesn't mean it deserves to enjoy an infinite copyright. Hell, the works of Plato are still relevant -- do you really think that whoever is still part of Plato's bloodline (probably a few million people now...
A Chilton's manual for a 1990 Tempo might be useful to someone trying to restore on 50 years from now (therefore relevant). Obviously it isn't going to be in print. And how many people have a preserved Chilton's collection? Should the knowledge of how to repair that car be simply lost? If you ask me, no. Releasing copyright after the reasonably saleable lifetime of the material would allow someone to copy the information. This means that 50 years from now, there could be a full older Chilton's manual collection, simply because if you combine what each Mechanic has, you will probably find a full set. But copying these old books to make a complete set for yourself would be illegal right now. That is just plain wrong, unless you are a masochist and WANT others to spend ungodly amounts of time talking to hundreds of mechanics to get one damn book.
But, at least for Chiltons manuals, you MIGHT have a chance at finding them in a library. Not so for most all computer software. Now THIS is where the real problem is: Libraries need to start carrying computer games for historical and archival purposes, using OUR money. Or copyright has to be diminshed, costing almost nothing. I like the last option.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
hehe, oh the memories. I used to do that untill (following a mag articla) I hacked the miniassembler out of Integer basic so I could use it without having to boot the apple into INT mode :). Oh, the hacks I got up to :) hires screen rotation (180), multi tones, disc hacking...
Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
I think the key issue here is that these games are dead. All the people who worked on them have left to another group or company. The company may not even have that division anymore. The game no longer sees a profit, it merely exists as a few awards in the hallway trophy cabinet, the original packaged version in the company library, and as some legal papers in the attorneys office.
The attorneys are the only one's paid to even care about the game anymore. So of course you'll find an inane thought process around the freedom of dead games, because Attorneys, in general. Are evil.
My 2c
-Jon
this is my sig.
Yup, I remember all those. But then, I remember when Costikyan was a 19-yo playtester for SPI.
Wow. And you still have hair on your head? Amazing....
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Brazil has decided you're cute.
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Your logic is flawed though. You have the right to say I can't use your idea/product/information/what ever, but who says I have to listen to you?
Now I agree copyrights should be legal for the purpose of motivating people to innovate. I think 10 years of profit is enough to motivate people to innovate.
Look at it this way, suppose the person who invented the wheel started a company called The Wheel, Inc., put a permanent copyright on his invention. We would never be able to use any wheel implemented in any product, to this day, that wasn't purchased from The Wheel, Inc.
But that's *okay* I suppose, because The Wheel, Inc. owns the invention of the wheel.
First, anyone concerned about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 should help with our lawsuit to overturn it--see http://eon.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno/ and please join the OpenLaw discussion linked from there or just get up to date on the online briefs.
Unfortunately, even if Bono is overturned, no computer games will enter the public domain for many years, companies who own copyrights will have few incentives to make them free, and so-called "piracy" will remain the only option for most of those who wish to enjoy and learn from these old programs.
So, secondly, please help me somehow with an Intellectual Property Conservancy, even if Bono is not overturned. The idea is to set up a non-profit, independent, tax-deductible, educational and publishing corporation. This Conservancy could accept donations of online publishing rights, copyrights, patents, and so on. After the work goes out of print or is not worth retaining except defensively, then the copyright owner could get a tax deduction for donating rights so the work could become freely available.
The idea is that the public would benefit from this "progress of science and the useful arts" and so ought to PAY the creators or copyright owners, instead of TAKING without payment their products. In past years, copyright owners had to register and renew copyrights, but today many works are out-of-print and it is impractical to reprint them except online.
I happen to agree with RMS that software patents are bad and copyrights of proprietary software ought never to have been allowed. But I think with this Conservancy idea we could LEVERAGE current copyright law to enhance freedom for all of us.
Then a Games Museum could come about, along with donated old computers and machines and software, so that all of us could not only enjoy ourselves, but also learn from the wizards of yesterday, and make future games and other products even better.
The Conservancy idea is very practical. Not only has at least one company donated patents to the FSF, but recently another company was able to get tax deductions for such a gift. Proctor and Gamble donated some of its "too many" patents to Western Michigan University, which can do better packaging research and develop better products based on these patents. All of us might win thereby!
- It is too long 150 (75+75) at the turn of the 20th century it was better (14+14).
- You don't have to make your product available. If we are granting someone exculsize right to product something they should have to produce it or lose those rights.
I'd rather see (7+7+7+7) and to renew you must demonstright that you are still making the product available to the public otherwise you lose your copyright. The major problem here is what available means, one could always put some high price on the product you don't realy want to produce. I have no idea how to define this.Heck even 7(+7)^25 sould be better from a cultural standpoint IMHO , with 150+ years of copywrong.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
The copyrights that used to be life + 50 are now life + 70. Remember that the Sonny Bono Act was passed during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, by voice vote no less; our representatives and senators don't have to answer to their constituents.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ah, good 'ol CP/M. I still have a couple of CP/M games that, unfortunately, I haven't found a good emulator to run.
:-)
And why not bring back old gems like ZBASIC?
Hmm, this is almost making me want to pull out my old copy of Multimate.
When copyright was first introduced (in England and the USA at least, AFAIK), the term was fourteen years, with a possible renewal for another fourteen years during the author's lifetime.
Since then, the world has become faster and the pace of change has increased. News is now minute-by-minute rather than week-by-week, technologies come and go in years rather than decades, the popularity of music waxes and wanes far faster than it did then. Yet the copyright term has become longer and longer, for some reason. It now ranges from life plus fifty years, to life plus ninety years. That's an effective copyright term of a century and a half in some cases - totally unjustified by any substantially increased incentive to create new works.
Unfortunately, international treaties prevent countries from adopting more sensible policies, even if they wanted to. Or rather, it means that greater political will is required to get past the 'hiding behind our international "obligations"' stage. (IMHO intellectual property law, like taxation, is best decided individually on a country-by-country basis.)
I reckon that the copyright term will be put right during my lifetime; if it ever became an 'issue' it would certainly provoke a lot of support for a reduction to the original 14 years, or some other reasonable term. Unfortunately, the large media conglomerates such as Disney are those who keep pushing for another twenty years every decade or so, so it's unlikely that any of the mainstream media would start actively campaigning on this issue. But sooner or later, it is bound to get attention.
Regular renewal sounds a bit bureacratic and could be an excuse to favour those who can afford the lawyers and paperwork. Having to prove (ultimately before a court) that your work is still worth copyrighting could bog the whole world down in endless appeals and wrangling. Better to have something which is clear-cut and automatic; such as, if the author is alive you can extend the copyright up to a maximum of 28 years; if a book is out of print, however, copyright expires after 10 years.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
>I made something. I invented it. I can do with it whatever I want to, and can direct my descendants to do with it whatever they want to.
A) Lets say, hypothetically, I made a car. I decide that only people in my family can drive it. I write that into my will. Now, the person inheriting that car doesn't like that idea. They want EVERYONE to enjoy the car. So they let your will default (ie: They don't collect the car). Guess what... Now the GOVERNMENT owns the car and can do what the hell they like with it. So directing your descendants to do what you want them to do just won't work.
B) If you don't like copyright, that's fine. Either run for Prime Minister/President on the platform of your choice, or rescind your citizenship and buy an island. As long as you live in a country that recognises copyright (isn't that all of them?) then you HAVE to abide by the rules of the land. This is in the same vein as wanting to do drugs. If that isn't allowed where you are, then you have to rescind your citizenship and live somewhere where it is legal. The comforts of the land are ONLY provided for people who obey the laws. Part of that is Copyright.
C) If the people want copyright to be 10 years, and someone is elected to do that, then tough nuggies. The majority of people want it that way, and they don't care about your minority ideals. You can still do (B).
>"oh it's not yours anymore, it's in the public domain. Give it to me."
Like I say, if you don't like the laws, change them or move. Your choice. Because right now, in most countries, this is the way it is.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Uh, no. Metallica's works are still bought and sold through retail channels. Abandonware is not. BIG difference.
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My university's video arcade has a Tetris machine. I play that way too much. The fact that it and the Pac-Man machine have stayed in for so many years attests to the fact that there are people who enjoy classic games, and that they're not a tiny minority.
Maybe OT, but I wish all small old games (hehe like joust) were open-sourced. It would be great to see how games on PC's came about, and how people used to program them before OO programming and game engines.
I find it easier to learn a programming concept by looking at a small program. Try to learn anything by looking at the Quake source. Ugh, my brain isn't that big. But I could probably learn a few concepts from looking at the source for Asteroids!
For those running Windoze, (More realistically for those running windoze as well) try the www.shockwave.com site to play fun classics like Rampage, Joust, and my favorite, Spy-Hunter.
Lots of fun time wasting activities available as long as you install the shockwave software.
"A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire
You'll dance to anything
I read this and think, "nah, that can't be..." And then:
[P.S. apologies to The Dead Milkmen]
Yes. Yes it is indeed :)=)
Thanks for the retro chuckle.
The article doesn't address something which interests me. Aren't the copyrights on some of these games, especially the old arcade ones, about to expire? And, if there is no one willing to fork out the cash to renew them, that puts them in public domain, right?
... an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain ... -- T. Jefferson
Well .. as the story points out in the end, maybe someone should grasp hold of this and try to get something up and running. The man who wrote the article surely had a good point.. We've already tried to do just this. Almost 6 months ago, a friend of mine and I talked about getting all those abandonwarez up for the public where they could get hold of all this stuff. I think that it was after a long discussion about the great Elite II where someone mentioned that he'd never played Elite II .. so he didn't really have anything to say about this. Well, enough about that, we decided to try to do something about it.
.. no, we're not waiting, because we're kinda bored of large companies that doesn't even bother to answer our emails.
;)
~6 months ago i email Sierra - Asking them how they thought about the matters of copyright for the old games - and getting an explicit permission to share out the games - and sharing all information about #s of downloads and alike with sierra. I didn't think much would happen - and it certainly didn't. After about 2 weeks we got an answer from the people we sent the mail to that stated that the mail had been transferred to the right department. And that's about it. We're still waiting. Or
I think we'll try snailmail. That might work.
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
These collections are usually hampered by the desire of the publishing company (usually not even the original company that released the games initially, due to buyouts 'n mergers 'n rights-transfers 'n stuff) to put bloated frontends on the emulators and the like -- who can forget Activision's first Atari 2600 "Classics" pack, which required Windows 95 (and chafed my po' Windoze 3.1 britches back in 1995) and featured a nagging parental voice every now and then telling you to turn off the game and do your homework?
