AdventureRacing
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Why History Needs Software Piracy
- Thread starter Des0lar
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What is?
wolfmat
Confirmed Asshole
PairOfFilthySocks
Member
Boom. Nail on the head.
Companies want to stop getting fucked in the ass by dirty pirates, but at the same time, they desire to retain their ability to fuck legit consumers in the ass.
True, but a routine of archiving is important. Today, we only know what we do about ancient languages and the history of how written language evolved through a series of chance discoveries and painstaking work to decode them.
Imagine if in say, 200 years, we have created an entirely new species: digital life/AI. In the context of the history of developing digital languages and programs, archiving something seemingly obscure such as Speedball on the Amiga 500 may actually help some future research. We just don't know what will be useful, but the flow in time of development and learning is extremely important.
In that context, the sentiment of people like phisheep is dishearteningly shortsighted.
phisheep
NeoGAF's Chief Barrister
Yep, seriously. I have no problem with anything being lost forever. The future can and will take care of itself regardless of what we preserve or what we don't.
For clarity, I don't see that there's necessarily anything wrong in wanting to preserve things, but I don't think there is necessarily anything right or mandatory about it either.
All those copies of Super Mario Bros. are gonna be unplayable in 200 years. If we're talking physical copies.
blitzcloud
Banned
Maybe the source of a few games have been lost, but the source would never be archived by pirating either, unless the company wants (Unreal/doom 3 etc). I believe they at least hold the finished product. If they don't, it's possibly not needed for archive.
Jake Tower
Banned
Panzer Dragoon Saga exists in emulation form, and is playable. That's all I'm gonna say . . .
So you would okay with just knowing that planes fly but don't want to know how the whole thing started? Or cars, electricity... every single invention/discovery ever made?
wolfmat
Confirmed Asshole
Well, that's the original point, right?
Aliens did it.
I've always assumed that it does exist, but I guess I'm more concerned about the lack of concerted efforts to preserve titles like this. Its not even a game I have any intention to play, buy or emulate. But one day other people will, and I think they deserve the opportunity.
Of course, should Sega ever find the source code, I'm sure it would be worthy of buying to encourage them to keep it this time.
AdventureRacing
Member
Yeah i'm not sure i think it should be mandatory but it is something that we should be trying to do.
Jake Tower
Banned
I wish I could find it, but there was a video interview with Sega a few years ago where the representative was asked why they never released compilations of their arcade classics instead of Genesis games. The answer: Sega has lost the source code for those coin-op games. Sega literally cannot find the source code in their IP archives. So they kept releasing Genesis games instead.
Thankfully, emulation has preserved ROM dumps of those arcade boards and they are playable in MAME. Of course, ROM dumps vary in quality, but generally they keep the games at least playable even if they aren't 100% accurate in emulation.
Edit: here's the video from Kotaku - http://kotaku.com/#!5028197/sega-cant-find-the-source-code-for-your-favorite-old-school-arcade-games
Thankfully, emulation has preserved ROM dumps of those arcade boards and they are playable in MAME. Of course, ROM dumps vary in quality, but generally they keep the games at least playable even if they aren't 100% accurate in emulation.
Edit: here's the video from Kotaku - http://kotaku.com/#!5028197/sega-cant-find-the-source-code-for-your-favorite-old-school-arcade-games
I am shocked that these companies lose the sourcecodes for their games.. I mean, what the hell, it's like
Ludwig van Beethoven: " Well, yesterday I had the final and only version of my 9th symphony here on the piano but I can't find it, the maid probably put it on the trash, oh well.."
>_<
Ludwig van Beethoven: " Well, yesterday I had the final and only version of my 9th symphony here on the piano but I can't find it, the maid probably put it on the trash, oh well.."
>_<
Jake Tower
Banned
Here's a Gamasutra article on the topic from a year ago: Where Games Go to Sleep: The Game Preservation Crisis
Gamasutra said:
phisheep
NeoGAF's Chief Barrister
Yeah, sure. And my grandfather was in fixing aeroplanes in the early days of aviation in 1914 and my other grandfather was an electrician at the time when domestic electric power was about as old as the internet is now - when being an electrician was sexy (apparently).
Yeah I'd be fine with that.
What I wouldn't be fine with is a gazillion historians faffing around over the minute details of it all a century later.
EDIT: This is turning out to be a much more interesting thread than I thought it would be.
