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The Abandonware Question
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Gamespot.com has an interesting article on abandonware games. They go so far as to seek out opinions of "game makers" with some interesting results. Some of them actually are flattered that their games have gone to that big abandonware site in the sky. Then there's Al Lowe (Leisure Suit Larry creator) who jokingly replies to the question of why gamers seek out free games, "Because they're cheap bastards, that's why! Always looking for something for free! Sucking the lifeblood out of us poor humble programmers! Now leave me alone so I can download more free pirated music!"" The first couple of pages are boring, with predictable opinions from big publishers. But it gets more interesting as you go on.
I'm not totally sure about the legal question, but I *LOVE* these sites. I get nostalgic for games I played in my youth (some of which I even bought! ;-) download them and am in heaven for a few minutes.
The funny this is, except for VERY rare great gameplay games, the novelty wears off pretty fast and I just delete it again for a few years. I really appreciate having them available though...
Is it legally wrong for me to download the titles? I don't know, but I believe it is morally right for me to obtain a "backup" of titles I purchased. As far as titles that are truly abandoned, but I didn't purchase, this seems a gray area.
The greed of the publishers is definately repugnant. Instead of opening their mind and allowing others to get some sort of satisfaction from an older title, they'd rather see no one have it and the game fade into obscurity. Perhaps if they realized that the goodwill they'd get for releasing these officially on a website would actually generate extra renevue from loyal customers.
Is ID software likely to lose business because they released the source code to their older engines? No. However, AFAIK they haven't released the graphics, levels, and sounds for them. I suppose this allows them to reuse some of the stuff for Doom3 for instance. Maybe someday people will realize that unlike the real world, I can give you something of mine that is digital and not only will I still have it, you will too.
And maybe after that, we'll have peace on earth, and goodwill towards men.
The more you know, the less you understand.
most companies love it if they can get their customers on a treadmill, constantly paying in new money. And honestly the cost of tech support for the older games may actually be a money losing proposition.
But They still hate the idea of not making money. and count potential loses are real losses.
Right now I think that that rights to software to revert to something more relaxed a few years after they stop providing tech support. They people who know how to use the older stuff will always be a small percentage anyhow.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
as merely cheap bastards is apparently self-abscription of game makers' own money-grubbing, greedy motives.
When Al Lowe characterized abandonware seekers as "cheap bastards", he was clearly joking. Read the article.
I believe, in keeping with the spirit of copyright, if a publisher no longer makes a copyrighted work available, then so long as this is the case, there should be no legal recourse against those taking the software for free.
However, I must question the motives of Abandonware supporters. If indeed these companies were to make software from 10 years ago available today (via a website or mailorder) and a small price according to the cost of doing so, would Abandonware supporters be willing to pay?
The real question is, are they truly supportive of it as a matter of principle, or do they simply enjoy getting something for free; being unwilling to pay for it if it was available through legal means?
Very good article. It focuses only on PC games though. MAME and its console-based ilk are another kettle of worms altogether.
I see these emulators as a valuable service, preserving what I call our "pop culture heritage"...sure, "Time Pilot" may have been popular enough to make it in some emulator packs, but what about "Time Pilot '84"? A much cooler scifi game in my book, but one whose limited release (during the crash) means that it's not likely to see a repackage rerelease.
I admit it is a bit complicated, because MAME does directly compete with the emulation game packs for modern consoles. But overall I'd rather err on the side of caution and not let these things fall into obscurity.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Here's the other problem with newer games. They're all about the great graphics. In addition to the usual complaint about graphics intensive games (They sacrifice game play for the thrill of "oooooooh, that blood looks real.), I find at least that almost real graphics look worse that the most cartoonish ones.
Take Fifa 2000 for the playstation. The players look almost real... almost being the key word. Whenever I see their blocky heads, I think about how bad the graphics are. By coming close to realism, you're forced to see how far away they still are.
On the other hand, a more cartoonish game doesn't invite that comparism at all. Take Super Mario brothers for example. No one thinks that the graphics on that game suck, even though Mario doesn't look like a real person. They get sucked into the game world because they don't even think about how much better he would look with a few tweaks.
Moral of this story? Don't worry about the graphics people, just make fun games.
...of course this is a moral from someone who doesn't really play games much, so take it with a grain or 10,000 of salt.
- VisiCalc
- Borland Turbo Pascal/C
- classic outliners e.g. Symantec MORE, ThinkTank
there are plenty more examples if you have a look around. Sure, having old games available is good for nostalgia, but things like this can actually be useful, especially if you're looking for stuff to run on older hardware or if you're after a feature that new software Just Doesn't Have (or the new software is not available on your platform etc.) - I know I've found this in various circumstances.Its a violation of the copyright holders copyright, so the only action could be civil action taken by the copyright holder. Its not illegal till you try to make a profit off it.