The collections are further ruined by idiot game reviewers who obligingly review them in between gaming sessions of Diablo 3 Arena Tournament EverCraft Online and trot out the same rehashed "the grafx sux d00d n its not in 3D" arguments -- remember, these are the people who complained that the Lost Treasures Of Infocom collections were boring cause they were made up of only words and no pictures. Each review is also not complete without an original, witty reminder to "stop living in the past." These insightful reflections provide more than enough inspiration to run right out and completely trick out your computer so you can play the latest FPS for a few months until another one comes out which renders your entire system obsolete.
The game companies therefore believe these collections have no real sale value and in an industry where you're expecting (and obliged, almost) to create the Next Big Game Franchise with every release, such collections are deemed a waste of production money. Meanwhile, nobody can understand why Daikatana has seemingly alienated a key portion of its intended audience already -- those who wish for a fun, playable game over the glitz and technical 3D card wizardry and oodles of Deathmatch weapon options.
I heartily applaud those who live in the past. Historical context is never a bad thing -- and yes, the games did have better play value, goddammit. I can still get hours of enjoyment out of MULE, and its theme music can still give me chills.
I think developers releasing source to old games is a great idea. It gives young developers guidance and inspiration. That's one of the things I admire about Carmack, Quake isn't really even all that out of date, and he already released the source. What a guy :o)
Segfault
segfault@bellatlantic.net
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Arguably it's an inferior translation to the unofficial RPGe translation, but it shows that games that appear to be abandonned can still have value to their copyright owners. If everybody had emulated illegal copies of the game then they would most likely have not bought Final Fantasy Anthology, making Squaresoft think that people don't like older games. This just makes the problem of abandoned games worse, as Squaresoft no longer has any reason to release old games. If you like FF5 then buy FF Anthology, it's a very good game and they deserve money for it.
Whenever you see a reference to a NYT article remember this: Replace "www" with "partners" in the URL and voila! No login required. Here's the article without needing to login.
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Brainwashing? It's called "memory". All humans possess it; it's really quite useful. It's what enables you to remember how to read and write, for instance. Of course, a suitably cynical person could say that we were all "brainwashed" as kids into learning these things.
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
While I'm sure there are a few die-hard fanatics out there who salivate over the chance to get some "classic" games to play on their antiquated Spectrums, Ataris and Amigas, for the majority of us this is non-news.
Computing, and gaming especially, has moved on since the days of the 8 bit computer, and games that wowed us fifteen years ago look tired and childish today. There's only so much nostalgia to be got from a game where the only user interaction is moving cursor keys in opposite directions repeatedly.
Sorry, but if it's called "abandonware" it should stay abandoned. It's not 1985 anymore, and we demand higher quality from games today than any of these "classics" provide.
In the case of software, what you have purchased is a licence to use the software. So, if the (copy protected) media fails at any time then the copyright holder should be made to have a legal obligation to replace the failed media so that you may continue to exercise your rights under the licence. Similarly for videos and music, if the copyright holder does not allow you to take steps to preserve the 'data' then they should be obliged to provide replacements (possibly for a reasonable charge) throughout the period of the copyright.
With 'physical' works of art, it is common for paintings, sculptures etc to be restored and preserved. So similar activities should be allowed for works of art held on magnetic (or other) media.
Keeping old games off use has a good side. It stimulates innovation. It cleans the market, like burning the bushes before planting a new crop.
Imagine if the world were filled with versions of Arkanoid, Tetris, Pacman. By enforcing copyrights, new games are more imaginative and don't rely on this burden of the past.
(Spot how my statements conflict with reality and you'll win an extra life.)
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Next to my CuMine 667 in this office sits a full Commodore 128 system with 2 joysticks. I still love to play old videogames, and enjoy being able to download a bunch of them from the 'net and copy them onto 1541/71 disks to play.
.d64 images of them all (which get backed up on CD-R) I also do the same for other forms of media, and have built up a small lab so that I can copy from Apple, C=, old IBM (360K and up), and soon Amiga here.
However, I also do think that the media that they are stored on is getting old and rather unreliable. I am fortunate that most of my 15 year old C= disks still work, as does my 1571 drive.
C= people have done a great job so far of cataloguing everything and were among the first to put it on CD-ROM. I cannot say the same for other formats. If I want to archive my old Commodore floppies on CD-R, my hard drive, or even 3.5" disks, I can. However, for many of these old videogame formats, and especially some of the games for older machines like the Spectrum, Apples, TRS-80, and MSX, it is not as widespread. It's there, but I can't just do it like I can with a C=.
This is not just an issue for games, it's an issue for many other packages too. Quite frankly, a lot of the programmers back then had a lot less to work with and made the best of it. There are many applications, file formats, and extremely COOL code floating around on these unreliable formats.
Don't laugh. Some of those people that programmed the TRS-80 built functionality into 16K of code for a word processor that I didn't see until Word 95. The people who wrote a lot of C= code did so with a machine that was not even the best machine of its time, however it was the most hackable of all of them for cool A/V effects.
Its programmers turned its bugs into features, unlike most MS programmers today.
However, I am doing my part to save these old games by keeping my archive of C= games (which is at over 500 disks from the 80's in my office here) safe, and gradually making
Some of what these programmers did just amazes me in how ingenious it is. The least we can all do is preserve it, study the code, and try to apply it so that we can write tight code in the future.
At World of Spectrum there is an excellent archive of thousands of Sinclair Spectrum games. They have been actively and repeatedly chasing copyright holders of various games, for permission to archive their games.
Have a look here for an explanation of their process, and here for some results. Every day they seem to get more positive results.
Sure, it's not as good as getting the source released, but at least we can legally download and play the games.
I don't think you guys understand. I made something. I invented it. I can do with it whatever I want to, and can direct my descendants to do with it whatever they want to. It is not something that I happened to "find", and am licensing it for my own use for a certain amount of time. Therefore it is not the public's right to say, "okay, you've had it long enough, give it to us, we want it for free now."
Copyrights 10 years? I write a book, and after ten years, you take it from me and say, "oh it's not yours anymore, it's in the public domain. Give it to me."
Have you any idea what you're saying?
Soy el plátano! No tengo gusto de monos!
In the case of a Corporation, why not have them loose their copyright to material that has been sold to the public five years after they cease to sell the material to the public. This would open up a huge amount of material after they have deamed it not worth selling. In conjunction with this, if a Corporate entity continued selling it through the entire 70+ years, they should retain the copyright until they stop. If they want to support the material, fine, but once they abandon it, it becomes abandonware for anybody.
2) The person reading your email is a part-time, min. wage tech support lackey who has no clue what you're talking about
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From what I remember (heavy head-scratching here), with indexed-indirect the instruction would have an absolute memory address opcode, add the value of an index register to it and then return the value of the memory location with the modified address (useful for pointer tables).
With indirect-indexed, the instruction would look up the value of the memory location specified in the opcode and *then* return this value plus the value of the index register.
OK, you can take that strait-jacket back now...
(eg: Elite, Frontier), the Authors HAVE now released the source code. And congratulations to both Ian Bell AND David Braben for doing so!
Last I checked, Braben was trying to block Bell relasing the older games they co-wrote. Has he stopped?
A multiple of the current selling practice sounds like a good thing---with an unwillingness to sell interpreted as an infinite selling price. But that still might screw over small-time developers selling to a small, specialized niche for a large price per unit. How about a multiple of the product of total revenue and selling price? This is mathematically undefined when the selling price is infinite and total revenue is zero. But you could make an arbitrary decision to set it to infinity in that case. You could probably come up with even more fair functions.
> Think of how many children and adolescents were turned into zombies by those old games. I know people that, even though
> they haven't touched a NES in years, can still remember where all the secrets in a particular game were. If that isn't
> brainwashing, then I don't know what is.
Umm, that's not brainwashing. Brainwashing is what your parents, teachers, and society in general tries to do to you when you're a kid. It's not remembering secrets in excellent video games.
I recently downloaded CCS64 to be able to play Paradroid once again.
I don't know, but this will remain my ultimate favourite game ever. Can you believe, that a videogame is still the same big fun to play after almost 15 years? I haven't seen anything like this ever since.
Of course, newer games are fun too and looking at the graphics and sounds of Paradroid, there have been many improvements since then.
On the other hand, there was a version for the Amiga (Paradroi '90) which had better graphics. Though, it just didn't have "it".
I think, the main reason that the C64-Version is more fun is in the fact, that all robots were symbolized the same as balls with a three-digit number. It was left to your own fantasy how those robots really looked. At least, this is why I like it more.
Maybe someone will come up with a totally refurbished 3D-Version of that game. I claim it still won't be that much fun.
Like the original 2D-Lemmings were far more fun to play than the latter 3D-Versions.
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
Mainly because games are fun regardless of age, and the nostalgia aspect can't be ignored. How many people have fun or get nostalgic with Linux 0.001x? DOS 2.0? Wordperfect 1? CP/M?
--
The July issue of PC Gamer will have a CD with full versions of 10 old games such as X-COM and the side scrolling Duke Nukem. I don't know about Commander Keen though :(
For my finances, I use Quicken 98, but there were some glitches in the online services. So I promptly went to Intuit's website to get a patch for it. Lo and behold, they did not offer a patch, but rather the entire program, as well as all previous versions. And Quicken 98 was barely 2 years old!
If financial programs can be made freeware after only 2 years, how can these game companies be pissed about people getting their software, which cannot be gotten anywhere else, 5, 10, or even 15 years after its prime?
Dyolf Knip
Dyolf Knip
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The dude who wrote this article is the author of the (pen and paper) RPG Toon. I'm not sure whether the game is in print any more, but I am prety sure it's no longer supported by SJG. I wonder what he'd think about people who weren't able to find a copy making a photocopy of a freind's book?
Software isn't the only much-loved thing that is abandoned.
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I remember a few months ago spending a happy few weekends going 'back to my youth' by downloading and playing old Sinclair Spectrum games - Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy and the classing Atic Atac
In those days there sure valued gameplay over fancy graphics.
I also tried to get some stuff for the old BBC Micro but found things in a much more dodgy state from a copyright point of view. Acorn was still asserting their copyright on the BBC Rom, and some games makers where getting heavy on sites and getting them to remove images of games. From 1985. Which only run on machines you can only find in junk stores and car boot sales!
I find this stuff absolutely ludicrous!
