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Fun story about the legality problems. Way back in the day, I worked for a company that created a "play old videogames" service. Our lawyers went out and hunted
by CobrastanJorji 10y ago
Fun story about the legality problems. Way back in the day, I worked for a company that created a "play old videogames" service. Our lawyers went out and hunted down the owners of old Commodore 64 titles and such. According to the internal rumor mill, some of these companies required us to convince them that they really were the owners of these games do to a long series of acquisitions before they'd agree to sell us the rights to the games.
Anyway, once we had the rights, we of course asked for a copy of the game. Well, naturally, they didn't have one. And several of these old systems had some form of copy protection. Well, fortunately, the 1980s demo scene had led to cracked copies of these games being easily downloaded (bonus fun fact: I may be the only person in history who clicked 'agree' on a 'you must have written permission from the publisher to download this ROM' and meant it). But of course the crackers had included crack intros which we certainly couldn't use. So we ended up including the cracked version, with the cracks, and just initializing the games to a memory state just after the crack intro played.
Without those crackers cracking the game, we might never have found a copy that we could have published.
- delroth 10y agoNintendo is also known for distributing "pirate dumps" of their NES games as Virtual Console titles. http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=4412 http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=4412
- tekklloneer 10y agoI read that as they just used the same file format as the piracy community. So, I don't know where the source of the dumps is specified?
- phire 10y agoIt's entirely possible that they used existing ROM dumping software on their own cartridge which would have appended the header. Not likely, but possible.
- tekklloneer 10y agoOr they prepended the header themselves as whoever developed the emulator used the de facto standard.
- timpark 10y agoAh, the C64... Once a friend had an original disk of a game that wouldn't work. Just for the heck of it we copied it and applied the protection (some copy software had it as an extra step, as I recall), and it worked. I'm not sure if this was protection related, but once I rented a C64 game and it wouldn't work. The store wanted me to pay for it until we booted it on their system and saw it work. Years later, I read in a magazine that that particular game wouldn't work with my particular printer. :( Weird.
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoAnd that's why copyright should lapse and die when the registered copyright owner can't offer the Library of Congress a copy of the work, for archival and eventual entry into the public domain.
- christoph 10y agoInteresting side question this poses... Could it be considered you published copyrighted content (the cracktro) without permission? Can a crack and/or cracktro be considered protected under copyright law? I know you skipped over it, but technically it was still included without permission, I assume.
- CobrastanJorji 10y agoI'm no lawyer, but I imagine that if you sued us for copying you demo, we'd sue you back for distributing the cracked game in the first place, and the comparison of relative damages would probably not work out in your favor.