Slashdot Mirror
Warez and Abandonware
markm writes "Stephen Granade, webmaster of the interactive fiction site at
About.Com has written
an excellent article
on the warez and abandonware scene. It's worth checking out, even if you don't
participate in trading warez."
What are your favorite abandoned games that you'd like to try playing again? Would you pay?
1. NATURAL VERSUS ARTIFICIAL RIGHTS.
:)
In the eyes of the law, the right of propertyowners to control the use of their property is a natural right. The right of people to be equal, regardless of skin color, is a natural right. The right to vote, regardless of gender, is a natural right. Note that the Constitution has not always specifically acknowledged these natural rights, and there are many natural rights which the Constitution does not recognize.
In addition to natural rights, there are such things as artificial rights. These are more accurately called "privileges". Just like you have a natural right to travel where you like in the US, you have an artificial right to drive on public highways. Remember how they told you in Driver's Ed that driving is a privilege and can be revoked by the State at will? It's the same principle.
Interesting, copyright is not a natural right. All natural rights recognized by the Constitution are phrased in terms of absolutes and imperatives: the government shall not pass law that restricts your freedom of speech, it shall not forbid you arms, it must get a warrant from a judge before violating your privacy rights, etc.
Copyright is a permissive, not an absolute. Congress may, in order to further social goals (scientific discoveries, literary development, etc.) secure for authors and inventors a monopoly on the usage of their creations. As can be seen from the wording of the Constitution, copyright is not a right--it's a privilege.
2. WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
The fundamental question of any government is, and always will be, who's in charge here? In the United States, that question was answered in 1783 when Washington accepted Cornwall's surrender, and again in 1789 when our Constitution was established: we the people are.
If we, the people, feel that the social ills of copyright outweigh its beneficial effects, then it is our absolute and sovereign right to ignore any and all acts of Congress which are contrary to our wishes.
America has a long tradition of rabble-rousing, much to the dismay of the government. When civil rights were not recognized by Congress and segregation was still the law, we, the people, marched on Selma and on Washington. We, the people, disobeyed the government. When Vietnam was tearing the country in half, we, the people, burned draft cards and engaged in civil disobedience.
Congress is not in charge of the government. Nor is the judiciary, nor is the executive. The people who are ultimately in charge are you and me.
3. WHAT IS THEFT, ANYWAY?
Black's Law describes theft as the unauthorized (not unlawful) deprivation of property, or in some cases, benefit of that property.
By that legal definition, unauthorized copying is not and cannot be theft. The `benefit of property' is none; if the author of the software is sitting on it and not turning a dime of profit by sitting on it, then I'm not depriving him of a dime by using it anyway and sharing it with my friends. After all, he still has his original copy (so I'm not depriving him of property), and he's not been deprived of any benefit (since he was receiving no benefit before).
Unauthorized copying is not equivalent to theft. Black's Law says so.
CONCLUSIONS:
1. "... The focus will switch to owning intellectual property."
As pointed out, it is impossible to own intellectual property. Physical property exists as a natural right; "intellectual property" is a privilege granted by the State, and privileges can always be revoked.
The alternative is to elevate intellectual property to the level of natural right, and if you're arguing that this should be the case, you're going to have a hard time convincing me--but please, try!
2. "If I broke into your home and took things out of your attic or basement, then you'd be outraged. But somehow calling it `IP' makes the difference? Does it really?"
Absolutely. The former is theft--the deprival of property and benefit thereof. The latter is unauthorized copying.
Now, it's likely that a theft argument can be made for unauthorized copying of material which is already available for a fee. If my favorite garage band is selling CDs for $10 a pop and I start burning copies of that CD for all my friends, I'm depriving them of a fraction of $10 per sale. (After all, most of my friends wouldn't buy their CD; of the ten people I burned a CD for, the band probably lost only one sale. Thus, their losses are $10, not $100.)
In the case of abandonware, no profit is being made, and thus, no damage has been done.
One of the facets under common law is that if someone doesn't use something for ten years, does not show any significant effort to maintain it, and someone else does these actions instead independant of the owner, the latter person gains the right to use that property as they see fit without the ability for the original onwer to prohibit them from doing so. Typically this is used with tracts of land, but I suspect it could apply to other things.