He's not only stopped (at least, openly), he's joined in, by setting up a club through which the Frontier code will be released.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
yes..they do... other people and the government shouldn't have to protect it for them... Id gladly exchange fire with BG
Right now, we have a video game industry that is, to put it mildly, profit driven. I know what some people will say, "But all industry is driven by profit! All any sane person gives a damn about is money and profits! Nothing else matters!" These people are wrong, because games, DVDs and the like, are luxuries. A person doesn't need games to survive and if the market becomes driven entirely by greed, it will collapse. (Although, people do seem to be willing to put up with a lot from the IP tyrants, they won't put up with crummy, junk games... because they don't have to.)
What has this got to do with emulation? It's simple, companies refuse to release old games, which were actually good in any format. They also refuse to allow games that don't fit into their idea of what people would like in a region to enter that region. They are trying to turn the gaming experience into "rental only."
I've reached a point where I am losing interest in consoles altogether, because I realize that very little that is actually good is produced for them any more. The best games I've bought for consoles recently were Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete and Final Fantasy Collection, both old games from the age of 16-bit consoles. It's a sad day when the game you are most hoping will come out for your system is Chrono Trigger/i> because you don't expect anything modern to match it.
No wonder the gaming cartels are so afraid of the games from their glory days!
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
All I'm saying is that theft of a physical object, because the individual object being stolen is unique, has a definite consequence that deprives the victim of the theft of the use of that object. Stealing software does not inflict the same harm. If there is any harm in stealing software, it comes from a potential lack of revenue from the sale of that software. You can argue all you want about author's rights and the moral right of ownership, but those harms are not quantifiable in the same way. Therefore, the harm done from "stealing" the ROM image of a game no longer in production or on sale is minimal at most.
As for violating the GPL, more power to you. The BSD license allows exactly what you've said. That, however, is not what I'm arguing. I'm not saying its all right to violate any license just because there's no economic harm done. Actually, what I was saying about being able to take a copy of software without impeding the proprietor's ability to use it, is part of the justification for the GPL!
What I am saying is that there is no reason for these companies not to make these old games available to those of us who spent lots of quarters and many hours after school and on weekends playing these games in our youth. I don't play games on my computer much any more, apart from the occasional Tetris or Asteroids, but I would play these games, and I'd be willing to pay. As it stands now, you can get them (pirated?) for free, if you know where to look.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Record companies can't hype old artists as well. They need a fresh herd of new young artists to parade across the airwaves to continually sell new CD's to maximize profitability. Also, new artists wear new fashions, which meshes well with current advertising.
This is why Brittney Spears outsells Frank Zappa.
So to sum it up:
New Music -> masses = MOST money for RIAA companies.
Old Music -> masses = less mindshare for new artists = less profit optimization.
Old music raped by new artists -> masses = better hype for new artists = even more money for RIAA companies = less artistic integrity overall, and destruction of human history, elimination of posterity.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
> I don't think you guys understand. I made something. I invented
> it. I can do with it whatever I want to,
Certainly. But so can I, without interfering physically in any way with your use of it. That's the whole problem.
> It is not something that I happened to "find",
Actually, technically, yes it is.
The fundamental schism between material property (made out of matter) and copyrighted 'property' (like your book, song, invention, or process), is that one is capable of being physically posessed, the other is not, the other is an idea. Albeit sometimes it can be a highly complicated idea, it's still at the root, just an idea. A thought. A train of logical knowledge and information.
An idea. It can be posessed by everyone at once, with almost no cost. It can be obtained by anyone independently of one another given the right circumstances. It can also be obtained by anyone through mere observation of one who already 'posesses' it.
Let us answer the question: What right does anyone have to claim ownership over an idea?
What fundamental source of thought or logic would provide the basis for the 'right' of 'ownership' over an idea?
In fact, we might want to think for a minute about the following: where does the right of ownership for anything come from? The objects in your dwelling. Your dwelling. The ground your dwelling is built on. The trees someone cut to build your house with. Trace the ownership of *all* of these physical objects back to their sources. You end up asking, who owns the the mountains? The air? The moon and mars? And how did a small part of one tree on the side of that mountain come to 'be yours'?
I find two answers. Firstly, everything belonged to everyone in the world, collectively. Society owned it all. And little by little, for society's good, parts of it were given (in return for some compensation) to individuals. Secondly these individuals added their efforts to the 'worth' of the objects, now in private hands, and so things went, until you ended up with them, having 'obtained' them in return for some of your own efforts.
Where do ideas and information originate?
Clearly the idea of a wheel, a circle, or how to start a fire existed before mankind existed. Just like the mountains. Just like the carbon that ended up in the trees, oil, and steel that became your chair.
Clearly then, society must 'own' them before any individual does. Whether society actually knows about the gold in that mountain or not is immaterial.
Remember how 'things' ended up in private hands? Society assigns 'ownership' based on what is considered best for all.
Would it feel right to you, to have a system where someone could be given the right to derive benefit, in perpetuity, from the 'innovation' of concentrating heat with a combustible and a flow of oxygen to create a self perpetuating combustion reaction? Certainly it would have been worth it to reward the individual who first comes up with the idea. But to give his descendents a large share of the rewards of its use by *all* mankind, forever? Surely someone else would have come up with it sooner or later.
Clearly we cannot allow someone to 'own' an idea in perpetuity, no matter how innovative nor complex. It would be too potentially damaging to the good of mankind.
In the long long long run, your descendents will completely and utterly mix with all of mankind. In the end, your 'innovation' *will* belong to everyone else. (unless there's some moderate inbreeding or abstenance in your family... :) When all of this logic is applied to something simple like fire or the wheel, it all makes perfect sense. I guess it could get a little more complicated when we're talking about highly complex 'ideas' like a musical composition or your book. But they are still merely 'information'. We're simply left deciding how *much* of a *finite* reward one should get(*).
Physics tells us that quite literally, one immortal monkey with one arm tied behind his back would eventually re-create your work. Some of us are a lot smarter than monkeys. And there are four billion years until the sun goes out.
Damn I'm good.
-NH
BTW: I've raised this point before, but I don't think we got a good answer. Without doubt mankinds greatest philosophers and thinkers have gone over this idea before. Where can we find a definitive summary of their train of thoughts and conclusions? Any historians out there who can point out the way? Clearly it would be idiotic to have to work this out from first principles all by ourselves over again.
It would be most efficient if we could just re-educate ourselves, our politicians, and everyone else, with what mankind has already likely learned, from a definitive respected source of information.
(*) I'd agree with you about 10 years being too short for your book. But I CLEARLY think that the life of the author PLUS 50 years is WAY too much. I liked the original 28 + 28 year terms. I don't mind *automatically* assigning copyright to the creator.
Personal note: It almost feels like the wisdom with which our society was created hundreds of years ago is being torn down by mediocre elected morons at the behest of the naked greed and aggression of bureacratic corporations. Anyone else feel this way?
Well screw them then. If they won't sell it and don't want you get it from an external source, what are you supposed to do? Just sit and twiddle your thumbs and say, "Golly gee, you know I tried to do this nice and legal-like and they just told me to fuck off. I guess I'll cry now."?
That's like Chevy refusing to sell you spare parts for an Impala and then getting an injunction keeping you from scouring junkyards to find it yourself.
If the company's not willing to accept legal tender for a product of theirs which would otherwise earn them none, then I'll look elsewhere. I have no sympathy for their telling me to keep my money.
Dyolf Knip
Dyolf Knip
Last couple of articles that linked to the NY Times had bypassed logging in by substituted partners for www in the url. Does anyone know why they stopped doing this?
PATENTS were/are about fostering innovation
COPYRIGHTS have always been about lining the copyright holders pockets. That's their entire point, to prevent unauthorized copying, to guarentee that the author has control over their works, etc....
No, no, no! Read The Constitution of the United States of America, please. In the U.S., both Copyright and Patents exist to guarantee innovation and advancement in the useful arts. The wording goes something like "Congress shall grant for a limited time". Pay attention, it says "limited time." But, don't take my word for it, read it for yourself.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
To them, popular culture isn't culture, it's just a way for their buddys, the media barons, to make huge fortunes (and give some of it to them.). They see themselves as superior to the people they govern... and that's the quickest route to fascism I can think of.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Why? Copyrights are only placed on finished works... How is a book that was written 50 years ago any less relevant today than when it was first published? How is a musical work any less inspiring simply because it's old? Copyrights are not akin to patents where patents protect implentations and idea's, where as copyrights protect finished works.
If someone has copyrighted something, it's very difficult for that copyright to prevent you from creating something of your own unless you were copying directly from the copywritten material. Software (source code) has been deteremined to be "speech", and therefore its' afforded all the protections as such.
Hi, I run an abandonware web site, that might give you a general idea of what it's like to distribute abandonware over the internet. We have a very strict policy, despite the fact that what we are doing is still TECHNICALLY illegal.
We will not post games that are still sold or supported by the company. It must be truely abandonware. Anything that's old, but still supported, it called "old warez".
Our moral beleif is that if it's no longer supported by the company, it has good educational and hobbyist use. I like to program games, and it's cool to see how they used to it. So even we're against software piracy, when it hurts companies.
If you want to look at our site, here is the URL:
http://www.abandonwarering.com/depot
if you have any questions about abandonware feel free to ask us on the forum, and we'll be glad to answer.
Yeah, but if I *steal* (that is, COPY) the code to a game, I'm not depriving the game company of its property. Look at it this way, I take the shirt, the shirt is gone, there's only one shirt. I take a copy of the game, the game is still there. There can be infinitely many copies of a game.
Using that logic, then it is permissible for me to take a GPLd program, modify it, then redistribute binary only under a different licenes. The original code is still there! I am not depriving the GPL author of it's property! Is this what you are arguing?
I am perfectly willing to accept the dissolution of copyrights as a premise. Are you willing to accept the logical conclusions of that premise?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
When you post a story that involves a link to the NY Times website, how about just prefixing the "www" with "partners" (http:// partners.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/05/circuits/a rticles/18aban.html), for the benefit of those who haven't registered, or don't want to?
Muchas gracias...now back to our program already in progress...
raunchola (at) hushmail (dot) com
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
There are several sites out there that have done this for old Amiga games. They have gotten permission to distribute many old games including most of the Sierra adventure games. Some sites have 100s of disk images, all of which are legal.
Before you go downloading realize that unless you own a real Amiga the only legal way to get Amiga ROMs (Needed by the emulators) is to buy Amiga Forever from Cloanto.
What's the point?
