First of all, unless King wrote down the entirety of his speech beforehand, the only thing copyrightable about it is the video recording of the speech, not the speech itself. Either way, fair use allows the speech to be made available for historical reasons, social criticism, and a multitude of other reasons, which are made all the more stronger that something factual as opposed to fantasy is held by the court system to be more important to disseminate; the only problem that would arise would be if someone tried to sell copies of that video or incorporate it in, say, a music video, and even then the sampling may be held to be a fair use in the form of social commentary. This means that should an organization start archiving games for historical purposes, they would have a pretty good case for doing so, so long as they did not distribute copies without permission of the copyright holder (unless, obviously, the copyright has expired).

Second of all, GOG (or, come to think of it, every other digital distribution platform) has to spend an insane amount of money trying to acquire the rights from the original developers (you know, the people who are responsible for the thing existing in the first place) to make these games available in the first place, especially older games since the IP rights have a nasty tendency to get caught in limbo when the company disbands, as a lot of makers of older games have done. One could always acquire an original copy of the game, but contrary to what you seem to think, a good number of these games require more than running them through Dosbox, but I have downloaded several games that I have tried for years to get working to no avail that worked perfectly once I bought them from Gog, and even if you do manage to get the game running on your own, often the prices for these used games can be quite high due to either rarity or high demand. Sure, you could download the game for free, but the law does not recognize someone, say, downloading a copy of a game for personal use merely because they think that they should be allowed to; I abstain from making any normative judgment on the matter, and merely mention to show that out of the available options, the option to download is highly risky, and as such, is not one that I personally find wise to engage in.

Is the copyright system flawed? You bet; I just finished taking a course on IP law last semester, and that field is a giant mess. However, barring some change in the near future, it's the body of law we are stuck with, meaning that downloading will carry the risk of getting caught. In the meantime, instead, I invest in GOG so that they can continue to acquire funds to allow them to acquire the rights to new games and pay their staff to make these games playable (something, I again remind you, is not always as simple as you seem to think it is).
As to revision of the copyright law, I refer you to my previous comment; copyright law is all kinds of messed up, no denying it. However, the way you are going on, you are actively making it hard for people to agree with you.

As to competition... The last time I checked, we had Steam and a number of D2D sites, some of which (iirc) also offer their downloads DRM free.

As to lower prices, I again refer you to the fact that GOG acquiring the licenses to these games is not cheap; we are talking amounts with a good deal many zeroes after them. Add on top of that the sometimes rigorous overhaul a game needs to even begin to make it playable, and one can easily understand why GOG charges what it does, let alone why it charges at all.

As to your last point, great. The only problem is that unless someone creates something under the creative commons, they are almost always going to want that copyright protected. Hell, the guy who made Hotline Miami is mythological in his rarity, as he has actually *helped* people who have pirated his game get it working. Most everyone else, however, wants the money because they didn't design the game for the lolz, they did it for money.

I agree that the current copyright system is a disaster, easily exploitable at the expense of many and needs a major overhaul if not scrapped altogether.

I don't agree that GOG should not be selling the game at $10. That the rights for the game are in gordian knots (and still are, seemingly, only the technicality of digital distribution allowing this to happen) is not GOG's fault though an arrangement that would benefit the original developers would be preferable, definitely.

Thank you very much, and agreed. Though to add.

I own the original disks for both System Shock (floppy's), and SS2. Getting them to work on XP can be a pain, now try and get them to work on Win7 (which is a nightmare born in hell ;) ), and you will understand why I kicked out 10bucks for a new copy of System Shock 2, from GOG just a few hours ago.

Abandon-ware is nothing more than a term that was adopted by piracy advocates to justify their making games free to download, when they were apparently abandoned by their creators, through no longer supporting those games. Many games fall under the abandon-ware terminology. “Alice Madness Returns” is one (and it is a fairly recent release), it has not gotten any support from EA or Spicy Horse since the day of release. AMR has literally been abandoned by both EA and Spicy, so does that make it right to download it for free?

To follow up on another post about System Shock being freeware:
There was a freeware deal going on when SS2 was released, but you had to show proof of purchase of SS2 to the dev team to get a copy of System Shock as a free download, but that was over a decade ago.

And all we hear is someone with an overinflated sense of entitlement.

10 dollars... expensive... yeah...

Who said the "piracy" on PC will stop with low prizes? LOL Best reply EVER.