Or they could just put it all on a bootable CD running open source DOS.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Most software developers (games and apps) should freely distribute abandoned software. I mean it isn't a full out request to open source their games and applications, but rather just a plea that once you can't sell in a retail channel and say a year has passed, that you let people use it for free (without support). It always makes you look good and in the case of a sequel or a line of products, it gets the potential customer used to using a product. I mean is it even possible to purchase Adobe Photoshop 3.0 ? If they freely distributed it (and if bandwidth was an issue, I'm sure some other sites wouldn't mind being a distrib) there would be more people familiar with photoshop line of applications (and those people with old photoshop 3 books could have something to do). I mean it was amazing when Sierra gave away "Betrayal at Krondor" off their site to publicize the release of "Return to Antara" and they took it off their site but it still got distributed (it's not so easy to find but it's there). If you are some third world country and you just got some donated machines (386, 486), I'm sure it would be really nice if you could run Microsoft Windows 3.1 and MS Works on it without paying.
Software companies need to show heart, and this is definitely one way they can!
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
The bulk of their argument is that legality equals morality, which any freethinking individual probably realizes isn't true... or else laws would never be repealed or changed.
Beautiful, you nailed it right there. Prohibition is the most obvious example of this, and I like using speeding. Has anyone ever felt guilty for getting a speeding ticket?
The software publishers are trying to take the moral high ground with copyright, which is a completely artifical construct.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
The biggest factor, IMHO, wasn't that the issues weren't well understood, or that we were sloppy. Everyone knew how things "ought to be done" even back in the dark ages. Heck, we even had indoor plumbing. The main reason early games were so often hardware dependent is that abstraction layers cost clock cycles. Remember that the processors for early video games were about three orders of magnitude slower than what we have now.
People used all sorts of tricks to squeeze performance out of the systems they had, and some of them were pretty darned ugly. Rather than calling a subroutine (the cost being stack operations--this was long before cache worries), move it inline. Rather than paying loop overhead, unroll the inner loop. Now you're tight on space, so do something clever (read: "kludgy") with code that isn't as time critical to save space. Lather, rinse, repeat. We knew some of the tricks were ugly at the time, but they got the job done where something clean wouldn't.
Remember: for any given clean, structured program, there will be a hack that does the same thing and is faster, smaller (or both) and much harder to understand.
-- MarkusQ
One of the issues that this article avoided is the issue of lost copyrights. This occures when a copyright is held by... No one. The copyright exists but the legal fiction called a corporation no longer exists to enforce it.
One of the best examples I have read of this is Wasteland. An Awesome RPG from the 80's. I wasted weeks on it using my apple IIC. I alwasy wondered what happened to it, why their was no sequel to it as it was much loved.
Then Fallout came out. A game that, not only played and felt a lot like Wasteland, but contained direct references to it. This was clearly stated to not be a sequal to Wasteleand, which confussed me as they were so close.
Getting Curious I followed up on this and read up on Fallout. enlightment came in an interview with the developer and producer of the game. Seems that they wanted to make a wasteland sequal and had gone looking to buy the rights to do so. They followed the trail from the original developer, who had gone out of bussiness to an IP holding company that had bought all of the developers IP when it went under. This company in turn had crashed and all their IP had been picked up by another company who had then immediatly gone bankrupt also. The IP was never moved from their, so this resource sat and died on the spot.
Great you would think, grab that IP for a song and get going. The problem is that, while the the IP is an asset of the bankrupt company and therefore saleable, their is no one to buy it from! With no corporate officers left and no truste of the bankruptcy who do you buy it from? No one is the answer so Fallout could not be released as an official followup.
This is the idea that I think the IDSA would really not like to have get around. Groups like this and the BSA bully people by making them think that they represent ALL copyright holders, which is not the case at all. A lot of software is in limbo, just like wasteland is.
Lucky underdog recognized this. They got their notice from IDSA and said, tell us which ones they are. The IDSA never replied, why? because the amount of games they actually reprsent in the abandonware genre are next to none.
The other factor in this enforcement is that groups like the BSA and IDSA charge for membership, which is were they make their money. For every title protected they charge X dollar amount. A company that has stopped selling a game is not going to continue to incur costs by maintaining a watchdog over it that drains money every year. So they remove that coverage, removing IDSA's right to enforce the copywrite, becuase IDSA does not hold any of the actual copywrites and can only act as an agent when given permission.
This is the lie of both the BSA and IDSA, they are paper tigers when it comes to abandonware, they have no enforcement rights in 99% of the cases. If they did most of the abondonware scene would have been stomped out years ago.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
There's been at least one AC troll laughing at the "moral" question raised here. But let's not forget civil disobedience.