If you write a book that you want to copyright, you obviously want to expose it to more people than your descendants. If your publisher refuses to continue printing the book, both you and your audience are screwed.. unless you can make enough copies on your own to satisfy demand.. or, you allow people to make copies from copies they already have.
I was very fed up with CNN reporting on this up and coming thing of errrr... shops without a web presence.
If there's no news, everything is news.
We now return you to your scheduled program, after this breaking news. Today, Larry King will talk with Mahatma Gandhi on Larry Kind Live, only on CNN.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
If this is true, shouldn't everybody in that company be hanging their heads in shame over the fact that many of us would rather be playing Tempest or Robotron than bothering with their latest and greatest?
If they are worried about competing with 15-year-old games that we all mastered and got bored with long ago, doesn't that lead one to think that they must be doing something very, very wrong?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Given that Disney-owned ABC, Viacom-owned CBS, or AOL/Time/Warner-owned CNN are unlikely to allow these issues to garner significant national attention, I'd say you're an optimist.
The corporations are the government. The mass media annointed Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum (that is, GW and Al Gore) as our presidential candidates years ago, long before a single vote had been cast; such a system can only survive by keeping substantive change off the table.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Rosa Parks was BREAKING A LAW when she wouldn't give up her seat. This CRIMINAL act started a movement that ended segregation.
And what evil means did she commit? Breaking a an evil law is not an evil act. Her means were fully consistant with her ends.
If you goal is to do no wrong, then do your very best to do no wrong! What is so hard about understanding this? If you commit wrong acts in the pursuit of good goals, you are a liar if you then go and claim that you did no wrong. Worse, you are a hypocrite. You cannot try to balance the evil with good and expect the result to be good.
I think ~15-20 years (for corporate copyrights), and the lifetime of the author (for individual copyrights) would be ideal.
I would agree. I've advocated just this position on Slashdot previously. However, do you realize that some of these "abandoned" games are less then 15 years old? Do you realize that the members of Metallica are still alive and kicking?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Clause 8:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
That is where the Congress's authority to make Copyright laws comes from. Notice that it says, "authors and inventors," not publishers and manufacturers. I think they're really stretching the "limited times" bit with the DMCA, don't you?
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Please read the thread again. I was not talking about the point of copyright, I was talkking about the point that of the renewal fee idea.
It is a perfectly simple idea... If you are making money off a product, it is worth $100 to renew the copyright. The idea could use a little tweaking (perhaps base the renewal fee on gross sales, like it has been suggested), but I really think the concept is sound.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Since this comment is not about old Games it might be considerd OT. But, seeing that you are a /. poster and noting the /. sentiment towards Bill Gates, I feel inclined to mention the following:
Did you know that he wrote the basic interpreter for the C= 64? I learned a lot of 6510 assembly tricks from it, like how to re-re-re use code, fitting it in the least possible amount of memory.
---
---
"Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a sick mind." (Terry Pratchett)
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
"How can you preserve history and learn from it, when the very act of preservation and dissemination of abandoned historical material is illegal? "
:\
You hit it on the head. Remember that TW/AOL, Disney, et al. will be glad to teach you history - from their point of view of course. Big Brother is here, only he's not a govt, he's several corporations. But then again, they own our govt, so what's the difference?
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
Things like this really make my blood boil.
"...the Interactive Digital Software Association is trying to shut down a different type of pirate: people who just want to play out-of-print games."
WTF is wrong with the Interactive Digital Software Association? Smells like a group of layers that have nothing better to do with their time.
Sure "piracy" is bad and I do not condone it except for a case like this. All the games I have seen for download have been for the C64 (my area of interest). The C64 is a dead platform[1]. The software for the C64 has long been out of print. If I cannot buy copies of C64 software I will (and have) downloaded them. Perhaps the Interactive Digital Software Association can tell me where I can buy a copy of foo for the C64.
Thought not.
[1] http://www.comodore2000.com it this a revival?
-- Spammers: My E-mail server is in California. Consider yourself warned.
Abandoned software is just the tip of the iceberg. Modern-day copyright law bears little resemblance to the original intent of copyright.
Congress is authorized by the Constitution:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
The purpose of copyright is not "to provide for the welfare of artists," or "to secure the intellectual property of artists." The constitutional authorizes copyright strictly to promote the creation of more creative speech. The fact that some people and companies can get rich from copyright is a side effect of copyright, not its purpose.
Copyright doesn't come for free, and more isn't necessarily better. Copyrights are a restriction of free speech. They are a constitutional compromise. Copyright temporarily trades away part of the natural right of free speech -- the right to repeat and build upon other people's speech -- in exchange for what is hopefully a public benefit -- the creation of more speech by artists.
The original copyright laws reflected this. Up until 1978, if you published something, but neglected to include a correct copyright notice, your work immediately entered the public domain. This forced artists to identify the works that they considered valuable, and provided protection for those specific works. Furthermore, after 28 years had passed, the work would revert to the public domain unless the copyright had been renewed. This took care of the abandoned-works problem. Works that were abandoned would enter the public domain faster.
The idea that everything you create is automatically your property protected by copyright is a very, very new idea. 1978 exactly.
In 1978, the law was changed so that everything that anyone creates is automatically copyrighted. This was a great deal for publishers, because instead of having to keep track of all of their copyrighted works, and renew them when necessarily, their copyrights would just take care of themselves.
What was lost was the public domain. Prior to 1978, vast amounts of material were published without copyright notice, or even registration, and immediately entered the public domain.
This was 22 years ago; which probably corresponds to the age of the average slashdotter. This is the first generation to come of age in a world with no contemporary public domain of ideas -- where all ideas are someone's private property, and will remain so long past all of our lifetimes.
It isn't surprising that the new generation is philosophically rejecting the theory of "near-perpetual copyright on everything ever published." There is no moral or ethical basis for functionally perpetual copyright on anything and everything. The copyright terms and conditions are, at this point, simply out of proportion to any possible public benefit to be gained by them. No surprise that many people are very dissatisfied with copyright law. Right now, it mostly exists to benefit the large media monopolies, and is being used to destroy our culture as fast as it is created. The DMCA makes it illegal to make a preservation copy of a copy protected diskette. Most old Apple II games are on copy protected diskettes. In a few decades, as those disks decay, the only records of the early days of home computers will be illegal records. Same for DVDs, and anything else that is distributed on encrypted media.
How can you preserve history and learn from it, when the very act of preservation and dissemination of abandoned historical material is illegal?
The destructive effects of the DMCA will be most acutely felt when future generations seek to study our era, and discover that most of our contemporary culture no longer exists in any form because our Congress outlawed its private preservation at the request of the RIAA and MPAA. At that time, our grandchildren will be awash in a sea of deteriorated, encrypted media from the early 21st Century, unable to read any of it, and the "benefits gained" from the DMCA will seem very small indeed. The only traces of our culture that will remain will be the few works that were continually preserved and restored by their copyright owners, and those works that have been illegally decrypted and preserved, using programs like DeCSS.
That is why the copyright problem is the most important issue of our generation.
No, it just means that the original thieves can't be prosecuted. If you steal a copy tomorrow, you're still a thief. For that matter, you could be prosecuted if you still possess something you stole, even if the statute of limitations has expired on the original act of theft.
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This is not my sandwich.
Remember--the old gaming platforms (and old PCs, for software based on PCs instead of consoles) were ridiculously limited by today's standards, and so the programming involved probably used a lot of nifty software hacks to squeeze every drop of performance out of those machines ...
It's not so much the neato hacks and tricks that they don't want people to see (as you realize), but just the coolness of older games in terms of gameplay. It absolutely horrifies game companies to think that we'll remember how good the game play used to be, before minds were melted by geometry-accelerated, anti-aliased, 24-bit source art-ed, individually textured polygons running on our 21 inch monitors at 1200x1024 at 90 frames a second.
Current games are, in many cases, boring old hacks that beat a theme to death (actually, they beat it not only until it's dead, but more or less unrecognizable as well, but that's beside the point). Glitzy graphics don't quite cover up the bad gameplay underneath, and gamers are already restless. The idea that some might just give up, and go back to playing Contra and M.U.L.E. is pretty scary for them.
Your scheme is interesting, but it needs some tuning to accommodate authors whose work is not appreciated five hours after it is published. Perhaps if we reverted to the conventional 14 year renewable scheme for personally held copyrights and applied your rules to copyrights held by corporations.
Then, of course, Windows would be copyright Bill Gates instead of Microsoft and we really would have to kill him to see the source code. Hmmm. Maybe your idea is pretty good after all...
--
This is not my sandwich.
Full Disclosure: It was the first driving game I was good at.
Besides, what's Vigilante 8, Interstate 76 and Interstate 82 other than updates of Roadblasters, really?
----
Brazil has decided you're cute.
Although I do think that copyright is corrupt in America.
The original spirit of fostering innovation has been replaced with lining corporation's pockets.
I think ~15-20 years (for corporate copyrights), and
the lifetime of the author (for individual copyrights) would be ideal.
PATENTS were/are about fostering innovation
COPYRIGHTS have always been about lining the copyright holders pockets. That's their entire point, to prevent unauthorized copying, to guarentee that the author has control over their works, etc....
As for your ingenious idea about copyright lives... you've just created a cottage industry of people being hired by corporations in oder to have copyrights assigned to them. And what about the individual on the other end of the scale that's doing really good withtheir business and forms a corporation to separate his affairs... Would that make his or her work less valuable and therefore lose protection in a shorter period of time?
Corporations are individuals in the eyes of the law. And there's so much grey area between multinational corporation and the writer who lives in the woods of montana, that really, the law is right in being crafted equally across all the spectrum. Otherwise, would a single person corporations property be worth less than a private partnership comprising several dozen employees and grossing $20 million a year?
Part of the idea is that things that end up making a lot of money will justify their continued copyright, whereas things that weren't able to, enter the public domain.
The numbers could be tweaked, certainly, but I'd like to know what people think of this idea.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
If I want to go find a tape of some obscure 80's artist, I'm usually SOL.
This is one of the great things about Napster... usually SOMEONE has it...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
Like the way Borland/Inprise allows free download of old versions of Turbo C, because many educational institutions use those version?
Think about it... if Microsoft were to offer Office 95 for free, do you think Office 2000 would have sufficient advances to make people want to buy it? However, Windows 2000 is probably sufficiently advanced to justify buying that instead of freely installing NT 3.
AutoCAD are unlikely to be able to make any money from those old versions of ACAD, and people who wish to do serious CAD work are more likely to want the later versions, so what reasons are there for *not* allowing free distribution of the earlier revisions?