And another GREAT one

Abandon-ware is nothing more than a term that was adopted by piracy advocates to justify their making games free to download, when they were apparently abandoned by their creators, through no longer supporting those games. Many games fall under the abandon-ware terminology. “Alice Madness Returns” is one (and it is a fairly recent release), it has not gotten any support from EA or Spicy Horse since the day of release. AMR has literally been abandoned by both EA and Spicy, so does that make it right to download it for free?

To follow up on another post about System Shock being freeware:
There was a freeware deal going on when SS2 was released, but you had to show proof of purchase of SS2 to the dev team to get a copy of System Shock as a free download, but that was over a decade ago.

Maybe think about it like this - the $10 isn't for the game. It's to pay for the service of providing an easy-to-install, updated-for-modern-systems version of it. Get SS2 off an abandonware site and you're probably gonna spend the next hour or so wandering through forums and whatnot trying to find a way to make it work (god-knows I had that issue years ago when I found an old copy of it - never did get it to work).

Considering how much time and effort that could've taken, considering they had to make sure it would work on a variety of systems, $10 is a bargain.

Comparing GoG to Steam:

It is necessary to compare GoG to Steam here in order to stress that GoG doesn't just sell games 'as is,' they actually make sure that they work on modern systems. There seem to be some notable examples like Dungeon Keeper 2, but I find it hard to discount GoG's credibility because some of their games don't work in a nearly bug-free state. GoG seems to me to be working on ways to fix the relevant issues with these games and I commend them for it.

Were we to look at Steam...well, not only would there no extras, there would be precious few manuals and a complete and utter lack of support. As far as digital distributors go, GoG is a shining example.

The issue of Abandonware:

Let's say that you're right about SS2, that it's been thoroughly abandoned. Just for the sake of argument.

I own System Shock 2. I have the physical manual and the disc from 1999. The vast majority of games I bought on GoG were re-purchases of games that I can't own and can't play on my system because the community mods just don't work for me when and where they exist. System Shock 2 and Thief Gold are notable examples.

I will happily pay a small price to once again have the real pleasure of playing a game that I otherwise could not have played. The fact that I can support a fantastic company at the same time is a serious bonus.

The issue of releases like SS2 looking dirty:

Aliens: Colonial Marines was actually released. That is dirty.
Skyrim was released on the PS3. That is dirty.
American McGee's Alice was included with copies of the sequel on, at least, the XBox360 and PS3. The port was absolutely disgusting. That is dirty.

The sorts of games that are being released now and the way older games are treated is what's dirty, that non-gamers and people who derisively view video games as disposable entertainment is dirty. This, right here, what we have in GoG and SS2 is something that gamers, real gamers, appreciate and respect. This isn't dirty, this is how things should be.

Abandonware doesn't exist really.

It's mainly a defacto abandonning of one's right on the distribution of the game, which isn't the case here.

If you speak about the "public domain" thing, I know that here in Europe (France at least I heard), something that's 70+ yers old falls into public domain. It's made for music and the like but nothing is specific to videogames, thus it uses the same "rule".

Pong... is not in public domain yet...

So yeah, this thread is bullshit.

I'm a little disappointed in the GOG community for being so hostile to the OP. Reasonable people can discuss without arguing.

This game is 14 years old. There are newer games on sale for less money at GOG. OP's observations are warranted.

Also, those of you who are quoting the DMCA and intellectual property law, please remember that American laws do not extend outside that country. OP is from Israel which is not subject to the laws of the USA.

It's not like I haven't played SS2 before (*ahem*) but I'm very pleased to have GOG's version. $10 is not an egregious price, and I've saved so much from GOG's other deals that I'm happy to pay it - I consider it more like a donation than anything else. To say nothing of the fact that this is the first version of SS2 I've ever found that works fully on my modern machine first go - tweaking the thing into touch is interesting the first few times, but it gets tedious for me every time I install the game.

This has also made huge news among gamers from what I can see - it means more income for GOG, and hopefully that will enable them to release more games in the future. They're charging more because they can capitalise on that - it's good business sense.

While I took time to attempt to thoroughly comment on OP's statements, I did so out of a desire to attempt to engage in intelligent dialogue; if my actions have been misinterpreted to be hostility, then I sincerely apologize for not having made my motives clearer. As to OP not being subject to the laws of the US...

