Curiously i've talked to him once or twice, mostly on a decompiler/detokenizer for the Atari. Still got to upload it somewhere.


This really is about not losing our heritage, and yet corporations want us to forget things, like the idea of owning our own media, our own hardware. Nevermind a number of older games were bad, not because they were done intentionally that way, but because hardware wouldn't let us do more, especially when it came to space like Atari where they said they refused to put in more than 2K for their gaming console for the game storage.

There already is a black hole where there shouldn't be. I've read spots on DLC for the Xbox (original) that you can't get anymore because you had to be online when it was relevant with the game in your Xbox to get it, which includes fixes and patches to the games. Games locked behind always-online like D3, XBLA titles that you can't play from anywhere but a 360 that has a license to unlock it from demo mode.

As for PC, it's some hardware that isn't used anymore. Amiga, DOS games since probably Windows ME, Atari, Apple 2...

I wonder if Copyright worked the way it should have, would EA still be shoving out crappy yearly titles or would they actually try to keep their customer base and have a 'pay what you want' system where people can opt to send them $10 a year and have several million subscribers who give them money merely because they enjoyed the good games over the last 10 years? Would Source code become available for OS's that are obsolete, and minor fixes/patches would get put to still use them well in emulators even better than now? Would obscure titles/software suddenly be the defeacto-standard when we see how much more awesome they are vs Apple/M$'s Monopoly of software? How would music work when you can remix music freely and create new things that you couldn't before due to worrying about the ban hammer from several separate entities, including Nintendo and say Metallica?

Have they fixed their silly policy on robots.txt where a new owner of an old website could come along and block the old archive of the site from being shown?

Very good point! This destroyed multiple wikipedia references... where is the petition, where can I sign?
*Sigh*, yes, source code on end-of-life is really required, should be enforced somehow by law. :/
(at least GOG could try to grab the source code if the possibility arises in negotiations with copyright holders)

It is enforced by law if you read up on copyright law, the problem is 70+ years to wait for them to cough it up. It's quite clear that with current copyright law, no source code will ever get released and instead by the time we can safely run Windows 95 without paying royalties to Microsoft, we still wouldn't be able to use it because not only would hardware be running on 128bit or 256bit chips, but reverse engineering it would be a pain; by then they'll realize software is a bad media in which to release things to the general public with no alteration (unless it was open to begin with).

Quite an obvious pattern is developing. The more evil a corporation is, the more it tries to milk everyone for more money from it's franchise(s), then blame it's customers when it's doing bad rather than putting out something original or something more enjoyable.

EA - FIFA & yearly sports titles (Plenty of others but aren't nearly as bad otherwise, unless they go always online like SimCity)
Ubisoft - Assassin's Creed & Farcry
Apple - iPhone/iPad every 1-2 years
Microsoft - Windows & Office, and probably XBox/Halo
Blizzard - WoW & Diablo
Nintendo - Mario/Zelda/Pokemon anything (Seriously, the gameplay hasn't changed that much)
Sega - Sonic (and doing terrible last i heard)
Square Enix - Final Fantasy
Bethesda - Elder Scrolls (and little else, so probably the least evil in this case if they would remove their fetish with DRM)
Sony - PSN/Playstation Now (subscriptions to tie you to them permanently and milk you for older games you used to own)
Corel - Paint Shop Pro (gutted from Jasc), and other minor nonsense
Adobe - PhotoShop, PDF anything, Flash...
Google - Ads and G+ Shoved onto anything they own (grr)

Those are off the top of my head. It's quite obvious most of them would need some different approach to their business strategy if they knew after 10 years they couldn't keep milking the same game(s) without putting out actually new ones. Most of them got their feet on the ground just trying to put out titles people would buy and keep them afloat, not milk them 20 years after they are no longer relevant.

Sadly not, at this future point in time we would be only free to use the binaries & to reverse engineer the source code ourselves. There is not rule which would obligate that the sources of a work must by released on end of copyright, just the work itself (the distributed binary) falls into public domain.

And here i thought i read the copyright law that going into public domain included sources... however it's still difficult to cough up sources when the company ends up going bankrupt 70 years before the copyright expires...

If the sources are released, yes. But normally the sources don't got released with the software so the source can't fall to public domain as they are plainly not available. (Beside, the practice that software is released without source code is criticized for good reasons by the Free software movement since the 80s.)

Well no. Technically it's possible that the rights holder has granted a licence for the Internet Archive to distribute the game free of cost. The fact that GOG has a deal to sell the game for money doesn't conflict with that unless GOG's contract has some kind of clause to prevent undercutting or something.

I'm not saying that it's likely this is isn't piracy, just that it's possible for it not to be. D'y'see?

So has anyone found a torrent yet to download all the games there? I only find them for individual games on their page.

I highly doubt that they got such a permission.
Also, would you look at that? The file has been removed. It was copyright infringement after all.

I see many games which are sold here at GOG (Lords of the Realm 2, M.A.X. etc). I'm not sure if they have the rights or just simply threw them up to the site and hope that no-one will notice.

Since they seem to be removing some now, they probably didn't think this through and thought "abandonware" is like "free distributable freeware".

Reminds me of a package of 50 DosGames one of the biggest German PC magazines has put on their site.
It's full of games sold in several shops, like Duke Nukem etc...

I don't understand how this got past the Internet Archive's lawyers.

If you read their site FAQ carefully, it says they don't actually have an in-house legal staff.

Basically guys, archive.org does not curate everything that has been uploaded to the site, and they operate on an exclusion policy. You can sort of think of archive.org like wikipedia or youtube. Users upload stuff there and legal responsibility is upon the uploader and the downloader to verify whether the material is actually permissable for use. They will remove items that have been reported to them as violating laws.

Tread carefully guys. You should also know that archive.org has a transparency report for how they have handled legal requests:

https://archive.org/about/faqs.php#Law_Enforcement_Requests

Now, they have not had many legal requests on user data, but the possibility does exist and it is in their terms of service that users are fully responsible for their actions and usage of the materials on the site.

Where can you see a list of games with a download options (other then just play in browser)?
I see some games that say Download but it's only a picture without a link (yet it does have a number of downloads).
Anyway none of them work in my browser, it asks to press space bar then stay on Loading Program for infinity X(