Friday Means Free Games

Joystiq has two posts up linking to sources of free games. Liberated Games offers up single player experiences, while GameOgre's list of free MMOGs will ensure you can get together with other people on the cheap. From the post: "Liberated Games is an online catalog of games that have been released for free in one way or another. This may be the full game, like Grand Theft Auto. Or it might just be the sourcecode, like Doom. Either way, this is a huge list of games that can, in some way, be had for the grand price of zero dollars and zero cents."

Comments

if we had sensible...

[KillShill]

copyright laws, which didn't extend to infinity (and beyond), these games would be public domain, including their source code.

copyright originally, in the industrial age, lasted 14 years. then someone got the idiotic idea of introducing, get ready for it, EXTENSIONS. back then 14 years was almost 1/2 or 1/3 of most life expectancies. that bone-headed move made it possible for low life greedy scumbags to introduce the idea of further extensions (and to top it all off retroactively).

in the age of information, copyright shouldn't last more than 5 years. most products (not including in-house software which is never distributed) sell the most in the first year anyway and it trickles down to nearly a standstill in 5 years.

if copyright holders won't respect actual, real copyright term limits, then frankly, they have no right to expect customers to respect their copyrights.

being the law doesn't make it right. prohibition as an example. when virtually everyone in a society doesn't want it, then it goes against the wishes of the populace, aka the voters. this is a democracy after all.

patents also need to be revised. 17(20) years is just too long these days. it needs to be proportional to the times we live in. these are not devine laws but manmade (for greed no less). patents on software is definitely a no-no. i'm thinking something less than 10 years. the fact is, the western world is choking itself and shooting itself in the foot at the same time over these issues. pissing off the end users and costing honest businesses (what few there are) massive expenses and headaches.

and these are quite favorable changes; it makes the end users happy and therefore the companies happy (the ones that care about customers, the real ones). it would in fact make real innovation something of a possibility again. we've been stagnating quite a bit in the last 75 years or so.

copyright/patents are not natural laws, they are wholly unnatural. the only way that it could work without massively harming the entire situation is to keep it limited in duration and scope. which clearly hasn't been the case for the last 2 centuries or so.

horse and buggy manufacturers seem to come to mind, not sure why.