ESA: Preserving Old Games With Hacking Encourages Piracy

[Tradjus]

There is a simple reason for their response, and it is this.

We live in the era of reboots.

A thirty year old game that hasn't seen a sequel in that time and has been all but forgotten is still considered a valuable property based solely on the possibility that it's I.P could be used for a reboot of it's franchise. So if they allow people to make the games free and modify them then they feel they are losing control of their intellectual property somehow, because corporate lawyers are trained to be psychotically obsessive compulsive about that sort of thing. Even if they had no plans, past, present, or future to ever revitalize an old property, the possibility, however remote, still exists that they COULD and thus they cannot allow anyone to touch it.

 

[Scars Unseen]

You know what encourages piracy? Companies placing themselves in direct opposition to their customers. This isn't about people trying to get games illegally. It's about people trying to play the games they already own. I don't expect a publisher to continue to support a game they put out 20 years ago, but the people who bought it should be able to engage in self-help to play a game they paid for.

My reaction to the licencing issues that got in the way of No One Lives Forever's preservation was "well that's a shame, but it does happen." My immediate reaction to the ESA wanting to actively block game owners from continuing to play the games they bought? "Fuck you." There were other thoughts I'm not allowed to express on this forum, so I won't directly reference them.

Yeah, pissing off your customers will probably encourage more piracy than letting them continue to use the products they paid for.

 

[Callate]

Grr...!

To my mind, it all boils down to one phrase:

when publisher support ends.

How can you "jeopardize the availability of these copyrighted works" when those copyrighted works are no longer being offered by their original publishers at all?

Is the ESA saying that the right of venture groups to usurp the names and libraries of older companies and profit from publishing "nostalgia packs" decades later is more important than the hundreds of games that could fall through the cracks and never be functional again?

Or are they worried that audiences will realize the "updated" versions of classic works don't actually hold a candle to the originals?

Or that given a library of older games, companies won't be as able to entice consumers with the latest round of chrome, smoke, and mirrors from long-held franchise entries?

Far too many great works of cinema have only survived because of reels held in the private hordes of collectors, rather than the movie studios themselves, which often failed to properly preserve their own archives. Video games could enjoy an enormous digital resource of tens of thousands of such "collectors", a collection that could grow instead of degrade... Except for foolish laws and short-sighted implementations of them.

I truly hope the EFF prevails.

 

[VincentX3]

:l . . . . .
*Sighs* Seriously? It's because moron's like this guy are in charge that make me fucking grumpy. It's not the fucking 90's anymore! Someone fire this guy and hire some new-blood that actually knows what the word "hacking" means.

Because downloading a 5-10yr+ old game and hacking has literally NOTHING to do with one another.
Anyone with half a functioning brain that's fresh out of high school could tell him the difference.

I'm seriously in the mood to write a giant post on why everything that he says is fucking stupid. But you know what? No.
If he doesn't understand the basic concept of hacking then It's not even worth the time.

So fuck this guy. Period.

 

[The Grim Ace]

Surprised no one has trolled in this thread yet with the usual case of missing the point by stating that, technically no one owns a game, only the ridiculously limited license to the game because EULAs, legal dump, and other bs.

Anyways, I can't help but appreciate the insanity that even with so very many examples of how much history is lost when preservation isn't allowed, that the ESA -- the same ESA that argued for games as art before the Supreme Court only a few years ago -- will gladly throw away so much of gaming history in the name of possible profits. So many of these rightsholders now are just slumlords: though they own all of these properties, they do nothing of real value with them yet still demand their full due when they demand it! Sega took a Golden Axe recode down a few years ago since they thought it would compete with another one of their lazy repacks and somehow that is fine.

Only thing more angering than the companies doing this, at least, are the consumers that defend it. Don't see any of that in this thread so, progress?

 

[SomeGuyOnHisComputer]

I strongly support the preservation of games, so the ESA can go fuck itself. The DMCA is bullshit, that's the bottom line. Copyright law needs to be reformed, and not in a way that's good for publishers/developers. It wont happen, because we can't have any laws that tell businesses to go fuck themselves without certain individuals screaming about socialism or whatever (with exception to rare cases like Net Neutrality, but even that had people arguing against it), but it needs to happen.

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

Am I the only one that wondered what the European Space Agency had to do with this before opening the link?

There are already several abandonware sites out there that already do this sort of thing, hell there are even rom sites that show up as top results on Google with full ad support with games that are still being sold and the emulators to play them.

Piracy is already at full saturation, so whatever fantasy world they think they are preserving is nonsense.

 

[L. Declis]

I'll tell you what.

Release every single game you've made, patch it so it works, then slap it on Steam or GOG or your own bloody webstore, I don't care, and then I won't need to crack old games to play them.

If Konami put out all 3 original Silent Hills, not HD, just lift the data off the disks and put that online, I'd pay full £40 for at least 2 & 3.

I am willing to pay. It's these publishers who are not willing to let us pay, but then forbid us from getting it any other way. Fuck that.

Let me pay for it. Or fuck off.

 

[Risingblade]

Isn't archaeology theft then?

 

[Arnoxthe1]

I shudder to think what would've happened if these chuckleheads...

