Kinda related, but I hate how the big studios go after old videogames and try to take them down. It looks like, in the future, this era will be called the "digital dark ages", not because all the stuff got lost to bitrot, but because all the stuff became illegal to own so that the studios could sell the new stuff again and again.
Isn't that one of the whole points of copyright? So the authors can print new copies and not have to compete with other people releasing copies they made?
Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
The original game might be stopping people. It's not like games have a good track record of continuing to work for decades. DRM of all kinds poses a huge problem in this regard, but so does garden variety technological change. The GOG preservation team has quite a few videos about deeply technical work they needed to do to make e.g. Prince of Persia run properly on modern PCs. Sure I can just pirate a copy for PS2 and run it with PCSX2, but thats “piracy" (even though I still have a working original disc!).
So, no: there's a lot stopping people, especially copyright law, from keeping around working copies of their games.
> copyright expires
Not in your lifetime. 70 years after death if the author brings us out into centuries. Books written 60 years before my kids were born won't be out if copyright until they are in their 40s, for example.
A fun way to frame the copyright lifetime absurdity is to point out that in a few years there will be books published on the 1900s that will be copyright protected until the 2100s.
Even GOG has some oddities were the available copy is not the original experience.
My recent experience of trying to play the original Mafia game.
Booting it up a GoG copy, I found that there was no music while driving (a core memory of my original play through).
This music has been removed...
This also affected small radios you'd find playing music, they now dead.
It really took away from the game experience
I ended up scratching out my original CD copy of the game, installing version 1.0 of the game. It had all the music and better visuals
The patches removed visual features for performance, not GoG's fault here, not sure why GoG hosts an inferior version, its quite a downgrade. The music removal I do not understand.
(This all was particually obvious in an early mission, where you have to beat up some parked cars with baseball bats, the patched version show minimal dents and zero scratches, and the radio sitting in the corner make no sound. This completely changes in the V1.0 copy, so much more atmosphere)
This happens because the original publisher signed a deal for the commercial music with a limited time.
So when that time expired, any further releases had to remove the music.
Another example of how copyright makes preservation difficult.
I mean, it's obvious: copyright seeks to create a mechanism to compensate creators by creating scarcity. They succeeded.
It turns out archiving those creations effectively is in direct tension with that scarcity. So we made a system to incentivizes creation, and then destruction of the creation. This is visible with the "copyright cliff" in books, but also the incredible difficulty of legally keeping computer programs running over the decades. Copyright's restrictions on derivative works, coupled with the insanely long copyright term, create a sort of digital wasteland, with only those willing to go underground having great collections of old programs.
javcasas · · focus · HN ↗
charcircuit · · focus · HN ↗
Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
The original game might be stopping people. It's not like games have a good track record of continuing to work for decades. DRM of all kinds poses a huge problem in this regard, but so does garden variety technological change. The GOG preservation team has quite a few videos about deeply technical work they needed to do to make e.g. Prince of Persia run properly on modern PCs. Sure I can just pirate a copy for PS2 and run it with PCSX2, but thats “piracy" (even though I still have a working original disc!).
So, no: there's a lot stopping people, especially copyright law, from keeping around working copies of their games.
> copyright expires
Not in your lifetime. 70 years after death if the author brings us out into centuries. Books written 60 years before my kids were born won't be out if copyright until they are in their 40s, for example.
dghlsakjg · · focus · HN ↗
Dead_Lemon · · focus · HN ↗
It really took away from the game experience
I ended up scratching out my original CD copy of the game, installing version 1.0 of the game. It had all the music and better visuals
The patches removed visual features for performance, not GoG's fault here, not sure why GoG hosts an inferior version, its quite a downgrade. The music removal I do not understand.
(This all was particually obvious in an early mission, where you have to beat up some parked cars with baseball bats, the patched version show minimal dents and zero scratches, and the radio sitting in the corner make no sound. This completely changes in the V1.0 copy, so much more atmosphere)
Kubuxu · · focus · HN ↗
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
I mean, it's obvious: copyright seeks to create a mechanism to compensate creators by creating scarcity. They succeeded.
It turns out archiving those creations effectively is in direct tension with that scarcity. So we made a system to incentivizes creation, and then destruction of the creation. This is visible with the "copyright cliff" in books, but also the incredible difficulty of legally keeping computer programs running over the decades. Copyright's restrictions on derivative works, coupled with the insanely long copyright term, create a sort of digital wasteland, with only those willing to go underground having great collections of old programs.