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Comment by gottam | Hacker News Reader

We could of had enthusiastic fans see the inner workings of such a beloved game and tons of articles around the technical details, but instead we protected the intellectual property rights of a billion dollar corporation. Strictly by law, it was "the right thing to do", but it was a real missed historic opportunity.

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I'll agree it's an unfortunate thing that Blizzard hasn't released the code. Personally I'd love to get at Diablo 1's code too. Maybe they will one day, but that right is theirs even though they are a huge corporation. Copyright law doesn't care about that detail. This thread has a lot of people wanting the guy to go vigilante, which I just can't get behind.

I'm not going to berate the guy for doing what he thought was right, but reading this news doesn't exactly give me a warm fuzzy feeling. Just mixed feelings.

When, in 20 years, we're hearing that this disc got lost again sometime in the bankruptcy chain of Activision Blizzard, we'll see whether corporate archiving or vigilante illegal archiving is more effective.

Is there any risk that the compiled binaries, on millions of computers and available for free and legal download from Blizzard, will disappear in 20 years?

No. But the source is useful for other purposes than compiling , especially with original comments.

For rarer games, and those shipped on DRMed/copy protected media, it's certainly possible to get into a situation at risk of losing all known copies of the binaries!

It seems that you think that following the law is the right thing to do. That's an understandable point of view. But there's also something called civil disobedience. Sometimes the will of the commons should trump law. Is this one of those cases? Frankly, I don't know or care. But I think if you don't try to understand what you call the "vigilante" point of view, you're doing yourself a disservice.

How is it civil disobedience, if private citizen violates right of another private citizen (or in this case corporation)?

civil disobedience in my mind is when private citizen stand's up to what he perceives as unjust system or law. And I can't see what unjust you see here in this case.

The way I see it is simple a lost property returned to an owner, and reward for person who found it

It's still their property. IMO non-Blizzard individuals have no right to post it.

Like I said, from a black and white legal standpoint it was the right move.

But so much was lost from not simply uploading it somewhere from an internet cafe.

It enters the same ethical flexibility as things like wikileaks in my opinion

> It enters the same ethical flexibility as things like wikileaks in my opinion

I agree with you, it is completely unethical and totally self-serving.

Your ethic smells bad.

Well, at least i'm not the only one who smells this way:

https://iapp.org/news/a/ethics-and-the-privacy-harms-of-wiki...

http://www.npr.org/2010/11/30/131699467/is-wikileaks-release...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/zorn/ct-wikileaks...

http://theconversation.com/wikileaks-journalism-ethics-and-t...

https://www.seeker.com/wikileaks-the-ethics-of-revealing-sec...

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/02/11/februar...

Liberating proprietary software is a moral good. Full stop.

The number of hopeless herbs on here who have so thoroughly internalized "legal == moral" is depressing.

You're the one who is making that connection, not me. I never implied it.

Yeah, sorry, I didn't at all intend that as a slight against you specifically.

As much as I would love to see blizzard's code, it is their intellectual property. This is nothing similar to wikileaks. Wikileaks publishes information that should have been public because it is of public interest and relates to the public yet it is not available to the public.

Why isnt a culturally significant game's source not considered public interest? Especially when the game is no longer being sold?

Because they might want to withhold their right to milk it for successive generations and not have to bother with making original games.

In this particular and narrow instance, it does seem like Blizzard is making good on going back and updating and maintaining the old code. You can argue the reasons, I suppose, but this seems in line with exactly what copyright is supposed to be protecting here. They're reviving support for the game, updating it for modern machines to receive, and making the previous iteration accessible.

I would love to have it to, but it's hard to fault Blizzard here for anything but "hey it would be really nice if you..."

There is still a vested interest in protecting this game from Blizzard's point of view, and it sucks, but in this case they have a fairly good justification and have been holding up their end of the bargain (re-releasing)

They've been real champs about these older games, like Diablo II getting updates. My heart skipped a beat when we finally got a native OS X client update that wasn't a Carbon app - that was really going above and beyond in my opinion, and their support was great for it despite the hiccups on release.

It was being sold up until about a week ago. I'm sure that you can find a store that still sells it on CD.

Blizzard is making a StarCraft remaster right now; who knows how much original source is still in there. My guess is probably a lot, since they want to keep the same mechanics.

Parent's usage of "Interest of the Public" here typically means "the welfare or well-being of the general public; commonwealth" and you seem to be meaning the "lot's of people are curious -- culturally significant" kind.

Doesn't mean he didn't take a backup!

there is no ethical issue with keeping the secrets of others you have no obligation or commitment to keep.

Does this mean that if you find a random person's diary, there is no ethical issue with publishing it?

> It's still their property. IMO non-Blizzard individuals have no right to post it.

It's not their property, it's copyrighted. He indeed had no right to publish the contents but also no obvious obligation to return it. IMO he did a lame thing, the only worse option being uploading it anywhere before the © expires and getting into legal trouble.

I didn't say anything giving it back, though. As you say, the issue here in particular has to do with him posting or not posting it.

I like your point. Were I the guy I'd have tried to push an agreement that they'd publish the source of their games once they had been discontinued for over 20 years or something like that.

Yeah. Even Apple recognized the historic significance of MacPaint and QuickDraw and released those sources.

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-...

Carmack released the Quake1 and QuakeWorld sources, and I think also q2 and q3 eventually too.

StarCraft is ancient and the source is of no commercial value to them any longer. They don't benefit from its secrecy, but we do benefit from its release.

Then again, this is the company that sued open source developers who re-implemented a server (bnetd) for one of their proprietary protocols. It was that day I resolved to never give them money again.

> StarCraft is ancient and the source is of no commercial value to them any longer. They don't benefit from its secrecy, but we do benefit from its release.

They are doing a remaster right now. It would be reasonable to assume that it has at least some of the original code in it. I also suspect that Blizzard has used the same code base and modified it little by little over time.

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