Now this is not quite a transfer of ownership, but it still is something significant. The question then arises as to if the latter person can then give copies of the item to everyone. It's hard to say; I don't know any court precedent here. A court case like this would be interesting to see.
Then it is clearly a depreciated asset. Why don't their bean counters take this into account? Take for instance company X. It spends $10 million to develop a whiz-bang new game and gets loads of people to buy it and it's rated the #1 game of the year, etc. Now, 5-10 years from now the company still has that game under copyright but the graphics are piss poor, the gaming experience sucks, and no one on earth would ever want to buy it except maybe to relive old memories of the fun they had. Unfortunately since it is so old it is no longer available. Company X won't even sell it if you ask for it because it'd cost them more in distribution media than it'd be worth. So why do the bean counters and stockholders continue to count it as an asset? Nobody wants to buy it, nobody HAS bought it in years, it is horribly outdated, and is generally worthless. The money you once spent on R&D to build the game has long since been returned in sales. What is the point of not just releasing it to the public for the few thousand people out there that might have a passing interest in playing it for a couple hours just for old times sake? Personally I loved "Dragonlance: Heroes of the Lance" when I used to play it on my XT with CGA graphics and I think it'd be nifty to be able to whip it out to see how funny it'd be on a PIII-500. Unfortunately it was distributed on 5 1/4" floppies... I have no 5 1/4" drive nor will I buy one anymore and I'm sure the disks are long since corrupted after 10 years. So what am I to do? Ask TSR to send me a copy? Doubtful.
The product is not the list of bits on the disk.
If game companies made old games freely available, it WOULD cut into their new business. You can not simultaneously argue that they should free these old games since you would love to play them and argue that they aren't losing business when they free the old games.
The week you spend playing Bard's Tale is one week of delayed revenues for Ultima 2001 Pro Special Gold Edition.
Bingo Foo
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taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
or Aristophanes or Lao Tzu or Emily Bronte. Certainly enough people have ripped them off. There is a beginning a middle and an end to IP whether that window is circumscribed by time or practicality. Abandoned is abandoned and if I want own something that is defacto in the public domain then the risk that it is broken or unsupported or wrong or I can't parts for it is pretty much my problem. Alternatively the value, for example in producing one of Shakespear's plays is not the uniqueness of the plot since everyone probably knows it already, but instead, the value is in whatever production I bring to it.
The best part of SimEarth was building a civilization up to the Nanotech Age and having them start to leave the planet for the stars. Then you could nuke one of the remaining Nanotech Age cities and spontaneously create robot lifeforms. The robots started off at the bottom of the evolutionary chain, and you could start guiding them up the ladder. Robots survived in any environment, needed almost no care, bred like rabid rabbits, and loved to beat the heck out of each other. Eventually you could evolve your robots through the ages, and have them leave the planet for the stars.
Robots are your friends.
You do as you please with the money, I'll do as I please with the software.
If you copy the money, you may be jailed for counterfitting.
If I copy the software, I may get jailed for copyright infringement.
In both cases, society has something to gain by perserving the value of the item.
The value of each is almost entirely artificial.
On one end of the scale we have commercial software, where you get very little value for your money.
On the other end, you have opensource, where you get very little money for your value.
We really need something in the middle.
How about software we pay for with kindness?
When will the industry mature?
Since many of these old games (and applications) don't generate revenue in any way, shape or form for the company any longer, why don't they release them under a license so that the general public can use them without fear of breaking EULAs or copywrite law?
For example, I liked the game Quarantine for the PC. You're a taxi driver taking people around a futuristic city that's filled with psychos and diseased people (yeah, I'm pretty twisted, get used to it). I'm 99.99% sure they haven't sold a copy of this in 3 or 4 years, so why not throw it on a FTP or web site somewhere with a new license and make it available to anyone who wants it?
The other idea I had is an "expiration" if you will on software copywrites, like patents. After X years, the software's EULA no longer applies and people can do whatever they want with it (including make copies).
Imagine Elite for the BBC Master was released from copyright. Modern versions of Elite would not then be made, at least not with the Elite name; companies would shy from associating with a rogue brand. Look at what happened to Doom.