I really think there needs to be a statute of limitations placed on this stuff that is within the timeline where the games are still easily available to be dumped and there are going to be plenty of working copies but not so soon that it infringes on the publisher's ability to make money in any major way. 10 years seems reasonable to me but I guess I wouldn't even oppose 5... I'll put it this way though, I would never download a game for a current generation console. But I don't see any reason people should feel guilty about downloading a copy of an old game like Suikoden 2 or Earthbound. You can't buy Suikoden 2 from the developers at this point and I see no reason anyone should feel guilty about downloading it as opposed to paying some ebay collector $200. Either way they aren't giving anything to the publisher.
The only problem with such a thing is that it could potentially infringe on the profits from things like PSN and Virtual Console. But from how little Sony/Nintendo have pushed such things I doubt they are particularly profitable anyway. Everyone has played Super Mario Bros, how many want to pay 5 dollars to play it again? They keep putting new games up so there must be some profit to be had there but if it weren't limited they would put a lot more push behind them.
The only problem with such a thing is that it could potentially infringe on the profits from things like PSN and Virtual Console. But from how little Sony/Nintendo have pushed such things I doubt they are particularly profitable anyway. Everyone has played Super Mario Bros, how many want to pay 5 dollars to play it again? They keep putting new games up so there must be some profit to be had there but if it weren't limited they would put a lot more push behind them.
phisheep
NeoGAF's Chief Barrister
Ocarina of Time 3DS
This hits the nail on the head. It's not a problem unique to games (though, being interactive, they are more challenging to preserve than most art forms), it's a general problem with copyright law being twisted into something it was never intended to be. A return to a sane copyright period (that doesn't extend more than 2 decades at most) would remedy this and a host of other problems.
I agree with phisheep. Old games aren't important. It's not like people today still enjoy and get inspired by old movies and music. Mozart who? Citizen Kane what? I just listen to Lady Gaga and watch Transformers.
It's not important for people to be able to look back at games like Pong, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter 2, and Doom to see how and why games evolved to become what they are.
It's not important for people to be able to look back at games like Pong, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter 2, and Doom to see how and why games evolved to become what they are.
And then image how is would be if the original score was gone, how Josef Böhm (thanks wikipedia :-D) would be heralded as a HERO if he'd taken a copy of the nodes during rehersals for first performance in Vienna.
That's it! Time to bring out the SSD and preserve me some Amiga-love for the future!
There are of course the rare situations where an old game can still be profitable but this wouldn't do anything to harm Ocarina of Time 3ds. Because though it would be easy to get a copy of Ocarina of Time to play, it wouldn't be possible to play it on a 3ds (making it easily portable) or with the new 3d capabilities. Also, even if we did have more public domain titles Nintendo still has to approve any titles published on their system so its not like someone else could put it out on 3ds without Nintendo's permission. It would be available as a ROM to play the original N64 edition. Guess what? Its still pretty easily available now. Do a google search and a ton of sites offering it for download will come up immediately. Some of these sites have been there for YEARS and are among the first google results and are very well known but aren't going anywhere. Why? In large part because the sites are smart enough not to host current generation titles and by and large no one cares that much about piracy of years old games. But if that's the case, why not actually allow it and allow it to be done in the open.
It might even diminish the piracy of current games which is really what loses developers their money. Do people really want to risk going to jail for downloading a game when there are thousands of great games that are 5 years old they can download? Probably not. But the people who are so interested in the games that its claimed they would buy the game if they couldn't pirate it (who absolutely exist though not in the numbers some would claim, its certainly not 50% of those who pirate and probably not even 25%) might just go out and do so.
Not to mention public domain doesn't make it impossible for the original creator to make money off something. The movie His Girl Friday is in the public domain and has a thousand cheap $1 versions out there. It can be downloaded from a # of public domain websites free of charge. Yet the original studio is still able to use the original negative they have to produce a much higher quality special edition that includes special features (interviews, documentaries about the making) that no one else could easily produce. This allows this to be profitable.
One more thought (which I'm sure has been proposed somewhere along the line): copyright periods should be not a fixed number of years but rather a function of the durability of their media. The idea of an 85-year copyright period for books is at least partially acceptable because you can always go and find the 85-year-old book even if the current copyright holder won't print one for you.
But if the copyright period is four times as long as the media can reasonably be expected to last, then the system virtually guarantees that the work will be lost unless the holder makes specific efforts to make sure it survives. That's not how copyright was ever supposed to work.
But if the copyright period is four times as long as the media can reasonably be expected to last, then the system virtually guarantees that the work will be lost unless the holder makes specific efforts to make sure it survives. That's not how copyright was ever supposed to work.
