Abandoned Games 334
Ghost Pig writes "The people of Exiled Gamers have put together an Abandonware Campaign with which they hope to be able to convince game publishers to rescue titles from their current 'Abandonware' status, and make them available for the public to play (legally) once again. They have made mention of quite a few titles that have slipped into the status of Abandonware (titles that it's no longer possible to buy at retail, and that are near impossible to locate on sites such as eBay), which includes System Shock 2, Freespace 2, as well as older titles, such as The Chaos Engine, Alien Breed and Flashback."
Re:Thats what abandonware is! (Score:2, Insightful)
That's an okay idea, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Open Source: Ensuring that my kids don't have to listen to Dad tell the same "Oh man, when I was your age I played this great game, but we'd need to find an old binary and a goddamn 60 year old computer to play it..." story over and over again.
Losing information is serious business. Games are quickly becoming part of our shared culture. Think of how much our culture loses by losing those games to time? I can still read ancient Greek and Arabic poetry but I can't play Master's of Orion on my PPC Linux box? I don't know, something seems really fucked up about that.
WRONG! (Score:5, Insightful)
Something goes into the public domain when:
1) The rights owner explicitly places it there.
2) The rights duration expires.
Unless either of those two happens, it's still Copyrighted and the rights to publish (i.e. make and distribute copies) belongs to the rights holder or their successors in interest.
It's infringement, through and through. What the "abandonware campaign" seeks to do is to get the status changed on those titles or get a publishing permission so that they can be distributed legally under whatever conditions they can manage to get the rights holders to grant distribution rights on.
Re:Dink Smallwood (Score:5, Insightful)
The very reason that copyright used to require renewal. If the holder didn't care enough about his rights to fill out a form and send it in introduction to the public domain was accelerated.
It was a simple plan; and it worked.
KFG
Most game companies . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if a publisher would want to do this... (Score:4, Insightful)
For instance they may have to pay royalties to the developer or licence fees for a software component or trademark for every copy distributed (even if for free). This is particularly troublesome if the party to pay is now defunct or if the current owner of the rights is unknown or disputed. The original contracts may even be missing.
If there was serious money involved they could perhaps be compelled to sort such issues out, but since that isn't the case, most publishers really don't want to go through all the hassle.
A damn shame for sure, but that's just the way things are.
Re:That's an okay idea, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Even if a publisher would want to do this... (Score:3, Insightful)
For instance, suppose a game was developed by Company A in 1990. They then signed a 5-year publishing contract with Company B. Everyone remembers the game being released by Company B. My understanding of TFA is that today they would petition Company B to relinquish the copyright for the game. Problem is that Company B no longer has any rights to the game. It solely lies with Company A. All that happens in this case is that Company B gets annoyed at GamerSite X for wasting their time.
Without knowing specifically what agreements were signed behind the scenes, it makes it difficult to know who exactly they should be pursuing to release the game to the public domain.
Re:Leave them "dead" (Score:5, Insightful)
Many really quirky Japanese titles you've never heard of which become legendary among small communities.
Many Japanese Playstation games. Dreamcast games in the same way.
You have to remember, some of us don't believe in credit cards. We also don't trust handing money over to someone who has a name like Superhappyboy9982 with top "karma", that his friends could of given him. Remember a lot of people are dodgy and I can't be bothered to trust them on a number you can easily manipulate.
Amazon is a good source for new stuff. But if I can't open the wrapping fresh from the factory I won't order it without checking it out in person. My "good condition" could be "Mint condition" to someone else just as easy as it could be "I threw it to the dog and he only sort of ate most of it.. but you can still read page 38 to 42 without any problems".
I live in England where we get royally shafted on the Japanese market. Getting most the stuff I want is extremely difficult, let alone trying to find a limited run Japanese SNES game which no one has even heard of outside the small community it's built up. I have at least 50 SNES games in a cupboard behind me from all over the world, just as many Mega drive/Genesis and such.
You could argue that because fans translated the old Shin Megami Tensei games on the SNES (and hence I pirated them), that ATLUS now have made 6-7 game purchases out of me. There is no way I would of found the Megaten series if they hadn't been pirated and translated, hence I wouldn't of taken any notice of ATLUS, hence I wouldn't of bought SMT3, DDS1, DDS2.
In the same way I couldn't get Super robot taisen. Now ATLUS has picked up the rights to the only 2 games they can release.. Guess who has both on pre-order?
So yea, maybe once in a while I decide to be cheap and "steal" a game. Maybe some times I can't get hold of them. But I see no problem with a little underhanded dealing as long as we both win in the end.
I suppose you've never done anything even remotely close to illegal. You're a regular perfect human being with no faults and everything right?
Re:legal abandonware (Score:3, Insightful)
But that describes the core problem, and the reason we have "abandon"ware in the first place...