It's not so much that the style of game would die; there will always be better updated clones. It's just that games of the same name would not be released. I'm quite nostalgic, and like to see games with the proper name. It gives the develepors a tradition to uphold and may even improve quality.
It's best all round if the games companies just turn a blind eye to pirating of ancient games, in the long run, I think.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
a Washington, D.C. firm. IPR calculated how many computers were being sold into a country for business purposes and how much software was being sold... From this they could calculate how much software should be sold to match the number of business computers in the country. The deficit between the ideal sales rate and the actual one is the piracy rate.
I don't understand how that could give an accurate estimate of lost revenue. Suppose a company had 1000 computers, each with a licensed copy of MS Office. Then, they scrapped all those computers, and bought 1000 new computers, and installed the old MS Office onto the new computers. There would now be a difference of 1000 between computer sales and software sales. There was no piracy involved, but according to that statement, MS lost around $400K ($400 for Office x 1000 computers) to piracy. How does that work? Even if the company sold the 1000 old computers to users, who in turn bought 1000 copies of MS Office, you'd still have a deficit of 1000 (+1000 new computers, +1000 old computers, -1000 MS Office).
Hey you nasty games companies! The loudmouth Stuart Campbell journalist thinks you should leave him and his retro-gaming rampant piracy activities alone. In fact, he thinks you shouldn't make much money on them, too.
Now, I've never wanted to point this out to Stuart, but most of his earnings come from game-related punditry. If the only games available were badly-done freeware clones, why would anyone want to have them reviewed, especially by a man with an evil streak a mile wide? But I digress...
Does my bum look big in this?
Yes, it's different. If you steal my IP, I still have my IP. We both have it now.
Do we both have the blood, sweat, tears and long lonely hours that went into creating it?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's a fine game. Sure, there's no up and down, no mouselook, etc., but it was elegant in its simplicity.
My vote is for Wolfenstein as game of the century.
Now...back to Tribes...
Got Rhinos?
I keep hearing how these abandonwarez sites are posting titles that can't be bought.
? SP=10023&PN=1&V1=167545&xid=9564&search_id=2087833 &doc_id=11 , I hope that works] and more are the classics.
Unfortunately, anyone with a few minutes of looking online can find *NEW* *FOR SALE* *FROM THE PUBLISHER* copies of a lot of the titles that are offered. Interplay's Forgotten Realms archives [look at http://www.digitalriver.com/dr/v2/Ec_Main.entry24
Many publishers have offered those games for sale, but I see "abandoned" sites listing the same titles online. Just because it's not front and center at your local Best Buy or Fry's seems to make some think nobody can find it.
If and when the "abandoned" crowd can actually clean up their act and bother to remove titles that are legally available for sale, then I might think of them as different from the "warez" groups. For now, they're merely lying about what's truly not available.
Yes, it's different. If you steal my IP, I still have my IP. We both have it now.
IP is a concept fabricated by the government. If you have an idea that you want to hide, that's fine. But making laws so you can sell those ideas and enforce their containment creates artificial value and outlandish expectations for law enforcement.
Not injuring people is an obvious societal law. (Fear of injury precludes order.)
Not taking people's stuff is almost as obvious. (To remain a stable society, people must be confident they won't forcefully lose the goods they already have.)
IP is not obvious, and, I believe, not justifiable. Do IP laws encourage innovation? That's not certain. That would imply that corporations would always out-innovate academia.
Do people deserve money for work done on ideas? This one's tougher. What determines what's worth money? Something is worth money only if someone's willing to pay for it. Government or no government, someone will pay for a chair. Government or no government, someone will pay for a service. IP is only long-term valuable if the government says it is. Otherwise, the purchaser of IP is able to sell it for less to someone else, and he is able to sell it for less to someone else, and so on until it is free.
Legal wrangling over intellectual property is only going to get worse as bandwidth increases. I think that's a sign that it was a flawed idea to begin with.
Right now, I respect IP laws. I don't trade in warez, I ripped all my mp3's from my own CDs. But that's not because I think the reasoning behind IP is valid. It's because I've agreed to live in the United States, and part of that agreement is abiding by laws whether I agree with them or not.