Fredrik
Member
Precisely.
Care to explain why that would be the result of preserving 'things' or why that wouldn't happen if you simply don't actively preserve anything?
Sort of true... but there are plenty of books that aren't going to be around in 85 years to be honest. Things get damaged and destroyed. I think 85 years is an awful long time for anything. I do agree that the length though should depend to some degree on how long the media will reasonably last. But just because the work could have reasonably survived a time period doesn't mean it will. As someone said, Panzer Dragoon Saga is only 15 years old and dangerously close to extinct. Luckily, that has been backed up to some places
Pureauthor
Member
You do realize that the historians would still be faffing about the thing, only without the benefit of a large accumulation of data and information to work with? That's kind of what historians do.
Inadvertent helping is still helping.
Fredrik
Member
How is that even possible??
You might have a historian as a friend, but you are certainly not a historian. We don't need data being missing to have a "job", our job is to analyze the material we have. And the more data is preserved, the better. Yes, even your breakfast habits!
During my whole study I've never heard of a professor who complains to have too much data, it's always "not enough" to prove this or that.
LiquidMetal14
hide your water-based mammals
The thing about the gaming part of this discussion is that most games from the near beginning of time are accesible to this date. So if someone wants to back them up by whatever piece of technology allows it, I would not be against it. I see no reason why we wouldn't have a high percentage of games available in DD form at this point anyways.
I know there are some things from the near beginnings of computers in the mid 1900's but that stuff is mere experimental. Not that it wouldn't be amazing to try some early form of what someone would classify as a game back in that time but that's deviating slightly.
phisheep makes some good points. How much do these really matter? You may be talking about something just for the sake of conserving things but my point on why most of these games being available via DD should semi invalidate the fear at this point.
I'm not saying we should be able to pirate every game day 1 (as if that doesn't happen anyways lol) but with newer games, I agree less on piracy. I do understand the BS DRM cracks which let you play Ubi games offline. That's something that I know many (well 4-5) people have done. But when games are this new, unless it's a company that is not so strict with DRM free releases, we should not really need to pirate.
If anything, there should be more demos. Someone mentioned a week or two ago that games used to have more demos (at least on PC). I do remember that almost every game I wanted had one. Now with the DD age in full swing, we are seeing them but in comparison to the amount of releases overall, the percentage seems down.
In short, you win some, you lose some.
I know there are some things from the near beginnings of computers in the mid 1900's but that stuff is mere experimental. Not that it wouldn't be amazing to try some early form of what someone would classify as a game back in that time but that's deviating slightly.
phisheep makes some good points. How much do these really matter? You may be talking about something just for the sake of conserving things but my point on why most of these games being available via DD should semi invalidate the fear at this point.
I'm not saying we should be able to pirate every game day 1 (as if that doesn't happen anyways lol) but with newer games, I agree less on piracy. I do understand the BS DRM cracks which let you play Ubi games offline. That's something that I know many (well 4-5) people have done. But when games are this new, unless it's a company that is not so strict with DRM free releases, we should not really need to pirate.
If anything, there should be more demos. Someone mentioned a week or two ago that games used to have more demos (at least on PC). I do remember that almost every game I wanted had one. Now with the DD age in full swing, we are seeing them but in comparison to the amount of releases overall, the percentage seems down.
In short, you win some, you lose some.
Dreamwriter
Member
I hate to throw a huge wrench into this "piracy is good!" thread, but the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it legal for nonprofit libraries and archive institutions to make digital copies. So no, piracy is not needed to preserve games for history, if you really are interested in preserving games for history rather than just coming up with an excuse to pirate games, feel free to form your own not-for-profit foundation for the preservation of video games.
And as for the "if it's 10 years old it hurts nobody, they aren't interested in making money off it" argument, how do you explain Nintendo's Virtual Console or G.O.G? Realize that without piracy both would have been far more profitable.
And as for the "if it's 10 years old it hurts nobody, they aren't interested in making money off it" argument, how do you explain Nintendo's Virtual Console or G.O.G? Realize that without piracy both would have been far more profitable.
Well, what establishes abandonware? Can a game stop being abandonware? I mean, gog's whole business model is getting these games' licenses and selling them again. They recently put up Ultima 1+2+3 up, and the first is a 31 year-old game.
Combine an extremely small run at the end of the life of a under performing system with a medium that breaks easily (and a game which had 4 discs, with even one breaking making the whole incomplete) and a publisher that has apparently lost the source code.
Video games are just as important as films or even music.
