ESA: Preserving Old Games With Hacking Encourages Piracy

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

The real problem stems from the fact that Walt Disney started a practice of lobbying to extend copy rights more and more. Now the whole of the entertainment industry is locked so deeply into it. Also since so many go by the copyright laws of the US, then content creators and Intellectual Property owners sit on a very narrow edge concerning how their content. If they allowed this they can actually lose all claim to the content under the law, this is the same reason some authors have issues with fan fiction. Basically copyright laws as they stand are a complete ass backward mess, and they're designed that way not to protect actual I.P. creators, the artists they employ, or they paying customer. They're designed specifically so that publishers retain control of creative works so they can line their greedy pockets. When it comes to Music, Movies, and Video Games.

Luckily it seems that book authors have been able to avoid this. Still the open domain ceased to exist sometime around when Walt Disney was about to loose Mickey to open domain. Which is a crying shame and the reason it's impossible to get of books like Leslie Charter's "The Saint" series. His copy rights survived past the Mickey Mouse protections, so if none of his heirs want to print it, it stays indefinitely out of print. Thankfully things that had their copyrights expire prior did go into the open domain, but it's a sad state for any thing that got renewed, even after the author died.

 

[Baresark]

Yeah, fuckin' asshats. I'm not going to disagree that it encourages piracy.. of those games. Why? Because there is software out there that only exists because it's sitting on peoples computers from an illegal download site. If the publishers and developers didn't let their programs disappear from the world, it would not be necessary. But no, they abandon them and the software disappears and then the developers and publishers cry like little girls because their software was stolen, even though they don't give a big enough shit to even try and preserve stuff. Hell... there are games from less than a decade ago that you just can't find to buy or even digitally download and buy. Less than a decade!

No, it's my opinion (which I can't stress enough) that organizations like the ESA don't give enough shits to preserve things that don't need to disappear, so they don't have any say over the habits of people who ultimately care more than the developers and publishers do.

 

[Lightknight]

Again, I have to ask, who would be able to successfully pursue this in court.

If you have purchased a license to play a game, you are fully within your rights to make that game playable.

So what court would ever actually hear this complaint and proceed with it?

 

[Weaver]

lol that the ESA says they work to preserve games.

Working with a single museum in Washington, D.C is for a limited run exhibit in which you can view old games is not what we're talking about here, ESA.

 

[Anti-American Eagle]

Old is just as good as new thanks to the continuing watering down of things. If they want to destroy the old so that they can force us to choose the new then clearly they need to be replaced with people who A) understand that their positions exist to serve us not the other way around and B) see other human beings as something other than consumers for the corps to own.

If they want to leave games to die then I don't see why they should care what I do with them in the first place.

 

[Silverbeard]

Are you shitting me, ESA? You want to put old games into a museum in the United States and throw some spare change at a half-baked project? This is your solution to the issue of preserving old games?
Why does the ESA even care about this? Who still makes money off of old games? GoG? I don't think they care about anything with Microprose on the label anymore.

 

[Dalisclock]

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

They're like the Illuminati. They have their fingers in every pie.

On topic, I'm pretty well convinced the ESA doesn't actually understand how video games work. As many others have said, a lot of games won't work on modern systems without playing around with the games or emulating them. If a game was last released on 5.25 inch disks 25 years ago, it's not exactly making anyone any money now is it? The company doesn't care, that's fine, but don't punish those of us who want to still play those games because somewhere in EA's vault(and I call out EA because of all the companies they've consumed wholesale over decades), in a dark corner behind the fridge, are some games we loved and want to continue to love.

I'm of a similar mind of games that never get released overseas. Nintendo doesn't want anyone else to play Mother 3? Then don't be surprised when people take the only option available to play it, which is finding on and internet and downloading it. You can't complain about losing money when you never put it up for sale in the first place, jerks.

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

To be honest, this isn't what really has me afeard.
Games prior to ´05 were sold whole and can never really be quenched once it's out there.
There will always be fans and creative people who continue to preserve games through coding.
Kudos to them for preserving our proud gaming history!