(Note. I don't endorse breaking the law, even when the law is blatantly stupid and wrong.)
--
life is better under the sea
While some above have correctly noted iD's *choice* of open sourcing their older projects (Wolf3D, Doom, Quake1), I feel we need to commend them for doing other things correctly as well.
When iD wanted to make Wolf3D, they did not have the Wolfenstein name. Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle WOlfenstein were done by MUSE Software, which was out of business. Did iD just unilaterally declare that the title was 'abondoned' and use it? No. They did the grunt work in tracking down the holder of the copyright (some granny in Maine, iirc), and *LEGALLY* got the name.
I commend them for doing things *rightly*.
Who says we can't learn from their example?
With copyright law as it stands, things *will* remain copyrighted for a darn long time unless you do one thing: ASK. Ask the copyright holder if they'll reclassify it, just as iD did with Wolf/Doom/Q1. If they say yes, everyone wins.
However, if the copyright holder says no, then it's time to prove we can behave like someone older than a two-year-old who's had his favorite toy taken away from them. Accept their judgment on the matter, and don't allow it to be copied (or posted for download).
It all boils down to respect for the author: if they say "freely copy this under BSD|GPL|XYZ license" then listen to them. If they say "don't copy this," then listen to them *the*same*way*.
- Nathan Mates
Please read the thread again. I was not talking about the point of copyright, I was talkking about the point that of the renewal fee idea.
I know, and I think that the a renewal fee is contradictory to the point of copyright. They should either be renewable without fee, or not renewable at all. The constitution says "for a limited time", not "for a limited time, which will depend on how much money you can cough up".
bitch, bitch, bitch... that's all i ever hear around here. so, malda doesn't like "abandonware" or closed-source software or whatever. i don't even remember what the article was about.
look, people. get real. it's nice to have a "cause" but don't drive this into the ground, okay?
look at it this way: suppose somebody came up to me and i just leapt out of my skin i was so hot for her. let's say it was... oh... i don't know... say... NATALIE PORTMAN. let's imagine she REALLY wanted me BAD (this is really easy.. i imagine it EVERY NIGHT)...
would it really make any difference to me if she was clothed in a designer see-through bathing suit (proprietary) or wearing a smart, sexy see-through bathing suit she found at a thrift store (abandon-wear). HELL NO!
EITHER WAY, i would GLADLY cut off my reproductive organs, stick a white-hot poker up my ass and crawl over a pile of undulating lepers for her!
JUST DEAL WITH IT!
jesus.
thank you.
I remember getting the hostages to run to me, then going "down" while landed to make the helicopter bounce. Hostages. Who likes *them*, anyway?
So if the game is out of print and the company is no longer in business, is it still piracy if you copy the game? Kindof like, "if a tree falls in the woods..."
There are thousands of people out there armed with little more than a record player and a cheap computer or sampler who sample and re-contextualize old recordings everyday. many share their samples on the net. Whole new music styles have manifested from this, and existing ones have mutated to assimilate the new ideas.
Seriously, I can't see any reason other than misguided RIAA-style "showing who's boss" to still guard 8-bit era software. I know, I have a page dedicated to my favourite C64 games and once received an appreciating letter from the creator of one of the games I included.
"The good die first." "Most of us are morally ambiguous, which explains our random dying patterns." --- MST3K
If you're willing to spend $20 bucks you could just head on over to www.apogee1.com. That's what it costs for episodes 1-5. Episode 6 is abandonware though. Good luck finding that one anywhere but a warez site.
Did anyone notice that the gamemuseum.org domain that was suggested in the article was gobbled up one day after the article was written? Wonder if the register will actually do the right thing or is just an opportunist.
Forget Whitesnake!
;)
Falco RULES!!!!
"Rock Me Amadeus" was one of the finest uses of public domain music of ALL TIME
Everything's been downhill since the TRS-80
I can still get hours of enjoyment out of MULE, and its theme music can still give me chills.
Yeah, like you're taking out a mule to a plot, and time's running out...
That was such an excellent game! Playing the market on smithore, worrying about pirates taking your crystite. Complaining to your friends because they won't sell you food at auction. Those were the days. Wish I had a C64.
Not that there aren't some good ones out now, like Alpha Centauri.
try here
;)
http://www.afiliate.com/miscelanea/juegos/
it's in spanish, but it works
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
I've been involved in abandonware for quite a while, now. Ever since a friend of mine gave me Monkey Island a year or two back, I started my own Abandonware site. Sid Meyer's Civilization, Carmen Sandiego, Ice Man, Avoid the Noid ... the list goes on.
... things that you can't find in any store, but you would pay lots of money to have a complete collection.
Right now, I'm trying to compile some collections of older, abandonware-ish things that aren't necessarily software. I've taken most of my old audio tapes that can't be found any more (Jim Henson's Muppets, in particular) and made mp3s and/or cds out of them. Another thing I'd like to do is take classic television shows that people have recorded on various VHS tapes and put them into mpeg form. Knight Rider, The Muppet Show, Pinwheel,
If anybody is interested in this sort of thing, please email me: dlugar at byu dot edu
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Is there any point? Will your software be relevant in 5 years? Note that each release will have a seperate copyright period. You will not have to renew the copyright on something you wrote 4 years, 11 months, and 30 days ago in order to release a new, validly copyright version of it today.
Or, in the case of GPL software, the "copyleft" already allows copies to be made. The expiry of the copyright in that case would allow somebody to make modifications to (the now 5 year old version of) your software and release it as their own. What will they gain?
The same logic that applies to copyright work having their copyright's expire also applies to copyleft work, does it not? The GPL does not replace copyright rules, it expands them to specifically grant freedoms. Once a copyright expires, then the GPL cannot be considered to be binding.
Currently, copyright lasts at least 95 years, and whenever the time rolls around when copyrights start to expire, Disney buys another 20-year copyright extension from Congress. This time it was the Sonny Bono Act (PDF factsheet).
Will I retire or break 10K?
My girlfriend suggested the idea of having copyright only extend until you have made a certain amount of profit off of the copyright. It would vary depending on the amount of work put into it (though that is hard to quantify in some cases), the type of the media, etc. (If something never hit its profit limit, then there would still be a time limit on its expiration, or vice versa; i.e. a movie copyright would last for 20 years or $500 million in total revenue, whichever came last, so that would prevent mega-blockbusters from becoming public domain in a year (which probably isn't a good thing), but would prevent corps from holding onto them forever.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Let's say s copy of Jumpman for the Commodore 64 was cracked in 1983 by the Berlin Cracking Service and widely distributed. I'd say the statute of limitations on the original crime is long passed, and since they (BCS) effectively destroyed any value of the original copyright, further copying at this point no longer constitutes a crime.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
http:/ /partners.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/05/circuits/ articles/18aban.html
Stupid Cheap Guitars
The PR that companies get from having their games out there (the "fame", if you will) benefits a creator of a commidity EVEN MORE SO if the commodity is current.
yes, big difference on the surface, however in theory the "cut" in sales doesn't compare to the sales generated from "try before you buy".
And just because Metallica's new singles are played on the radio doesn't necessarily mean that I'll like what they were putting out three albums ago...
Of course, the other similarity, is that they are alienating *ME*, a cheapskate who HAS money to spend.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
OK, everyone has seen this URL, right?
http://www.spectrum.lovely.net
If you read further in this act, 17.108(e) rights are not provided for musical or audiovisual works, under which portions most video games would fall. The commentary explains that the congressional intent was mainly to protect printed matter and some exceptions for televised news programs. A library could not reproduce an episode of Seinfeld for its patrons, for example, even if no copies of the episode were being produced.
I stand corrected! I had no idea that this existed. I will have to go buy a playstation... Or better yet, I'll go purchase Bleem and buy the CD. Still, SOM2 was never re-released.... was it?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
In other words, don't you have to produce something under the copywright in order for it to still own it? For example, you can't copyright the phrase "GM Electric Car" and sit and wait for GM to fork over a bunch of money to you?
Legal minds, help?
bun-fhuinneog agam!
The citation for that case is:
Sociedad de Autores Españoles v. Americo Marin, 4 Porto Rico Federal Reports 288 (D.P.R. Sept. 18, 1908.)
I prefer anarchy, but only under a strong & wise anarch
I was rebutting the statement that "pirating" software does not deprive the owner of his copy. Your last two points are identical in this regard. Whether I illegally download frogger, or legally download gcc then illegally rerelease a modification, the author's original copies are intact and unchanged.
If it's okay to copy frogger because the original is still there, then the same argument applies to copying then changing gcc. Admiring the concept of copyleft is not a justification for holding to a double standard.
Please put 2 seconds into your OWN rebuttals.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
2. Nobody is really losing any money by having old games become more "public"; If anything (as with the Mp3 controversy) it's only giving them some free publicity. My brother recently went out to purchase an old NES system and a whole mess of games after screwing around with Nesticle for a while. MAME, likewise, brings arcade games to home, but is that really taking anything away from the Pac Man terminal at your local supermarket?
3. Old games, instead of fading into oblivion, can be revived, bringing new publicity and respect for the companies that originally created them.
Got Rhinos?
The dreamcast is only doing well in the US. In Japan, it's getting its butt kicked by the PS2.
And because as far as consoles are concerned, the Japanese market is much more important than the US market, the dreamcast has already lost (in North America) by default.
This is a good thought, but it's not enough to protect our modern cultural legacies. Sure, games need to be protected. But games are only a very small part of the copyrighted material that gets "abandonded" every single day.
For example, music. How many old LPs are out there, mildewing in somebody's basement, that will be destroyed and unusable in another decade? Quite a few, I'd guess. This music should be allowed to be digitally recorded and publically displayed, for example, on Napster (another good use for that medium).
Or, say, old tapes. They don't last very long, and most aren't being produced any more. If I want to go find a tape of some obscure 80's artist, I'm usually SOL. Once again, these should be encoded and put online.
Modern CD's probably come the closest resembling the situation with games of anything I've mentioned so far. There are plenty of old CD's that nobody buys anymore, that will be obsolete when, say, DVD-Audio comes about, and that have not been updated in YEARS. This is music that has been left by the side of the road - nobody has remastered or rerecorded or remixed it for years or even decades. Why let this music die in its staleness when everyone who wants a copy owns it? Digitally redistribute it!
