Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

I think the real tragedy of abandonware is that copyright holders aggressively pursued abandonware sites "just in case", while not actually having any plans to redistribute the games legally. The abandonware sites were cracking (or making cracks available, whatever) and making these games playable in modern devices, thus ensuring these games were preserved, but copyright holders (through ESA [1] legal action or similar) simply wanted to stop this, with not plans otherwise. These games often weren't available otherwise. We're talking games of the DOS or C64 era, with no real commercial viability (unless bundled with thousand other games, which they eventually sometimes did, often using the cracks developed by the abandonware scene!).

----

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Associa...

View on HN

It is often very difficult or even impossible to locate who currently owns the rights to some intellectual property in order to re-release it legally.[0]

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3053050/how-one-company-is-bring...

Yeah, that's part of the copyright mess. It's partly described by Lawrence Lessig in his book "Free Culture" [1].

It seems petty to me that copyright holders (or their legal proxies) aggressively sought to shut down abandonware sites without any plan to make the software available in any shape. I mean, these were marginal pieces of software, no longer money earners, and the abandonware sites served as digital museums.

----

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)

>thus ensuring these games were preserved

I refuse to believe this train of logic. By the time copyright expires AI will be able to handle removing copyright protection and making it able to run on modern hardware. The only point of doing it now instead of later is so that people commit copyright infringement.

> I refuse to believe this train of logic. By the time copyright expires AI will be able to handle removing copyright protection and making it able to run on modern hardware. The only point of doing it now instead of later is so that people commit copyright infringement.

This must be some powerful combination of magical thinking plus a lack of awareness of the context. In the early 2000's, the time I'm recounting, nobody thought of AI. And it wasn't about copyright infringement since the people in the abandonware community I'm talking about owned the goddamn games, they were trying to digitally preserve them and make them available to others. You really need to be familiar with these people and their goals before you "refuse to believe" anything; uninformed opinions just won't do.

It helps to get a perspective about both the time and the type of games we're discussing. In fact, if you were at all a participant of the community back then, you'd know in which little regard warez kiddies were held.

Even without AI the time it takes to break DRM is not decades and many schemes are trivial to break. And a lot of pirates who share copyrighted material had that material originate from a legal purchase. That doesn't make it any less worse.

I think you're simply unfamiliar with the topic. Have you ever interacted with abandonware communities from 20+ years ago? Since you're so sure their goal was copyright infringement.

In many cases, all that remains of these games is the cracked digital versions, the physical versions don't exist anymore. The abandonware crew did all the preserving, without them there wouldn't be anything to release, AI or not.

Also, a lot of "legally available" software from today (say, via GOG who do own the rights) has the fingerprints of crackers who made it possible for the software to run today.

> And a lot of pirates who share copyrighted material had that material originate from a legal purchase. That doesn't make it any less worse.

Regular pirates distribute recent games, which is obviously an entirely different matter. The abandonware community is/was concerned with preserving digital artifacts and games for posterity, and making old stuff playable today. Games that otherwise would have been lost, forgotten, or simply impossible to play. Those are completely different goals, and it's wrong to claim they did it "to commit copyright infringement".

I don't want to offend you, but your initial claim that abandonware crews decades ago should have somehow foreseen AI would make cracking/fixing easier is the most deranged thing I've read in a while. It also doesn't address that something you cannot play in your lifetime is effectively unavailable and lost to you.

>Since you're so sure their goal was copyright infringement.

It was the means towards their goal at the very least. These people could be maintaining a private archive of this software and other material in a temperature controlled room to preserve it until copyright expires. The legal paths of archiving exist, but these people choose to do it illegally often knowing that other people are going to down and use the software.

>The abandonware crew did all the preserving, without them there wouldn't be anything to release

Usually there is a copy or backup somewhere. Just because a pirated copy is more accessible that doesn't mean that pirates should get all of the credit.

>and it's wrong to claim they did it "to commit copyright infringement"

You are taking this too literally. "Regular pirates" don't want to commit copyright infringement either. It is just the means they achieve their actual goals.

>It also doesn't address that something you cannot play in your lifetime is effectively unavailable and lost to you.

No one has a right to use anyone else's software. I don't have a right to use Windows 3.1 in my lifetime. I don't have a right to play some random game from the 90s that only had 100 copies made. It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.

>No one has a right to use anyone else's software. I don't have a right to use Windows 3.1 in my lifetime. I don't have a right to play some random game from the 90s that only had 100 copies made. It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.

If you replace software with book, music or movie, would you still claim that? That would kill a lot of culture and cultural studies. Are software that different? More specifically, are games that different?

Yes, I would still say that. Cultures naturally have a lifecycle which yes, does include dying.

In other words, you don't care about preservation, which makes the rest of your arguments moot.