Yeah, about that. American law holds that personal jurisdiction may be exercised over a person where they have "sufficient minimum contacts" within a state so long as said contacts are related to the harm that gave rise to the cause of action. All very dry stuff, and it has been applied fairly uneventfully aside from overturning the much tighter standard set by Pennoyer v. Neff. With the advent of the internet, however, courts have been applying the same framework to cases over the internet, and in some of the cases we have been covering in Internet Law (yes, law on the internet is so bonkers that it has warranted its own course), the standard seems to have been applied in a more relaxed manner, meaning it is easier for the court to find that it has jurisdiction over someone, even if said person is outside of the country; in one case, the court found personal jurisdiction existed by noting that the defendant had operated a website that did some business with the US, despite the fact that only 2 sales were made and neither had any link to the cause of action (essentially, it was a very lenient general jurisdiction standard, something that is usually applied when the defendant has so many contacts in the forum that the court stops caring about the nature of the contacts and treats the forum as a "second home", despite the fact that the court was ruling on the issue of personal jurisdiction).

Now, the court *does* also weigh whether or not exercise of that jurisdictional power to compel the person to appear in court would be unreasonable in determining whether jurisdiction exists, but technically, if a person were to download a pirated game off a server located in, say, the state of New York, they would technically be subject to New York's jurisdiction, and would be subject to the law of said jurisdiction; their contact was their interaction with the server, and the contact was directly responsible for providing a cause of action. And, if jurisdiction was found to exist, that person could be sued pursuant to the law of New York (or, more appropriately, Federal copyright law).

It's not something unique to the United States, either; online American publications have run into problems with the UK over some of the stories they run since the UK has libel laws that are much more plaintiff friendly, and the very act of publishing a story that is derived from something that happened in the UK has been found to create UK jurisdiction over American entities, meaning that they get to be sued under UK law.

Now, is it realistic that OP can expect to get sued if they live in Israel? I don't know; without more data as to the location of servers that host pirated software, it is impossible to know. Perhaps OP uses the Pirate Bay, which, according to my limited understanding, is hosted in Sweden, who could care less what OP does with software that is protected by American copyright (unless they happen to sign ACTA, however).

EDIT: also, in order for jurisdiction to be exercised, it must be shown that the defendant personally availed themselves of the forum, meaning that they had to know that they were, say, downloading something from a server located in the US; at least, that's what a strict application of traditional jurisdiction law says. From my internet law class, it seems that personal jurisdiction standards are much looser when applied to the internet. Furthermore, a state may still be able to enact a "long arm statute" that lists what kinds of contact with the state constitute sufficient minimum contacts, thereby giving them jurisdiction.

tl;dr: US law can effectively apply to people outside of the US.

Does anyone here ever purchase 200+ year old books that are in the public domain? I did once. It was Candide, published with a bunch of extra pages of footnotes to help a modern reader understand the context, making the reading easier. I didn't regret it.

In fact, I think you can have still another answer.
We are lazy.
GOG provides us games fully functional on our systems, without any (or with relatively few) hassles and we expect they will keep doing exactly that whenever we will change our systems again, so when we will pass to win 34, we will simply re-download the updated installer and voilà, here it is our copy of Zork, in all its textual magnificence.
Plus, GOG throws in some goodies and the feeling that you are "doing the right thing", both because you are buying, not stealing, the game and because you are sort of signaling the gaming industry that you are fed up (REALLY fed up) of DRM and that DRM is hindering, not increasing their revenues. So, you see, it is not at all about old games priced too high. It is psychology, it is Sociology and a bit of Economics.
And the full render of Shodan is worth for me at least 3 of the 10 bucks paid for System Shock 2 ;) .

I pay GoG for letting my games live in the Cloud. That is it. I do understand it is a big big world and for some $10 might be their weekly wage, but overall, it is great to have my library being kept by GoG and not by myself. I traveled a lot for a while and all my old games got lost, be it the Ultima Series or Fallout 1+2 or King's Quest, etc. Who knows where they wound up, Heck I remember being awed when Ultima went from using 3.5 floppy disks to using CD Roms. But they are all gone. So now GoG has them in their Cloud and that is where they will stay.

My question is: Why do you take such awesome classics, give them an incredible price and keep them in a Cloud for me?

Clearly satire. Amusing as heck. Folks that get upset about this really do confuse me.

10 bucks is like. Barely more than a value meal at a fast food joint. It's not that much more than your modern matinee ticket at a theater. Video gaming remains one of the most economically cheap forms of entertainment in terms of return on investment, and $10 is among the lowest common non-sale price points for a video game. Those facts alone should give anyone cause for pause.