Or, even better, just like the optimal solution would be to Open Source abandoned games so that they can be further improved, we should Open Source abandoned music. I propose that any music that has not been rerecorded in any form within the past five years should have all the masters freely made available so that the public will have an opportunity to improve and enhance the original, and add features that have been requested for a very long time (for example, adding definition to "'scuse me, while I kiss the sky" on Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix). Many ears make bad mixing shallow, and somebody unknown may have the perfect sample for you out there if you'd only let him play with your master copies and make his contribution.
So why let your favorite music grow stale and die when it could be made fresh again every single day? Sleep on that thought, and I guarantee you'll agree with me.
I own the Game Boy Color Super Mario rehash, and, admittedly, it's pretty decent. Personally, I'd rather play the new port than play the old NES game without continue or save or anything... I also believe it's got the Lost Levels in it and everything. The guy who said that these old games could very well serve as demos hit it right on the head. (With, of course, the exception that when playing SMB emulated, you can save and load at anytime anywhere)
Anyways,
-=Canar=-
This should go for copyrights AND patents...
Unused IP should be protected for about 5 years after first installment of the patent. If applyed within that 5 years then the IP should remain valid for 5 years after applyed or full legth (whatever is shorter).
After 5 years the IP may be applyed to anyone but dose not enter public domain automaticly. If the IP holder applys the IP and publishes this fact in a publicly accessable forum (on an offical governemnt website or on the companys own website) then the unatherised IP user has 6 months to terminate use.
If an IP is in use for 5 years by an unatherised user and during those 5 years an athersied user dose not reclame ownership though application of same IP then the IP reverts to public domain.
The idea here is that dorment IP is captive IP. An IP that is not applyed by a third party might not be applyed at all and as such the ownership should not be reguarded as "in captivity" but in a "bad time" as in lacking marketshare.
The downside is that an idle IP user may risk losing his effort to the IP holder. This means idle IP use is likely to remain within the hobby community as hobbys don't lose proffit margens in terminating projects. However hobby projects may devise new and novle uses for an idle IP. Clearly a company dose not own a hobbys matereals to spite the IP use (this should be drafted into the law for redundency clarification) so the IP owner would have to buy off thee hobbys matereals. A hobby being in the position of not needding to generate cash flow remains in the bargenning position when a company wishes to relcame it's IP.
IP published as public domain by it's owner remains in public domain. This may be allready true however it should be stated clearly and made retroactive.
This is my preposal for future law...
Take it... modify it.... improve it... then take the results and contact your representives...
If such a law existed companys wouldn't be so quick to abandon IP...
Fair use usage of IP should be void from the 5 year use rull. This encurages corprations to cease the reduction of fair use sense fair use during idle dose not decay the IP.
I don't actually exist.
However, what is befuddling is why those software companies would refuse to release the copyright to those games. That is, it is befuddling at the first glance. After all, nobody is making games for the original NES or Colecovision any more. The 8-bit graphics of the NES seem laughable to the N64 and the Dreamcast, and so the mass market would dismiss these products right away. Clearly, there is no money to be made in keeping up these copyrights.
We must remember, though, that a software company is driven (generally) by profits first. As silly as it sounds to us, Nintendo is right when it says that the old games directly compete with its newer lines. Remember--the old gaming platforms (and old PCs, for software based on PCs instead of consoles) were ridiculously limited by today's standards, and so the programming involved probably used a lot of nifty software hacks to squeeze every drop of performance out of those machines. Those same hacks, while not useful in their native form, could point the way towards design philosophies and methodologies that would enable a software company to create a product that is a little better, a little faster than its opponents. That is what the software companies fear.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps there is something else in those old ROMs that software companies don't want anyone finding out about. After all, it is easy to denounce a few gaming enthusiasts as misguided, paranoid, or wrong. It is much harder to denounce the majority of your target market, and much harder on profits.
Think of how many children and adolescents were turned into zombies by those old games. I know people that, even though they haven't touched a NES in years, can still remember where all the secrets in a particular game were. If that isn't brainwashing, then I don't know what is.
What are they hiding?
www.alarmist.org
What are you talking about. I'm not talking about copyrighting ideas. They're not copyrightable. I was discussing things that are copyrightable!!
Soy el plátano! No tengo gusto de monos!
It's not just the RIAA/MPAA not getting it. All these console manufacturers need to start flowing with the times. Nintendo, for example, is a corporation. A corporation's primary purpose is to make money. Well, they can still make money off of old games by:
1. Distributing the ROMs for free. Yes, free.
2. Writing their own emulators for all the platforms and charging for it. I know I would rather pay $15 for a perfect NES emulator, as opposed to my iNES, which !@#$s up the sound.
3. Making the 2-player feature networkable over LAN/Inet/modem.
4. Starting up a universal online gaming site for those with their emulators, to allow very cool 2-4 player interaction.
Hell, if Nintendo did this, they could start spanking Sony again.
Off-topic: I wish ALL systems had 10/100 enet and 56K Inet connections. Networked gaming is IN.
- Leam who enjoys every minute of the insanity he suffers!
you can't copyright a wheel, dork.
Soy el plátano! No tengo gusto de monos!
In this day and age, copyrights should last maybe 10 years. They've got it all backwards!
Got Rhinos?
I'm the computer fanatic.
I had to get rid of an appartment full of obsolete computers becouse the manager didn't like the living room piled up with it.
My sister isn't a computer fanatic at all. She dosn't even have a computer at current time. Well she dose now. She asked for one Commodore 64 with disk drive, Pacman cartrage and a game based on the Rocky Horror Picture show. She has it now.
It's all abandonware.. and thats all she wanted.
She dosn't want Quake or doom. She dosn't want a P5. She dosn't want anything current. What she wants is the old games. The stuff she played as kid and had me stash away.
It's in her closet now...
She knows she must protect it becouse if anything happends she'll never see it again.
She won't pay $5 for anything current but would pay for the old stuff...
Thankfully her older brother is a computer fanatic and keepped everything in storage for her.
I don't actually exist.
From the article in question:
'THE phrase "software pirate" conjures up images of foreign sweatshops mass-copying software or hackers swapping files.'
Dammit, why, as soon as there's a hint of illegality or piracy, do journalists have to start describing the culprits as "Hackers"?
Hacker should be a respectable word for the die-hard computer enthusiast. Would the reporters in question like it if the computing community suddenly, and en masse, started calling them "lying gits" instead?
I remember playing games like Zaxxon and Wizardry and Skyfox on my Apple II. THose were classic games. Lots of fun. You could do all sorts of things with them. And considering the relative limitations (compared to what we have now), some of them looked damned good. Do you remember SkyFox? First-person combat flight game. Amazingly cool. I still have my Apple ][+, and I sometimes hook it up to play Skyfox.
And Costikyan knows it, and so do other people. How many great games of the past are lost? Who remembers Choplifter? Who remembers the original Lode Runner? When the point was simplicity and not 'hey, what graphics board can we overexploit today?'.
If Dr. Jenkins is right, if gaming is ever to be understood as an art form that is worthy of study and has valuable things to offer, critics and academics and gamers must come to appreciate the history and development of the form. That appreciation can be created and sustained only if they have access to the games of the past.
Places like the Obsolete Computer Museum are keeping it alive. But looking at some things... I'm not sure people care. Look at the news: Diablo II! Quake 3! Warcraft 3! (with the fifth race!) Yeah, everyone wants the next big thing.
But no one wants the last big thing. Come back, Roadblasters... come back.
----
Brazil has decided you're cute.
It's not 1985 anymore, and we demand higher quality from games today than any of these "classics" provide.
The moderators will probably say that parent is (f)lame-bait, but I'll take the hook, line, and sinker:
Those games are still fun. Graphics don't make the game; otherwise, the GIMP would be the hottest selling game. What makes the game is the fun factor. Super Mario Bros. was fun. Tetris® (1988 or so) was fun. And they're still played.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The person who bought this one is:
Registrant:
Gamemuseum.com
P.O. Box 20013 4839 Leslie St.
Toronto, ON M2J 5E4
CA
Domain Name: GAMEMUSEUM.ORG
Administrative Contact:
Khan, Saleem khancorp@idirect.com
416-494-0908
Technical Contact:
Admin, Network postmaster@easyhosting.com
(416) 233-7150
Billing Contact:
Khan, Saleem khancorp@idirect.com
416-494-0908
Record last updated on 19-May-2000.
Record expires on 19-May-2001.
Record Created on 19-May-2000.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Made by Microsoft?
Some things never change.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
If you're not too interested in the source for these things, there's some cool arcade classics on shockwave.com. Defender , Joust, Spy Hunter and more.
nal 11
An amazing abandonware site
Wah!
Very similar to Metallica "protecting their interests"...
It's just a shame that companies have lawyers on retainer with nothing better to do than look at copyright infringements, without realizing the "quality" of the situation: 1)these games aren't being sold any more 2) these games aren't being sold by the so-called "pirates" 3) if anything, this generates good PR for what the company produced in the past, sort of a testament to their greatness. It's not about dollars, it's about sense.
However, I'm not sure the old game designers have their old code... I think at most they have assembly of their code (not the easiest to learn from, considering it's hardware dep.), and considering in the 8bit days they hack just to get the whole game to fit into 4k (or maybe 8k) with graphics and music, it probably is all based on machine exploits. But I could be wrong
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
> For years I've been hoping that Ultima 7 (and Serpent Isle) would be open sourced
;-(
...
You're not the only one. Unfortunately EA now owns the copyright, and they will NEVER release the source for their old games. When I first released U7Shapes I got a job offer from Origin, ironically the same day I had an interview with EA Canada. After working for EAC for a bit (Need For Speed PSX), I emailed Lord British asking if it would be possible release the source to keep the game alive for its fans. He replied, but said Origin wasn't able to since they didn't know where the source was.
Here's 2 links for the Ultima 7 hackers out there
http://www.geocities.com/hous tondragon/utility7bg.htm
http://www.chez.com/pulsar rtc/wizard/ultima/u7wizard.htm
P.S.
I've run the Disassembler on U7.EXE, but I still can't locate the "flat real mode" techique that it uses. e.g. switching to flat real mode. (I know it uses the +EBX offset in flat real mode, to access up to 4 gigs from real mode, but where does it check for if EMM is already running? )
I suggest that everyone go out and buy an NES. You'll be surprised how good the games are. I can sit in front of an NES a lot longer than in front of a Dreamcast, I tell you what.
Got Rhinos?