Consider a game produced by a privately-owned company, consisting of one person with no offspring, no known relatives of any degree, and no outstanding debts... If that person died, no one could "own" the copyright, but the copyright would still exist. You still couldn't legally copy that game.
Now, in the real world, you have much more complicated situations that the one I just described, but leave about the same chance of someone legally reissuing the game. For example, company X went under in the 1985 videogame crash and all its assets (including copyrights) went to dozens of different companies and individuals, many of which might not even realize what they got in the deal. One (or more) of those went under in the 1993 Comic crash, with a similar diasporic outcome. Who "owns" the copyright to a given game produced by company X?
You could try to construct a moral or legal argument involving abandonded property, but a bona fide effort to find out whether the holder of the copyrights really gave up his rights might involve approaching the holder.
Yet we have a curious irony here - With a physical object (a sunken ship, for example), yes, you could call it abandoned/salvage/whatever, and legally take posession of it. With abandonware (or books, or music, or any form of intangible "property"), even though everyone could in practice have a copy of it, the law doesn't allow that, and you commit a crime by copying it even though getting permission to copy it would require nothing short of ubiquitous consent from everyone on the planet.
When dealing with older games with a well-defined still existant owner, we get into an ethical (if not legal) grey area. But for games that would take thousands of hours of research just to come up with a pool of probable owners who never even heard of the game in question? That needs to change. Nothing "sketchy" or "contrived" about it!
Re:Leave them "dead" (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you really think that the people who worked on and made Gunship actually got any semblance of a reasonable cut of that $40-$50 back then?
At any rate, you obviously missed the point of the parent's post. It wasn't to financially compensate the developers. What exactly was he supposed to do? Hunt them all down (since they've all undoubtedly changed jobs many, many times since) and pay them individually? If any have died, should he write a check to their estate for the 2 cents that they would have earned back then from his purchase plus interest?
The point is that he did his best to make right now what he screwed up then, thus the karmic balance.
I won't judge whether his efforts are admirable or not or whether it truly makes things "right" enough, but it's more than I'm guessing 99.9% of other people have done. God knows I probably still owe Sid Mieir some money for Civilization that I'll likely never make any effort to repay. (But I don't feel so guilty about that since I paid way too much for Civilization III.)
Re:Leave them "dead" (Score:1, Insightful)
"good" with the media fed propoganda
Equating copyright infrigment with crime.
Copyright law of 1790 and today. (Score:1, Insightful)
For me, it's a matter of preservation, and I think the geek community does that a lot better than a company with (legitimate) profit motives.
Then there's the whole issue of copyrights and extensions. A system that had started out as protection for 14 years renewable for 14 more is now author's life plus 70 or 95 for a corporation. This is especially ironic when you consider 14 years was the default well before the age of convenient and accurate post, much less network television, instant 24-hour news stations, the internet, and widespread broadband. One could argue that today's media month is equivalent to a media year or more in 1790, yet even then, 14 or 28 years was considered enough. These days, with copyright laws extending every time the issue comes up before Congress, is in effect copyright into perpetuity. So not only is "abandonware" not in the clear, the first time you can legitimately distribute 1977's Gun Fight is
While "abandonware" is legally meaningless, I think 14 years in computing and videogaming is sufficient for copyright protection. That would leave protection for companies for the current and previous console platforms, for instance. Under copyright law as originally written, anything before 1992 would be fair game. As it should be.
Seems to me that the Founders got this right the first time, and we've been mucking it up for special interests ever since.
Re:Thats what abandonware is! (Score:3, Insightful)
While that is an interesting rule, it still is not the law.
general principle of abandoned intellectual props (Score:4, Insightful)
Some wisdom from spanish proverbs.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which roughly translates to "water that you are not going to drink of, let it flow". It seems like game companies (not game developers, though as it would seem by the article) don't get that they're not going to get any money on these games, and insist on suing the pants off anybody who tries to relive the old days by downloading an old adventure game off bittorrent. Some people are saying, "Well, they could be ported to mobile platforms and sold for money!". This sounds like a great idea, if I do say so myself. Heck, I would buy them if some old games got ported to the PSP/DS or cellphone. The problem is, they're not doing it! And even if they were, what if I didn't happen to own the platform which the companies choose to port it to? Would it really hurt their revenue if some people were playing it for free on PCS while some were paying to play it on the DS? No, it probably wouldn't. Because the people who would play these old games on new portable platforms wouldn't be playing at home. They would buy it because it's PORTABLE, first, and it's NOSTALGIC second.
The bottom Line? why are you game companies hoarding water (old games) and not drinking it (selling it)? It's not doing ANYBODY any good, and releasing it as abandonware would improve your image.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)