No, what I fear is that games released with any form of Online Activation or ever worse, Online Only DRM will simply vanish once it's no longer made available.
Seeing as such games don't contain all the code necessary to play it without the publishers/producers consent.
10 years of gaming history will go poof!

 

[FalloutJack]

Yeah, good luck stopping that retro gaming thing, just like how they halted video gaming culture proper, TV, rock and roll, and so on. Oh wait, that never happened... Oh well!

 

[FoolKiller]

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.

See for me this is the sticking point.

Say you buy a game 15 years ago for the original Playstation. That game is no longer manufactured. By the law, I paid for the license to use the software. But if that's the case, then if I scratch the disc I should be able to get another one for the price of the disc. But that's never the case. The law also says that I can create a backup for this purpose but I'm not allowed to circumvent the DRM to do so.

This leaves only one recourse: to download the game and run it on a modded system. Technically this is legal as defined by law. Modding my system isn't illegal. Downloading a copied version that already has the DRM circumvented means that I haven't done so.

What a fucked up system that is?

Also, all on disc DLC can be accessed legally by anyone with the knowledge. And it doesn't matter if you circumvent DRM to get at it or not. By the letter of the law, its actually legal. I'll let you think about that one for a while.

 

[WildFire15]

Another issue; with the prevalence of day one patches it's entirely possible that circumventing DRM won't be enough in future if you can't get the patches or re-engineer the game to overcome major bugs.

 

[09philj]

If they aren't going to let the community preserve the games, they need to take responsibility for it themselves. The British Library has copies of almost every book published in the UK, ever. We need something like that for games before it's too late.

 

[Vivi22]

Luckily, what they want to happen and what will happen are two very different things.

If they're not going to do anything to preserve old games (and companies are, for the most part, doing absolutely nothing to preserve old games) then it's up to the gaming community. And there is essentially nothing they can do to stop it because when has trying to stop pirates and hackers ever worked?

 

[Vivi22]

If they aren't going to let the community preserve the games, they need to take responsibility for it themselves. The British Library has copies of almost every book published in the UK, ever. We need something like that for games before it's too late.

The sad thing is, even just keeping a copy isn't really enough without good emulation or the source code. Physical media and the hardware that run games all change and deteriorate with time. Even PC games get harder and harder to run as new hardware progresses. It's not that bad yet because emulation is still reasonably doable, but the more complex games and their hardware get the more impossible the task of trying to keep them playable.

 

[R.K. Meades]

Yeah, good luck stopping that retro gaming thing, just like how they halted video gaming culture proper, TV, rock and roll, and so on. Oh wait, that never happened... Oh well!

Disco's still alive, so the old text adventure won't be going anywhere.

 

[Rozalia1]

Blah blah blah anyone who has seen my posts knows what I'd say.

All I'd say beyond that is people have a fatal misunderstanding of certain aspects, but nothing will change their mind as they must justify it to themselves at all costs for varying reasons.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

There is a lot of old games i would play that i cant. Many old C64/Amiga games i would love to play but you cant buy them and i dont want to pirate them because you cant trust those websites. Loveto play Creatures 1 and 2 again - love those on my C64. Oh and Turrican 2 and Dizzy.

There needs to be an official website where the owners of all the old titles can sell those games for download once the console becomes obsolete.

 

[FalloutJack]

Disco's still alive.

*Blink*

It is? That is...actually quite surprising. Where does it live?

 

[blackrave]

I think this is fairly simple- if game hasn't been playable for last 5y and publisher has no intent on fixing it, then it is fair game.
No matter what police and courts may claim, laws are strict guidelines, not something you should follow 100%
Exceptions happen and in certain circumstances breaking laws may be justified.
Spirit above letter people, spirit above letter.

Isn't archaeology theft then?

Worse, often it is graverobbery too

 

[Hero in a half shell]

This is like saying that athletics should be discouraged because it encourages people to run away from the police.

Under this logic Archaeology should be discouraged because it encourages grave robbing!

Yeah! Think about that Professor Jones.