.. the 1983 Sir Tech game "Rescue Raiders" was an awesome helicopter flying game (side profile view like choplifter, but you could pick up men, drop them behind the enemy line, send out tanks!, jeeps with an anti-helicopter missile, demolition van, bazooka men, etc. )
Check out the link here for a screen shot
http://www.multimania.c om/apple2c/archive/Action/Action.htm
Some of my favorite Apple ][ Games: Rescue Raiders, Karateka, Captain Goodnite, Lode Runner, Aquatron, Conan, Montezuma's Revenge, Wings of Fury, and Goonies.
A game that reaches hundreds of thousands or even millions of people eventually becomes more than a product to be sold, it becomes part of our culture. But the shelf life of these things is fairly short, a few years at the most, but on the other hand it takes several decades for the music or game to become public domain. In the meantime, the original printings of the work degrade, or the hardware they require disappears, and because of the copyright "protection" the work disappears altogether. And of course since there's no longer any money to be made from it, the owners of the copyright just let it gather dust on a tape somewhere. And ultimately, by the time anyone interested can legally distribute it or emulate it, no one is around who remembers it.
Clearly, the laws must be changed. Any sane government should recognize that even popular culture items are part of the overall culture and it's in the public interest to preserve them. The duration of copyright protection needs to be shortened. One way to do this which would quell the corporate fear of having a money-maker torn from them by the law and given to the public domain, would be to tie some sort of "marketability burden of proof" on the item -- if it hasn't been sold, made money, etc, in several years, and it's past the expiry, off it goes into public domain. If it's still selling, then the copyright holder gets an extension.
But regardless, something must be changed. We lose enough information on a daily basis as it is, we don't need laws that force us to lose our culture to bit rot.
I have two mint condition C64's. The first is the original model with the original monitor (which I use as a small TV sometimes) a 1502 disk drive and a tapedrive to boot. I also have the newer whitish one with the newer monitor, and a 1502-II disk drive. These things rock. I've got alot of ultra classic stuff (original pacman cartriges, contra, castle wolf (hehe), and alot more). The coolest thing is, even after 15+ years, not a single one of my disks have gone corrupt - way cool. If anyone WANTS one of these babies, go garage sale hunting.. the second C64 I own was bought for $5 (for EVERYTHING inclduding the snazzy monutor).
of course, it'd be a better world if the software companies would just shrug and say, "aw, what the hell, you can have it." it would give them some say in the matter, as well as market data.
but any rom collector knows that this won't happen. because the companies are stingy. they don't want their software available for free. and i wouldn't blame them, really, if it represented a revenue stream. but it doesn't. and litigation doesn't improve their image.
in my opinion, crack-downs on this sort of activity cause an opposite effect than the game producers intend. it tarnishes their image to gamers, or a segment of gamers. then those same gamers have a choice: download the game for nothing, or purchase it (if possible) from a company they no longer have any respect for.
i prefer to pay money where respect is due.
Somebody agrees with this post. Copyright term has gotten way out of hand. It no longer satisfies the "limited times" requirement of the Constitution if a work is under copyright during its entire useful life.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I reckon that abandonware should be opened up, or given away. Case in point: I'm looking for the Space Quest series. I went to Sierra's web site to find it, however I was unable to find it anywhere on their product lists. I emailed them and then I found out that they no longer sell it!
I really enjoyed that series - now I can't play it no matter what happens. I can't even buy it! Let's open abandonware up - then I can play SQ in piece.
"My first puter was a Timex Sinclair with the 16K RAM pack."
;)
I just want the old Atari Star Raiders game. It's been obsolete 17 or 18 years... surely no one could lose opening that!
Geeky modern art T-shirts
The problem is these shorter politicians, like Sonny Bono. They have an inferiority complex which causes them to want money, and Disney is happy to give it to them.
A while ago Sierra decided to allow 'Betrayal at Krondor' to be downloaded for free as kind of an advertising for its sequals. While I don't know about anyone else, I bought one of them, and I wouldn't have even heard of it had they not.
Now, if it only could have been as good as the original...
I remember a little old game called "The Dark Heart of Uukrul." (Does anyone else remeber it) Well, anyway, I got to a point near the end of the game at which I couldn't get any farther, or so I believed. Faithfully, I had kept the disk, since the late eighties. Then, last year, that one floppy disk containing the games, saves, everything I had worked so hard to create, was overwritten by my little brother. And do you know what he overwrote it for? A damn English report!!!
Well, seeing as how there is no way for me to buy the game again, it would be extremely useful if the game could be released in public domain or open sourced. That way I could figure out the damn ending which has eluded me these 10 years, and finaly know the answer.
------------------------------------
No, I am not insane.
--------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------
"
Now, that's a brilliant idea!
Renewal how and when? Why should I even have to do anything to gain copyright protection? I certainly wouldn't want to go through a registering process every time I moved a comma in a text or fixed a bug in a program or posted a photo on a website.
There are NO racing games today that offer both the playability AND realism of Revs.
Repton, for all it's age, rocks. (Pun intended.)
Galaxy Wars (for the PET) is -STILL- the most challanging 2-player space combat game out there.
For all it's age, Manic Miner is still a good game.
How could ANYONE imagine the Zork trilogy as aging?
Wizardry's I, II and III are old, but blow =ANY= modern D&D-style game out the water.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2.0 was a powerful piece of software.
Double Phantom was an ingenious networked game with -very- low net overhead.
When it comes to -some- games (eg: Elite, Frontier), the Authors HAVE now released the source code. And congratulations to both Ian Bell AND David Braben for doing so! It proves their maturity as human beings.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There is a reason why the game companies are only passively enforcing their copyright. The fact is that if people's access to games that really have little or no current commercial potential causes a copanies brand to be associated with "history" or "gaming traditon," it is beneificial for the company to leave these sites alone. They are effectively helping to build a lasting brand image that exists apart from a \ny single successful game. For example, people know of "Atari" even though they have not had a commercial success since the early 1980's.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Subject to renewal.
In other words, if I create a copyrighted work, it's only legally protected for five years. When the five year deadline arrives, I have to renew my legal protection.
If I fail to renew the copyright, then my work is automatically placed in the public domain.
If we then place a cost (say $100) on the renewal process, we force companies to think about whether or not they really want to renew that copyright. The renewal fee is low enough that a regular person can afford it, but high enough that gigantic corporations with thousands of items under copyright protection will want to think twice before just blindly renewing everything they own.
. . . or at least that would be the theory.
I have no
Unfortunately, corporations with many lawyers and many dollars, as has been said before, will fight to extend the copyright for as long as possible, in twenty year increments. There is no real solution.
But we'll just set copyrights back at 20 years and set things right, you say. Well, remember those lawyers I mentioned earlier. As soon as you do that, they'll probably bring up something called ex post facto which means after the fact, and is unconstitutional. Which means that they'll say that making copyrights they applied for and receive for 95 years expire after 20 years is unfair, retroactive yadda yadda, they'll throw it out, and we'll be back at square one. But it sounds like a fun fight, all in all.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
i wish we could get companies like Nintendo and Sega to free-ware their old games that they do not make money off of anymore. it's kind of a hassle to find roms even of games you own on the internet, and give me a break-does Nintendo actually make money off Double Dragon 1 anymore? it's like 15 years old. it would be a lot cooler if they would, after a certain period, allow dumping of games. it's not like they lose money off it.
that Game companies are
1. Greedy
2. Shortsighted.
A game museum for people to play out of print games? Out of the question.
I can go back and play all the classic nes games for hours. I owned many of them. Most of mine have been destroyed over the years going through my siblings. A lot of them are no longer available even from Ebay or FunCoLand. And if it weren't for emulators and people hard at work, I would have never been able to play Secret of Mana 2 or Final Fantasy 5 in English on SNES. Square is not losing any money from this. If anything it's helping them out by getting new players involved in that series. What a great game.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
If he felt only lust towards her, sure, but this is true love, which knows no limitations.
I was also pissed to learn that there was an exhibit last year in a local (baltimore) museum dedicated to the original video games of the 70s and 80s. Sigh...
-p.
I emailed Lucasarts about porting Monkey Island for free, closed source. They didn't even bother to reply. If they don't want to know about simple ports, how likely are they to want to give them away altogether?
Thanks to the Sony Bono Copyright Extention Act, we merely have to wait 90 years before the games become a part of the public domain. And that's just the binary version of the game; the source will likely never be accessible. Depending on how the DCMA turns out, reverse-engineering abandonware could be illegal. The DCMA might even make emulators illegal.
Cheers,
Slak
Interestingly, someone reverse engineered this game to create their own version. Rather than suing them, complaining etc., he (Ian Bell) compliments them on the achievement, and includes the resulting game on his site.
Finally, he links to a couple of emulators. Makes a refreshing change, dontcha think?
The 8-bit graphics of the NES seem laughable to the N64 and the Dreamcast, and so the mass market would dismiss these products right away. Clearly, there is no money to be made in keeping up these copyrights.
Nintendo keeps up its copyrights because (for example) it doesn't want people selling exact (emulated) clones of Super Mario Bros. to compete with its port of SMB (not the NFS wannabe from Microsoft) to Game Boy Color.
Will I retire or break 10K?
ex post facto which means after the fact, and is unconstitutional.
Ex post facto applies only to criminal cases. Copyright is normally a civil offense.
Which means that they'll say that making copyrights they applied for and receive for 95 years expire after 20 years is unfair
Then make it retroactive to whatever the copyright term was when the work was fixed (a long time ago, it was 28+28).
Will I retire or break 10K?
A week later, the Nintendo of America lawyers would send a letter to Slashdot telling them to remove the post. This would stir a censorship debate throughout the country.
Slashdot will gather their lawyers together, and then send a letter back to Nintendo saying that
a) "Donkey Kong" is obviously taken from "King Kong", so Nintendo doesn't really have a trademark anyway.
b) The tricks in Donkey Kong were lifted from Highland Gorilla training tricks originally developed by animal trainers at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology, and therefore the game belongs to all taxpayers.
c) Since the game can be gotten so easily on the Net anyway, how can Nintendo claim that the game is copywrited?
Mattel Inc will respond by blocking the Slashdot or any Donkey Kong related site with their censorware. A brave group of librarians will then prove that what they have done is block access into any site that mentions donkeys, or even horses, ponies ,zebras and unicorns.
This, will of course, cause even more controversy, especially when rival toy maker Galoob claims that Mattel only did this so they could prevent children from getting to their "My Little Pony Web Site"
Bank of America claims that they have a janitor working in their St. Louis branch with the name and likeness of "Mario", and would Slashdot please take this down?
