Lucas Confuses ScummVM With Abandonware

Anonymous Coward writes: "Seems LucasArts finally noticed ScummVm although they seem to be confused about what it is. ScummVM is a 'virtual machine'(yes like Java) that allows you to play scumm games (Monkey Island, for example) in modern OS (Linux, BSD, err Windows XP) and weird machines like PDAs and the Dreamcast, but Lucas have confused them with an abandonware site."

Comments

Call off the dogs

[E1ven]

Although I'm glad that more people are noticing this, the natural tendency at Slashdot is to fire off an e-mail campaign, which is exactly what is not needed in this case.
Lucasarts has made a mistake. As was mentioned on the mailing list, they have to deal with hundreds of Abandonware sites weekly.
From their quotes, Lucas thought that ScummVM was re-distributing the original engine, and saying it was under the GPL.
I believe this situation will soon be resolved calmly, but a hundred "You SUCK!" e-mail cannot help.

LucasArts and Activision

[Sargent1]

Once upon a time, there was a company that had a bunch of games that ran under a virtual machine. Eventually, people who loved those games reverse-engineered the virtual machine and wrote interpreters for the VM that ran on everything and anything, from Palms to BeOS to OS/2. And the company decided that that was okay.

The company was Activision, which bought up Infocom in the late 1980s. Remember all those Infocom text adventures? People reverse-engineered the virtual machine, known as the z-machine, and wrote plenty of z-machine interpreters, all of which are freely available. Activision apparently decided that this was fine with them, as long as the games themselves weren't being distributed.

Now LucasArts is in a similar situation. Will they be as calm about a new VM interpreter as Activision was? Sadly, I'm not so sure.

Here's The Lawyer's Response

[dbretton]

Paraphrased:

While this would be true, it could still be argued (successfully) that the emulator would have a negative impact on potential future revenue of LucasArts products, such as a LucasArts Classics package for BSD.

There are 2 arguments that the scummVM ppl need to make. However, they only made one of these arguments.
1. ScummVM is an emulator, and was created using legally valid and sound reverse engineering techniques. (this agument they made)
2. ScummVM was created as an academic exercise in software and reverse engineering techniques. As such, ScummVM is not bound to the DMCA, or any other such laws, as it is considered a form of free speech, and is protected under First Amendment Rights.

-Dennis

LucasArts just missed a great opportunity...

[meringuoid]

... I've bought the DotT / Sam & Max 2 in 1 pack; it doesn't work, because the .exe files are so old and can't cope with modern hardware. LucasArts provide patches, which work, sort of...
I've also bought the Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3 pack, and the result with 1 and 2 is the same. Doesn't work out of the box, works, sort of, once you get the patch. The patch at least gets the game running, but the sound is decidedly dodgy. I don't even want to think about what happens to WinXP users...

But now there is ScummVM. All these games run better than they did in the first place, they run on machines and OSes that LucasArts never bothered with, and they run perfectly.

What LucasArts should do with ScummVM is write the authors a great big thank-you letter and start bundling it with all their old games. There's no reason why they shouldn't. Trying to shut down a project that's doing for free what you should have done a long time ago is just plain silly.

Re:LucasArts just missed a great opportunity...

[meringuoid]

The only people who can override the Legal department are... Marketing.

Someone ought to get in touch with some of these people and show them ScummVM. Show them Monkey Island 2 running under the DOS .exe, as supplied at present, and then show them the same game running under ScummVM, with anti-aliasing and superior MIDI. Then show them the same game running on about three million different platforms. Show them Dreamcast Monkey Island. Show them palmtop Monkey Island.

Then tell them that this marvellous technology is free, tell them they can use it in any future reissues of these old games, that they don't need to pay anyone for the privilege.

Tell them that they can market it as 'Monkey Island Classics Deluxe' and double the price.

Then watch those lawyers disappear.

Re:Copyright expired = Public Domain

[Twylite]

My point was not that it does not become public domain, but that there is no explicit legal requirement for the release of the material to the public.

That is to say, when (if) Disney's Copyright on Micky Mouse expires, there is no legal requirement that they hand over their Micky Mouse archives (or a copy thereof) to some sort of public institution. If you happen to HAVE a copy - sure, go ahead and copy it. But getting your hands on it may not be such a simple matter.

Abandonware is a case in point. Many games available on Abandonware sites do not exist somewhere in corporate archives, because the game companies simply went under -- there was no sale of assets, not buy-out by a bigger company. Just a quite whimper. Even though there was a threat (to society) of that information being lost forever ... there was no attempt or requirement to make it public.

Talking about software specifically, where is there any implication or requirement for (say) the source code to be made public? Simple, there isn't. No more than an author could be expected to make his/her notes public when Copyright expires (okay, this would be posthumous anyway).

So here you have the basis of the problem: Copyright is a LEGAL measure to prevent you from distributing something; but when Copyright expires you have no LEGAL resource to FORCE distribution. If the (elapsed) owner simply doesn't make a copy available, you can't force him to.