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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Is this made/approved by Valve? Or is it just that nobody cares about taking down CS 1.6 piracy anymore because it's such an old game?

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Cracked (non-steam) CS 1.6 clients are available for years and I don't think Valve ever cared.

This site is charging, though.

Surely the patent of cs has expired by now

It was never difficult to play CS for free, and that's probably the reason for its success. I remember getting into CS because you could play online with basically any Half-life product key and by 2000 you could buy bundles that came with like 3-4 keys.

I think CS, in that era, was free if you had a HL product key. It was a community mod and even when it transitioned to a boxed standalone product you could still download it if you had a HL key. CS: Source was also a free upgrade.

yeah but you can't play with your friends on steam so... there was never really a point to play on these servers (also cheat)

A counter question: why do you care? Do you believe someone waited all those years to not buy it and play for free in browser with massive lag? Is this an attempt to enforce bullshit corporate-centric policies that are copyright laws simply for the sake of enforcing them?

You're projecting a lot on my comment. I spent most of my youth pirating CS and Unreal Tournament so no I don't care at all if people can do it from the comfort of their browser, besides such old games might as well be in the public domain as far as I'm concerned. I was just surprised that a website like this one managed to operate for more than a few days before getting shutdown for obvious piracy, that's all.

I guess there's precedent for Valve being pretty lenient with that stuff though, after all they embraced the Black Mesa HL remake when most other editors would've ceased-and-desisted it into oblivion.

FYI the creators are actually charging $2/week subscription for this game. Profiting from a cracked software definitely crosses some moral boundaries.

Does it? It has been over 20 years. Should a creator be able to profit indefinitely off a single work? 20 years is long enough for a patent to expire. The fact that copyright outlasts patents is really just a corruption bug in our legal system.

Yes it does. The creators also maintained that code, and the other intellectual property, by expabding on it with source and csgo. While I am nobody to poopoo piracy, this is a piss poor justification.

Patent does not apply here, copyright does. And the US copyright lasts 70 years after the death of the author, and for companies, 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever is shorter.

It's like a best of. Those aren't the latest 1.6 models, it's the 1.5 knife, but the 1.6 shield is in the game.

Aside from the HL2 leak and CSGO skin trading sites, Valve has been very liberal with their IP.

They generally don't care.

Certainly not, it's using Xash.

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