Good Old Games still has a point regardless of piracy, many of these old games don't run correctly on modern systems. They correct this. That's extremely valuable. How many people still have a 20 year old PC sitting around? Maybe a few but not many.
I think you missed the point
LiquidMetal14
hide your water-based mammals
That's kind of what I was touching upon. It's not like there aren't people doing this just for preservation. Even with rarer stuff like unreleased Dreamcast games, there have been a few that have come to fruition. I would hope that the folks with some rare SW or cancelled games would have the mind set to somehow back it up before their dog chews it up or they put it in the toaster on accident.
The point isn't just to have it available in a library somewhere. The point is that even 30 years from now those who want to should have access to it to enrich themselves. That was the original point of copyright laws. Even if we did have a library somewhere making these digital copies (which frankly, would be very hard to get funding for in this economy) that wouldn't entirely solve the problem.
What's the point of anything we've created then? That's an incredibly narrow mind view.
Starwolf_UK
Member
This reminds me of the early networking efforts like SEGA channel (which hosted the occasional US version of a game that never made it to retail) and Satellaview (which had a whole load of interesting content). The SEGA channel US games are usually just minor modifications to the header so not of much historical interest or lost now.
Anyway back to Satellaview, in the 90s ROM dumps were made of some of the broadcasts but its only a partial picture (for instance the second quest of BS Zelda was lost for over a decade until someone stumbled upon a dump of I think week 3 from it), even today people are buying random Satellaview memory cards and dumping them in the hope they find a new undiscovered game or demo.
Of course given how much storage costs these days its going to become less likely. There was also an attitude thing of "my work here is done". Take the Okami port to Wii. Ready at Dawn didn't get the computers or fiels from Clover until quite a bit into the project. I can't remember if it was down to Capcom Japan being uncooperative or what.
I'll also point at Chocobo's Dungeon 1 for the PS1. Translator works on it and decides to compile source code. Runs into errors due to missing file. Asks for the missing files (presumably from Chunsoft?) and its "can't do, we deleted them all".
Link's Awakening DX has a load of space at the end of the ROM (the EEPROM was used as RAM* leaving source code behind) which suggests they reverse engineered the B&W LA which might have been due to lost source code.
*-A trick that was done in the 90s to save buying more RAM.
Anyway back to Satellaview, in the 90s ROM dumps were made of some of the broadcasts but its only a partial picture (for instance the second quest of BS Zelda was lost for over a decade until someone stumbled upon a dump of I think week 3 from it), even today people are buying random Satellaview memory cards and dumping them in the hope they find a new undiscovered game or demo.
Lost source code. It comes down to storage and costs. The project is done, if you put them on the hard drive or the tape drive you've got no space to work on current projects and it was seen as too costly to just buy another hard drive.
Of course given how much storage costs these days its going to become less likely. There was also an attitude thing of "my work here is done". Take the Okami port to Wii. Ready at Dawn didn't get the computers or fiels from Clover until quite a bit into the project. I can't remember if it was down to Capcom Japan being uncooperative or what.
I'll also point at Chocobo's Dungeon 1 for the PS1. Translator works on it and decides to compile source code. Runs into errors due to missing file. Asks for the missing files (presumably from Chunsoft?) and its "can't do, we deleted them all".
Link's Awakening DX has a load of space at the end of the ROM (the EEPROM was used as RAM* leaving source code behind) which suggests they reverse engineered the B&W LA which might have been due to lost source code.
*-A trick that was done in the 90s to save buying more RAM.
captmorgan
Banned
I was wondering the people that claim piracy is needed for the greater good of society or its not hurting anyone or I wouldn`t have bought it anyway. How far should that line of thinking go?
If I develop a game at home but never share it with anyone say its just for me does society have the right break into my computer and copy the game for the greater good?
How about if I create something and decide to only share it with 10 of my closes friends, does it now have to be forcefully archived against my will?
If I develop a game at home but never share it with anyone say its just for me does society have the right break into my computer and copy the game for the greater good?
How about if I create something and decide to only share it with 10 of my closes friends, does it now have to be forcefully archived against my will?
Problem is, libraries don't make ROMs of games afaik, so any copy of an old game on floppy will still be lost, if it isn't digitalised and remodded to work on current hardware. Also games with online activation and the likes which need cracks to run properly... Do these libraries have DRM free versions of everything? I am genuinly curious.
You never ditributed your product openly, did you? So no one will force you to archive it. Once you put your game on your homepage or in some indie bundle, yes then there is reason to archive it since a lot of people might have played it.
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