If you think copyright is a goal rather than a means for culture, then you're wrong and everything you say stems from something misguided.

I care about preservation, but my care for preservation does not place it above the law.

Law and morality are two different things. When the law stands in the way of good, it should be ignored in the moment and reformed to be better.

> It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.

We can do better than that.

LLMs right are generating tons of software that will ultimately never be archived. I think you should come to terms with reality. Not everything is distributed to other people. Not everything is saved to disk. A LLM will generate a script to calculate something, then eventually that script is deleted to make room for something more important.

As I said, we can do better.

> [copyright infringement] It was the means towards their goal at the very least.

Which one is it? Before, you claimed it was their goal (what they wanted to do). You cannot have it both ways. The actual goal matters.

> These people could be maintaining a private archive of this software and other material in a temperature controlled room to preserve it until copyright expires. The legal paths of archiving exist, but these people choose to do it illegally often knowing that other people are going to down and use the software.

As I said, this just shows you are unfamiliar with the goals of abandonware. They were preserving the games in playable form, and they needed them to be played, because games are not static artifacts; they must be experienced. Besides, asking them to keep copies in temperature controlled rooms is ridiculous, these were passion projects done on a budget, out of commodity hardware and rented servers. This started before torrents by the way, and some abandonware communities frowned upon the notion of just downloading a big file of everything anyway.

> Usually there is a copy or backup somewhere

No, there often wasn't. Resist the urge to reply "well, theoretically..." and consider that maybe I know about this a bit more than you.

> You are taking this too literally. "Regular pirates" don't want to commit copyright infringement either. It is just the means they achieve their actual goals.

I'm taking this the way you wrote it, how else? Don't backpedal. The goals of pirates and abandonware crews were different (though, of course, there was some cross-pollination).

> No one has a right to use anyone else's software. I don't have a right to use Windows 3.1 in my lifetime. I don't have a right to play some random game from the 90s that only had 100 copies made. It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.

"Right" is a made-up thing (often broken by the industry that later enforced similar rights; do you know the history of Hollywood studios?). And no, it's not ok. Just because you think some made-up legal right trumps human cultural experience doesn't mean you're right.

It's not ok for software (or books, or movies) to be lost. It matters. Just not to you. I think basically 99% of your argument boils down to "I don't care enough about games preservation, and therefore I don't see the problem".

>Which one is it?

You are the only ones talking about goals so I'm not sure how to even answer this. I believe that pirates use the idea of preservation to justify why they pirate things and to make them feel less bad about breaking the law and stealing from others.

>out of commodity hardware and rented servers

Those servers were likely more expensive than properly storing it at their house.

>No, there often wasn't.

In practice there tends to be. If you are in the retro hardware / software community you will see rare things come up on auction. The idea that all copies just disappeared does not match reality.

>The goals of pirates and abandonware crews were different

But both of those groups distributed pirated software.

>It's not ok for software (or books, or movies) to be lost.

Then I would encourage you to preserve archival copies of things you want to see preserved.

> You are the only ones talking about goals so I'm not sure how to even answer this. I believe that pirates use the idea of preservation to justify why they pirate things and to make them feel less bad about breaking the law and stealing from others.

No, I'm not the only one: you mentioned what you thought was the goal in your initial comment (copyright infringement) and you're restating it now. Again it's very telling this is your "belief", but you acknowledged tacitly that you are unfamiliar with how abandonware projects worked, never having talked to the people. But I have. Do you think it would be maybe wise to acknowledge your beliefs are not based on actual knowledge?

The goals matter. In fact, they matter to you as well, because you've been arguing from a position of belief about the goals ("justify why the pirate things") that is simply incorrect. Why not update your knowledge instead?

> In practice there tends to be. If you are in the retro hardware / software community you will see rare things come up on auction. The idea that all copies just disappeared does not match reality.

This is simply false. I don't think you are into "the retro hardware / software" community at all, I dare you to claim otherwise. Also, rare things do come up on auction, but this doesn't mean as a norm they exist! And the people involved in these projects are breaking all kinds of copyrights and have always been persecuted for this, which you'd know if you were involved in those communities.

> But both of those groups [pirates and abandonware groups] distributed pirated software.

I talked about goals. Your answer is a non-sequitur, because it argues about something that wasn't in dispute. Please try not to do this.

> Then I would encourage you to preserve archival copies of things you want to see preserved.

You haven't the faintest idea of what I do or don't do. More importantly, we're not discussing me, are we? Please try sticking to the point.

At this point you're sounding like a mix of dishonesty and willful ignorance.

The media won't last 70 years. It has to be (infringingly) copied, or no copies will exist.

US law allows for 1 archival copy.

"You" are not supposed to play those old games. "We" have new games for "you".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com