I think I have run out of silliness. Thank you for listening to my silly rant.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Elite, by Ian Bell and David Braben, for the BBC, Nintendo (NES)
Elite has never been released in the States for one reason: It is not compatible with American NES consoles. The graphics engine in NES Elite is so complex that it requires more CPU time per scanline than an American NES can give out (European TVs have a slower scanrate for higher spatial resolution). Plus, there is no emulator that can run the Elite ROM (which is freebeerware on the legal ROMs sites).
Will I retire or break 10K?
There is plenty of precedent for different laws for copyrights held by corporations vs. individuals... seems reasonable that copyright renewal could be cheaper for individuals than corporations.p. Even with a free renewal, though, this would take care of really-abandoned abandonware.p.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
It's nice to see someone bringing up the important issue of abandonware. The game companies are way too anal about keeping a hold on their old games. Bravo to Id and Parallax for releasing old source code (Doom, Quake, Descent, etc).
man, i would just like the z-code for all the old infocom games.. those were the best.
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$ su
who are you?
$ whoami
whoami: no login associated with uid 1010.
Although I think it's a great idea if the owners of old out of print games would "donate" them to the populous at large I don't agree that it "should" be done or that there is no value in old games.
Activision, Namco, Konami, Williams, and Atari/Hasbro have all gotten value from their old titles. Activision released a 2600 emulator. Namco and Konami have released "classic" collections of old games on Playstation. Williams also released a classics collection and Atari/Hasbro has release new versions of old games (Frogger, Centipede, Missile Command, Pong) as well as included an emulation of the old game with the new one..And..they have also used them as advertising (ie. Frogger, Asteroids, Missile Command, Joust and Robotron are all available to play on www.shockwave.com
The point being that the arguement that these old titles have no value for the owners and should therefore be legal to copy and distrubute is bogus.
-gregg
But seriously, I'm not especially attached to the actual price level -- I just tossed out the first figure that came to mind.
Instead, what about a percentage of revenue (in your case, a percentage of zero, thus zero) or a multiple of the current selling price (in your case, a multiple of zero, thus zero).
Alternatively, the law could specify that any nonprofit is automatically exempt from the renewal fee but not exempt from the need to renew. Thus if you signed your copyright over to the FSF (or became a nonprofit yourself) then nobody would need to pay to keep your stuff free.
I have no
I used to use NESticle from Bloodlust Software, but then I found LoopyNES. LoopyNES has a much more accurate simulation of the timing in the NES's blitter, which lots of games depend on. It also supports more game boards (what the ROMs fit on; commonly called mappers). (E.g. LoopyNES runs Klax; NESticle doesn't.) Get LoopyNES at Zophar.net.
Will I retire or break 10K?
http://www.mobygames.com/featu red_article/feature=7/
Yes.. those old games are still assetts to the company that owns them. Technically, someone else shouldn't be able to make money off them. The problem, of course, is that us geeks view our own 'culture' as first, and the 'corporation' as secondary. Even in our youth.. we pirated. The fact that some company actually made the game was only an afterthought. And you know the wierd thing? I have great respect for the game companies that I 'pirated' from. I really do! I 100% appreciate what they did, as a piece of art. I just.. didn't pay for it.
Nowadays though... YOu know what? I *LOVE* my c64 emulator. Hey.. if you want me to spend money, show me a fully vintage, but in brand new condition c64, and show me vintage software! on real c64 floppies! and cartridges! oh.. but wait... you better give me some kind modern CDRom with the software on it from which I can make disk images.... cuase those disks will corrupt eventually...
Seriously. If companies were to offer 'retro packs', ie: emulators coupled with massive archives of out of print games.. I would *gladly* buy it, if it's fairly priced.
Let's face it though. To me, and I'm sure, to many of you, the games of old, and the computers of old.. the whole computer/video game culture was *art*. It was art, pure and simple.. a subculture unlike any other. Hell.. I'd still love to open an arcade...
This was the main reason Sega Saturn was never popular. It was easy to access half the power of the Saturn (the part that was just like Genesis 32x), but it was extremely difficult to master the odd multiprocessor scheme it used (required to achieve PlayStation level games). It seems Sony is making the same mistake Sega made; Sega wins round 4 of the console wars:
Will I retire or break 10K?
The games that they refer to are not missed because of their place in history or even nostalgia, but because their value as games is greater than the fact that they were computer games. As anyone who follows Cheapass Games, the concept and gameplay is the important part, not the pieces.
M.U.L.E. rivals any game like Monopoly or Settlers of Catan in replayability.
3-in-3, which I would _dearly_ love to get, was a puzzle game as complex as Myst.
Both of these games would fit on a Palm Pilot now, and that's the realm I'd really love to see them return to. Palm now holds Taipan (Bad Joss Taipan! Your Cargo of opium has been siezed!), Dope Wars, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Arkinoid, all the Zork-like games, Rogue-like games...
Bring 'em back as Palm games! I'd pay for them.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your Friend.
$100 ... The renewal fee is low enough that a regular person can afford it
What about poor open source hackers like myself? Can we afford $100 to maintain a copyleft?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Another poster has already implied this:
... ARE STILL THERE in Win98 (shock!).
Why should this sort of discussion involve only games? What about other software that's out-of-print and no longer supported?
Putting old games into the public domain would set a precedent that the business software developers do not want to see. All old and unsupported software would become fair game, and Micros~1 innovation would be exposed for what it is - meme recycling.
First, let's consider that there's lots of good ideas out there, and someone still owns the rights to them. It's quite possible that the holders of these rights would like to act on them, but are waiting for a statute of limitation to expire before they do so. For example, maybe IBM would like to bring back the SmartSuite; they own the rights via their acquisition of Lotus - but there may be an injunction preventing this action for some number of years... IANAL and all that.
Now for the more likely (IMO) scenario:
What would happen for example, if M$ suddenly HAD to open DOS 6.0, and EMM386.EXE turned out to contain some undocumented calls that
Thing is, code is code, and who's to say what makes a particular piece of code into a game.
For example, James Gleick's Chaos: The Software (featured for free here) is educational in nature; but I consider it a game. So is GIMP in my book, since I don't use it 'for work'. Same with AutoCad... It's just a fun little drawing program for me... Open up all but the current version, I say!
Now, this would be great for me, and most of you. But the rights-holders for old software may have some objections to openning up old software.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
In English, this is the devaluation of the software over a period of time, usually 1 fiscal year. And I got news for you folks, but at LEAST 95% of the old games discussed are now, legally and financially, worth NOTHING to the software companies. And since you've PAID them NOTHING, then you've paid them exactly what it is currently worth to them in order to use that software. In fact, you could even say you've paid what it's worth with a reasonable retail markup, because a 50% increase of 0 is still 0.
Now. Whether or not this would actually hold up in a court of law, I don't know. But I can't see where it's a violation of copyright - I'm not distributing it as my own work, nor am I harming the potential profits of the copyright holder. I'm not even reselling it for only the cost of media. I know it's shaky, but if no harm is done to the company or original author, then who's to say that they would win?
Maybe this isn't even relevant overall. But the fact remains that these companies have already written off this software as valueless. And it happens a lot quicker than you might think. It's entirely possible that software like Windows95 is now worth about $5 to Bill Gates and Microsoft, but it makes you wonder when Staples still wants to charge a hundred for it.... No .sig here....
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
Even worse, an owner of Ultima7 emailed EA, asking if he could
use an alternate game engine with the U7 graphics files. He received
the following response:
"Using technology from any Origin/Ultima title is an infringement of
copyright laws. Thanks for inquiring, but I'm afraid allowing this
is against our company policies."
Seems pretty laughable to think that 'technology' is covered
by copyright laws.
This of course doesn't say anything about formats, but it seems to *POTENTIALLY* cover the net-libraries of ROM images, IMHO. However, this law also has some specific requirements the library has to follow to avoid infringing, and the one ROM archive I've seen wasn't following those rules. A library trying to set itself up to use this defense should get an attorney, 'cause I ain't one...
Though I have a hard time beating it, mebbe only one time in 10 will I win.
George
id published the "id anthology" set when Quake was originally released. This included all the Keen games, all the Doom games, all the Wolfenstein 3-D games, the first Quake, plus supplementary material. While this box is out-of-print, it may still be available from some software dealers.
Actually, a quick check at www.3drealms.com shows that they still will sell you the Keen games separately -- a CD with all of them is $20.
Err... Sony is one Huge Ass Corporation. One possible screw up is *NOT* going to put them out of business.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
As a QuakeForge developer and the GooseEgg author, I think about this a lot.
I emailed Core Design to offer to port the old Tomb Raider to linux. ( indirectly ) I didn't get a reply, so I guess I'll make a clone - and it's about 80% done atm.
Btw, please test my new TR level and mesh editor GooseEgg. If I make a good clone maybe LokiGames will hire me. hehehe
GooseEgg http://gooseegg.sourceforge.net
QuakeForge http://www.quakeforge.net
There is one hurdle that must be negotiated...
Nintendo summed it up with their "response" Let's read that response clearly.. ""It undermines our corperate assets..."" - change that to english? -
There is not one person in a corperation that is not there for 2 simple reasons... Money, and more money. They couldnt give a flying fart about you, art, preservation, etc... Tobbaco companies have been willingly killing their customers for years (And anyone that didnt know that smoking was bad over the past 30 years is a true moron) and the gaming industry (software industry) coud care even less! They whine how they lost $60 billion last year to piracy (Yet software sales are HUGE!)
Everything any corperation tells you is a total LIE, we all knew that for years. They lie to make the politicians that they grease with their bribes feel better..
The solution is simple... a sattelite server not under any country's control.. load all the mp3's and programs ther eyou want and tell the companies to go and sit on their thumbs.
oh well, it'll never happen...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It seems to me that the biggest reason to keep these games out of public circulation is to prevent them from competing with the latest high profit margin beast.
Why would nintendo want you to keep playing a NES when they can sell you the latest N64? And think of all the new games you'll have to buy(ROYALTIES!) in that desparate search for something as enjoyable as the old games!
Its the same tactic M$ uses to keep selling OSes- come out with the next "big thing" and convince everyone they need it while dropping support for the old one...
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
No doubt. Choplifter has to be one of the most entertaining games I've played. I've been hoping for a Palm port of it... now THAT would be the perfect thing to do in a boring meeting.
And all of the Choplifter copies suck. We need the real thing. Sure, a few hundred delays would need to be added in to compensate for today's CPU speeds, but it sounds like a worthy goal.
Waaaaai! 3 in Three was awesome! Someone had it on a Mac, and gods know how much class time I wasted on it. *_*
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Do I look like I speak for my employer?