I too feel there are many moral problems with copyright. If enough people share these beliefs, and we act on them (like downloading abandonware) then it's not as cut and dry as the publishers think. It's not "piracy" any more. It's enough people disagreeing with the law... implying that maybe, just maybe, the law is wrong.
Remember, laws are pieces of paper. Many of them have nothing to do with right or wrong anymore. They have much to do about money and greed and control.
Bill
Upon seeing the box was too small, Schrodinger's Elephant breathed a sigh of relief.
I posted this way too late so nobody will ever see it or reply to it. However, I just want to point out this is another issue of supply and demand, just like mp3s. There is a demand for digital music. The RIAA does not supply digital music, so people take it for free.
There is a demand for old video games. Game publishers do not make old video games readily available, so people take them for free.
Businesses just don't get it. When people want something, give it to them, or you'll lose money. The only logic they could be using is that they make more money off of copyright infringement lawsuits than they would by selling the old video games. Somehow, I don't think that's the case.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
You're missing part of the point. If people are content to play older games, the revenue stream for software makers will dry up. I love 3D shooters too, but how many more games do we need based on the Q3 or UT engines? The only games I've ever truly been addicted to are Angband and Escape Velocity, both of which ran fine on my 68040 Macintosh. As much as I respect the work that ID and others are doing, I just can't see myself paying for it when I can play classic games for free.
The software developers won't re-release these classic games because it would be detrimental to their main products. By abandoning titles after a few years, they essentially force you to upgrade. I'm not saying this is the primary motivating factor, but it's certainly an important part. Some people will always buy the latest and greatest, for a variety of reasons; the rest of us only do so when pushed.
This is the way the software industry works. How many Word users need more functionality than Word 5.1 provided? Furthermore, if you can keep people on an insane upgrade cycle, you force them to buy new hardware as well. If each new version of Windows was capable of running faster on older hardware thanks to tighter, more optimized programming rather than feature bloat, the PC makers would revolt. There were stories this summer about charities not being able to get ahold of Windows 3.1 or 95 for the old crappy (but functional) PCs they distribute except at exorbitant prices. It's the exact same problem.
-Nat
Here is what I consider to be the crux of the matter. Copyright grants a limited monopoly before the work in question passes on to the public domain. If it is lost forever, it will never pass into the public domain. The copyright owner has essentially killed the work in question.
An attempt to actually kill a work in this way is such an obvious breach of the intent of Copyright so as to justify the entire abandonware concept entirely and without hesitation.
Perhaps Copyright law should be modified so as to require "abandoned" works to be explicitly placed in the public domain, and if this is not done, and the work is "lost forever", then at the expiration of the copyright, the owners of that copyright should be fined the estimated worth of the work in question, plus some punitive minimum amount.
A Copyright holder has a duty to be able to provide the work so protected to the public at the expiration of the term of Copyright. If and when they cannot do so, some sort of punitive and protective measure needs to be taken. (Perhaps all their other copyright worked are immediately placed into the public domain, as they have demonstrated an inability to even retain a copy of the work they claim copyright on.) A deposit of the work, in archival format, with the Library of Congress would suffice, or donating the work to the abandonware sites upon the corporate decision to abandon the software would work as well.
The issues of lapsed warranties were also touched on in the article. Personally, if a company cannot or will not honor a warranty, then they have effectively given that product's IP into the public domain. (Patents *and* Copyrights!) I have old games that I would still like to play, but they are copy-protected *and* on failing media, and the creating companies are "out of business". Naturally, I think this sucks. But I'm breaking the law if I acquire another copy of the software from an abandonware site.
No, it shouldn't. Were that the case, the ability to make a new derivative work would be ruined. That will not stand.
There's value in being able to take a story like the Odyssey and Illiad, and being able to reuse elements from them in crafting another work -- such as the Aenid. Disney does this all the time. Those guys didn't independently develop Snow White, or Cinderella. Nevertheless, there's value in the new derivative work.
I'm sorely hoping that the Eldritch case will go well so that I can work to create a brand new Mickey Mouse cartoon. He's a good character, you can do some good stuff with him. Disney _isn't_, but what I'd like to see is everyone, including them, doing so.
Like it or not, our cultural icons are locked up in copyright schemes now. We used to have trickster characters like Odysseus, Loki, and Coyote. Now we have Bugs Bunny, and it is impossible for our culture to thrive as it did in the past by retelling and changing the stories about him, like we did with the others since time immemoriable.
The justification -- the sole justification -- for copyright is the benefit reaped by the public, not in mere commerce. The abandonware people are doing the right thing. Were it left to business, our history would be wiped out in order to favor their own positions in the present. It's as bad as strip mining.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.