Chuckleheads... I'm totally using that.

OP: Everyone's asking why they're doing this but isn't it obvious? What with all these HD collections suddenly becoming the "in" thing to do these days for various reasons, publishers are now doing their best to take back ownership of classics they've formerly forgotten in order to resell them in HD.

 

[RealRT]

In other news, according to gamers ESA can go fuck themselves. More news to follow.

 

[BoogieManFL]

People will do it anyway.

Try and make your little laws. When they are phenomenally idiotic don't be surprised when people completely ignore them.

 

[Nazulu]

Oh for fuck sake! There is always a new evil. They are not doing this to stop piracy, they just want power the greedy bastards. It all ends with making money. Anyone who isn't scum knows that this is a huge dick move.

 

[Strazdas]

ah, silly people doing more silly stuff. the benefit of preservation of those games are so great that any possible cracking of games that should have been public domain by now anyway is completely and utterly irrelevant. what ESA doing here may be legal, but its also a crime to human culture.

Its also funny how they do this to discourage piracy when im certain this will encourage it. if internet is good at anything its in sticking the middle finger to these people. im sure the piracy rate of these games has just quadripled.

Hey, remember this nifty little thing called "Fair use" doctrine? The one that allows me and any other guy or gal to do basically whatever the hell we wish to do with our own personal copy of the product except for directly messing with immaterial intellectual property rights and selling copies of the copy? Well, I do.

actually thanks to updates in the law circumventing built in DRM is not protected under fair use.

How are you supposed to play some of these games?

This right here is a very good point. You can no longer play the first Assasin Creed game because the DRM server is down and game thinks not being able to connect to a down server means pirated copy, hence crashing to desktop. Now, you can still play it if you make it think you do not have internet, but apperently they want to make that illegal. As online DRM has pretty much started around that time, id bet we will see more and more unplayable games as time moves on.

 

[Mister K]

Hey, remember this nifty little thing called "Fair use" doctrine? The one that allows me and any other guy or gal to do basically whatever the hell we wish to do with our own personal copy of the product except for directly messing with immaterial intellectual property rights and selling copies of the copy? Well, I do.

actually thanks to updates in the law circumventing built in DRM is not protected under fair use.

No no no no, I know that. This is what I actually meant. By creating DMCA USA took away most of the rights consumers enjoyed for at least century.

 

[Strazdas]

Hey, remember this nifty little thing called "Fair use" doctrine? The one that allows me and any other guy or gal to do basically whatever the hell we wish to do with our own personal copy of the product except for directly messing with immaterial intellectual property rights and selling copies of the copy? Well, I do.

actually thanks to updates in the law circumventing built in DRM is not protected under fair use.

No no no no, I know that. This is what I actually meant. By creating DMCA USA took away most of the rights consumers enjoyed for at least century.

ah, you were referring to how it used to be before the chances. I see. I agree that it seems that every chance is made to lower the rights of consumers and give more rights to monopolies. But then i cant be surprised considering these laws were drafted by these monopolies themselves and voted for by politicians that recieved massive funding from these same monopolies. There is a reason people call the new copyright act Mickey Mouse Act. its sole purpose was to extend copyright so Mickey Mouse would not be public domain. Thanks Disney.

 

[Mister K]

Hey, remember this nifty little thing called "Fair use" doctrine? The one that allows me and any other guy or gal to do basically whatever the hell we wish to do with our own personal copy of the product except for directly messing with immaterial intellectual property rights and selling copies of the copy? Well, I do.

actually thanks to updates in the law circumventing built in DRM is not protected under fair use.

No no no no, I know that. This is what I actually meant. By creating DMCA USA took away most of the rights consumers enjoyed for at least century.

ah, you were referring to how it used to be before the chances. I see. I agree that it seems that every chance is made to lower the rights of consumers and give more rights to monopolies. But then i cant be surprised considering these laws were drafted by these monopolies themselves and voted for by politicians that recieved massive funding from these same monopolies. There is a reason people call the new copyright act Mickey Mouse Act. its sole purpose was to extend copyright so Mickey Mouse would not be public domain. Thanks Disney.

Yep. I agree. Totally.
...
...
I don't know what else to add, so here is funny bulldog gif

 

[Ytomyth]

There's 24 hours in the day, we need to spend time on eating, sleeping and working/learning, most of the other time can be considered 'ours'. That's the time that entertainment companies want you to spend time on -their- product that you've spent money on and that, if it breaks down, you'll spend even more money on.

If we started to play old games for free then that time would no longer be profitable to game producers, which would 'hurt' the economy, makes us able to save up money, maybe get out of debt? All those things that the upper-class (financially) are terribly afraid of that we might do. xP

(Maybe a bit succinct, but I hope it got the point across. Also; no, this is not something I support in any way.)

 

[alj]

If a game/movie/book and so on is not published in your area or is no longer being sold it should not be treated as copyright, it should be public domain and free to do with as you please.

And removing DRM, if you paid for the game you should be able to bypass the DRM.

 

[MrFalconfly]

My only question is, why the hell do the European Space Agency (ESA) care about hacking old games from the early 1990s?!?