. By saying "we recognize that you used to have a right to your copyright but aren't still using it", you're saying that anyone anywhere can determine which property rights are valid and which aren't and which should be respected and which shouldn't
Okay, let's review here -- Copyright expires. It currently expires after 75 years for these sorts of things (video games, but terms are different depending on the exact circumstances).
So we already have a situation where we "take away" what someone else owns, we just wait 75 years. The abandonware folks are saying the period of time should be shorter for software since it disappears so quickly (and loses commercial value equally as fast).
No one is suggesting we man the barricades to burn the companies to the ground, just that we reevaluate whether the current situation really addresses the reality of the monopoly copyright grants (the same reason folks are suggesting we think about making computer patents expire quicker as well!)...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
They are public companies, mostly.
As a public company, their Intellectual Property is viewed by the investment community as an assett.
A company giving away it's assets for no monetary gain runs the risk of having it's directors in some severe class action lawsuits, for improperly managing company assets.
THAT is why public companies don't just 'give shit away because it's the right thing to do'. Because even if the Management, and the Board think it's okay... it opens a VERY REAL door for a class action lawsuit from the shareholders.
A couple of points:
A. Equating intellectual property rights with actual property rights is an extremely ify proposition. The awful consequences you trot forth in the case actual property rights are not observed (breaking into a home) actually do a pretty good job of illustrating why intellectual property rights are completely different from, and don't deserve the same level of respect as, actual property rights.
B. I have bought (that is paid for, with actual, real money) quite a few games which I am no longer able to play because either: (i) the media has worn out (ancient floppies), (ii) I no longer have a reader for the media (5.25" disk drives), or (iii) I no longer have the necessary hardware (Atari 2600). Abandonware sites, and modern emulators of old hardware, permit users like me to continue playing games we already paid for.
And yes, I am a lawyer. Actually, an intellectual property attorney, although I am in the process of extracting myself from that cesspool of intellectual dishonesty.
-Steve
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
Since you insist that real property and "intellectual property" are the same thing, fine. Let's put the analogy in real-world terms. You dropped your wallet on the street and left it lying there. Five years later some homeless person finds it (now empty and covered with dust), picks it up, brushes it off, and puts it to its original use. Do you claim you still own that wallet?
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
To all software authors,
For crying out loud, when the users pay money to purchase the programs you wrote, the did it because of their trust in you.
I am not a warez user, nor will I ever be. I respect the goodworks and time and effort you've put into your software product, but if you ever decide to ABANDON the product you have written, please consider the users who have PAID THEIR MONEY to purchase the product! Please, don't leave them holding the empty bag.
The VERY LEAST you can do is to let the users have the SOURCE CODE of the ABANDONWARE, and let them decide what they (the users) gonna do with it.
I am speaking from experience, both as a user and an author of an already abandon software. I feel very sad that after I have paid good money for something - which I thought might have SOME MORE MILAGE TO GO, for years to come - and wake up to find that the software I use can no longer be used on newer OS environments, and the original author has decided to abandon the product altogether !
One example I can point to is Optasm, an excellent Assembly Language compiler. After the author sold his company (along with all the copyrights of his software) to Symantec corp, Symantec decided to DISCONTINUE the development of Optasm, and YET, they (the folks at Symantec) steadfastly refused to release the source code for Optasm, and we, the users who have appreciated the way Optasm compile the assembly code, are now facing NO OPTION but giving up our favorite assembly language compiler altogether.
Had Symantec releases the source code to Optasm, I bet someone (even perhaps moi!) may try to modify it to run on other OS environment, including the Open-Source ones, such as Linux or FreeBSD !
Now, I am not saying that the assembler language utilities for LInux or FreeBSD is not good, but if you compare the way Optasm did the compilation to those currently available for Linux and FreeBSD, there's just NO comparison at all!
Hopefully, one day, Symantec will come to the conclusion that releasing the source code for products that they have decided to TOTALLY ABANDON may generate goodwills for the company, goodwills that may reap MORE BENEFITS in the future, in term of support and sales of future products.
Let me re-iterate my point again, I am NOT interested in Warez, but please give me the source code of the product if you the author decides to abandon it.
Thank you again for reading.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !