22 ms·

GOG has had to hire private investigators to track down IP rights holders

259 points by haunter 1y ago

rolph 1y ago
kudos for the effort, really.
mr_sturd 1y ago
I'm sure this was alluded to in NOCLIP's YouTube documentary on GOG[0]. It was said then that half of the battle was tracking down rights holders as IP had sometimes been absorbed through multiple acquisitions by the time they came to restore some games. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A
bawolff 1y ago
Maybe we should bring back copyright renewal. If you had to file a renewal with the government every 20 years it would solve a lot of the problems with abandonware.
- t-writescode 1y ago
  Copyright was 20+20. MOST problems with it come from endless extensions and no format shifting exemption. Fix those and we’d be muuuuch better off.
  - jaggederest 1y ago
    You also have to charge a fee/pigouvian tax on the renewals. When renewal is free, there's a substantial deadweight drag on society as a result from everyone renewing by default.
    - bawolff 1y ago
      Even without a fee, requiring renewal at least means stuff that people have totally forgotten about doesn't get renewed, and stuff that does get renewed at least has a recentish owner on record. It would be a large improvement over the status quo of having a term of 70 years after the death of the author.
    - Bratmon 1y ago
      Even if all it required was one to sign an affidavit saying they are the current copyright holder, that would solve a LOT of archiving problems.
  - cxr 1y ago
    28, not 20.
branon 1y ago
I like GOG a lot but it's wild to me that their GOG Galaxy client doesn't work on Linux! A lot of gamers who care about preservation and availability are spending money with Valve because Steam's DRM is mostly inoffensive and the Linux support is so good. The addressable market segment of people who play PC games and also care about DRM-free accessibility would be larger if GOG's launcher ran on Linux and targeted Linux users. It seems like a logical overlap to me. Valve is eating GOG's lunch in this segment but it could easily change. Sure it might be small but it's bigger than ever, still growing, and seems to fit GOG's mission. I would definitely start repurchasing my Steam games DRM-free on GOG if only they provided a launcher with the tooling necessary to download & run them on my system. As things stand now, and for all the good GOG does... it's not enough to be DRM-free but only distribute Windows installers. You've just outsourced the DRM scheme to Microsoft. If the software doesn't run on a DRM-free OS, the job is only halfway done. And in the meantime, GOG's product is tragically subject to piracy, (I believe) partially enabled by their decision to _only_ package games for the OS upon which most piracy traditionally takes place! :( I hope this could be offset by packaging for a crowd with more ideological overlap.
- mathieudombrock 1y ago
  It really does seem like the idea of DRM free games and Linux goes hand in hand. I would be really interested to hear about why they don't currently offer Linux support for their launcher. I'm in the same boat here. I would be more than willing to rebuy some games on GOG if they supported Linux.
  - lawlessone 1y ago
    Does it work with wine/proton? anecdotal but even in apps/games where they make a linux port the wine/proton version sometimes works better.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
      I have Linux GOG games which refuse to run for one reason or another. Some outdated library, compiler, whatever that is not on a modern distribution. If you want easiest future proofing, you have to use the windows release.
bragr 1y ago
>Paczynski says they once hired a private investigator to find someone living off the grid in the UK. He had unknowingly inherited the rights to several games My grandfather was a "landman" for oil companies tracking down mineral rights and has all sorts of stories like this. It can all get messy and weird fast. Stuff like tracking down people you'd assume would be dead but are in fact ancient and alive at 103 in a nursing home. Convincing a bank that through a series of mergers and acquisitions that they are the rightful owners of the mineral rights to a piece of land foreclosed on in the great depression by a bank that itself failed. Generations of poor people dying without wills or settling probate. Inheritance battles spanning generations until no one alive was around for the start. Step mother that swooped in and married a man at the end of his life, inherited everything, remarried, had kids and left everything to them instead of the step kids.
- nocoiner 1y ago
  Tracing ownership of land back 400 years to some Spanish land grant…
- nihilist_t21 1y ago
  I work for an oil and gas brokerage company. What you say is absolutely true (Especially your last sentence!). Some wild stories. We've certainly dug up some family drama throughout the whole process.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > Convincing a bank that through a series of mergers and acquisitions that they are the rightful owners of the mineral rights to a piece of land foreclosed on in the great depression by a bank that itself failed. What's the goal of convincing the bank that they own some land? Is this a case where the original bank foreclosed on the property, resold the surface while carefully keeping the mineral rights, and then failed? And the current owner of everything-but-the-mineral-rights is fully aware of not possessing them? If you determine that someone else is the owner of some land, and they deny it, you can just start doing whatever it is that you want to do on the land, and you'll become the owner.
  - 1y ago
phendrenad2 1y ago
A weird quirk of the system. PIs are the only private-sector way to get certain kinds of information about people, including corporate entities.
jccalhoun 1y ago
Link to the actual article instead of a page summarizing the article: https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/when-we-launched-resident-evil-on https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/when-we-launched-resident-...
namrog84 1y ago
I briefly worked at Microsoft xbox back compat where we made the Xbox OG and Xbox 360 games work on Xbox one and newer generations and I know the PMs spent considerable time and effort doing similar things for the earlier Xbox games to be allowed for us to have them work on newer Xbox generations. It's really surprising that sometimes IP changes hands enough in some cases the owners might not have even known they owned something. I think the legal and permission always definitely one of the harder problems. I know music in some games were also particularly challenging, a few games had to have sound tracks removed or replaced.
- fluoridation 1y ago
  Why would you need permission to make a game work on a newer platform? Were the changes made to the code of the game, or of the console?
  - handoflixue 1y ago
    A lot of contracts are for a specific release, and a lot of IP gets contracted out (music, art, sometimes even game engines). Especially for music, it's not uncommon for the license to be very specific: you can use our music for this particular game, on this particular console, released in this particular region.
ChuckMcM 1y ago
Sigh, "bought" a copy of Dark Reign which I had a lot of fun with back in the day, but is doesn't run. Click on 'Play' and it briefly says "Syncing 0%" then the play gets shaded for 3 or 4 seconds and then lights up again like it has never been selected. Not a lot of direction on the 'support' page about where to go from there. So not a great initial experience.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  Monitoring system calls (on Windows, that's a type of DLL call) is a good way to debug confusing processes that only last for a few seconds. I expect the launcher is launching some program, which is saying "I started successfully!" and then hitting an error state before it draws a window, so the launcher concludes you must've finished playing. Sysinternals Process Monitor ("procmon") is your friend.
- opan 1y ago
  Can you get more info by launching the game from a terminal? Also, shot in the dark, but maybe try the solution from this old thread: https://www.gog.com/forum/dark_reign_series/dark_reign_2_not_launching https://www.gog.com/forum/dark_reign_series/dark_reign_2_not...
  - ChuckMcM 1y ago
    Good thought. Managed to get the game to start although without sound which makes it a bit challenging. An acquaintance suggested I just cons up a virtual machine running XP (or Win98) and do it that way (I've got the original media so presumably that could work). Will check with GoG on their sound blaster emulation.
  - ChuckMcM 1y ago
    And it definitely seems to be the audio stuff. Got the game to start but no audio, and that lack of audio persists for everything until a reboot. So something is hanging up in the OS.
Animats 1y ago
This is why copyrights should need registration and renewal. They used to, and things dropped out of copyright when nobody paid for the renewal. There's a similar problem with mineral rights. US states register land ownership, but not mineral right ownership is not as well tracked. Litigation over abandoned mineral rights is not rare.
yardstick 1y ago
Special shout out to the No One Lives Forever (NOLF) series of Spy-parody FPS. Stuck in rights purgatory for 25 years now. https://www.thegamer.com/no-one-lives-forever-the-operative-legal-issues-explained/ https://www.thegamer.com/no-one-lives-forever-the-operative-...
- 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
  Which inspired someone to straight up offer it for free[0]. Essentially saying, "If you own the rights and have a problem with it, here is your chance to do something about it" That being said, I am not sure why an interested party could not make their own knock-off version of the game. The game is a parody 60s James Bond with a female lead. Would anyone care if it was functionally the exact same game, but everyone was wearing a funny hat? [0] http://nolfrevival.tk/ http://nolfrevival.tk/
  - justsomehnguy 1y ago
    Then it would be a game with a funny hats - maybe a good game but with a funny hats and not the original one. You can look Freedom approach to that idea. I tried it a couple of times and as someone who had it in original way, in DOS 6.22 and wtih ESS Blaster - it doesn't click for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_modding#Freedoom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_modding#Freedoom
cynicalsecurity 1y ago
I play on Linux only. It's a shame GOG doesn't support it.
- senectus1 1y ago
  lookup heroic launcher. all gog games run just fine signed into that.
emergie 1y ago
Lame journalism. If they're struggling with spelling of basic surnames like Paczyński, Brzęczyszczykiewicz or Gżegżółka then what will they do if they come across harder ones like Stółzpowyłamywanyminogami or Chrząszczbrzmiwtrzciniewszczebrzeszynie.
- encrypted_bird 1y ago
  /s?
  - ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago
    I actually think perhaps not.
    - encrypted_bird 1y ago
      That is unfortunate.
  - SSLy 1y ago
    More like irony, perhaps.
  - throaway1988 1y ago
    Gog is Polish
skopje 1y ago
Call me naive but I think that's some good news.
atum47 1y ago
Most voted comment on the last YouTube ad, which I liked by the way: where's the Linux support? I support gog, I've been buying games from them for a long time. By yeah, where's the Linux support?
- tmtvl 1y ago
  That's a weird comment. I'm on GNU/Linux, I can just go to the website, log in, go to my library, and download any game I want. What part of it isn't working for you?
  - atum47 1y ago
    I'm just echoing the sentiment from the community https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/release_the_gog_galaxy_client_for_linux https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/release_the_gog_galaxy_c...
GaryBluto 1y ago
As much as I like the idea of GOG, it annoys me that they don't offer versions for the original hardware, as it would take little effort for them to do so.
- skopje 1y ago
  Agreed. Playing VGA games in a DOSBox is nice, but I recovered my 386sx clone from my parents' garage that still boots DOS 6.22 on 5-1/4 floppy and I very much wish I hadn't given away all my disks (diskettes :) before I moved.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  I was annoyed that I purchased Civilization III, and it came with a readme saying that by default it would launch the game with all expansions, but if I wanted to play an earlier, unexpanded version (which I did), I could just go to the install directory and start the earlier .exe. They don't actually package the earlier .exes. You get one choice.
charcircuit 1y ago
>Of course, this will never happen because executives don't care about preserving games. It happens with Denuvo because executives recognize licensing DRM software costs more than the revenue the game brings in.
- Anamon 1y ago
  I guess we really have to thank the developers of Denuvo then for choosing that licensing model, although I'm sure game preservation wasn't their primary reason for doing so. If it's a one-time licensing fee, it's the removal that costs additional money, which, of course, no publisher would spend on an old game.
throwaway21015 1y ago
Living off grid after getting the rights to two video games.
Anamon 1y ago
I'm surprised nobody asked -- does anyone know which games this off-the-grid Brit had inherited the rights to?
greatgib 1y ago
For me this is the "business as usual" asshole move of GOG. If there is no clear owner, and no one claiming right anymore, then it is abandonware that we can all profit of. But now Gog will actually spend lot of effort to make the intellectual property alive and so killing abandonware that is their competition in the end. When a game is still sold through their platform, it can't claimed to be abandoned as it is still in the market generating revenues. And in the example they give with the PI it is even worse. You don't do this in the interest of the creator that needs to be rewarded for its game but some distant relative that had nothing to do with it...

259 points by haunter 1y ago

kudos for the effort, really.

I'm sure this was alluded to in NOCLIP's YouTube documentary on GOG[0]. It was said then that half of the battle was tracking down rights holders as IP had sometimes been absorbed through multiple acquisitions by the time they came to restore some games. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A

bawolff 1y ago

Maybe we should bring back copyright renewal. If you had to file a renewal with the government every 20 years it would solve a lot of the problems with abandonware.

t-writescode 1y ago
Copyright was 20+20. MOST problems with it come from endless extensions and no format shifting exemption. Fix those and we’d be muuuuch better off.
- jaggederest 1y ago
  You also have to charge a fee/pigouvian tax on the renewals. When renewal is free, there's a substantial deadweight drag on society as a result from everyone renewing by default.
  - bawolff 1y ago
    Even without a fee, requiring renewal at least means stuff that people have totally forgotten about doesn't get renewed, and stuff that does get renewed at least has a recentish owner on record. It would be a large improvement over the status quo of having a term of 70 years after the death of the author.
  - Bratmon 1y ago
    Even if all it required was one to sign an affidavit saying they are the current copyright holder, that would solve a LOT of archiving problems.
- cxr 1y ago
  28, not 20.

branon 1y ago

I like GOG a lot but it's wild to me that their GOG Galaxy client doesn't work on Linux! A lot of gamers who care about preservation and availability are spending money with Valve because Steam's DRM is mostly inoffensive and the Linux support is so good. The addressable market segment of people who play PC games and also care about DRM-free accessibility would be larger if GOG's launcher ran on Linux and targeted Linux users. It seems like a logical overlap to me. Valve is eating GOG's lunch in this segment but it could easily change. Sure it might be small but it's bigger than ever, still growing, and seems to fit GOG's mission. I would definitely start repurchasing my Steam games DRM-free on GOG if only they provided a launcher with the tooling necessary to download & run them on my system. As things stand now, and for all the good GOG does... it's not enough to be DRM-free but only distribute Windows installers. You've just outsourced the DRM scheme to Microsoft. If the software doesn't run on a DRM-free OS, the job is only halfway done. And in the meantime, GOG's product is tragically subject to piracy, (I believe) partially enabled by their decision to _only_ package games for the OS upon which most piracy traditionally takes place! :( I hope this could be offset by packaging for a crowd with more ideological overlap.

mathieudombrock 1y ago
It really does seem like the idea of DRM free games and Linux goes hand in hand. I would be really interested to hear about why they don't currently offer Linux support for their launcher. I'm in the same boat here. I would be more than willing to rebuy some games on GOG if they supported Linux.
- lawlessone 1y ago
  Does it work with wine/proton? anecdotal but even in apps/games where they make a linux port the wine/proton version sometimes works better.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
    I have Linux GOG games which refuse to run for one reason or another. Some outdated library, compiler, whatever that is not on a modern distribution. If you want easiest future proofing, you have to use the windows release.

bragr 1y ago

>Paczynski says they once hired a private investigator to find someone living off the grid in the UK. He had unknowingly inherited the rights to several games My grandfather was a "landman" for oil companies tracking down mineral rights and has all sorts of stories like this. It can all get messy and weird fast. Stuff like tracking down people you'd assume would be dead but are in fact ancient and alive at 103 in a nursing home. Convincing a bank that through a series of mergers and acquisitions that they are the rightful owners of the mineral rights to a piece of land foreclosed on in the great depression by a bank that itself failed. Generations of poor people dying without wills or settling probate. Inheritance battles spanning generations until no one alive was around for the start. Step mother that swooped in and married a man at the end of his life, inherited everything, remarried, had kids and left everything to them instead of the step kids.

nocoiner 1y ago
Tracing ownership of land back 400 years to some Spanish land grant…
nihilist_t21 1y ago
I work for an oil and gas brokerage company. What you say is absolutely true (Especially your last sentence!). Some wild stories. We've certainly dug up some family drama throughout the whole process.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> Convincing a bank that through a series of mergers and acquisitions that they are the rightful owners of the mineral rights to a piece of land foreclosed on in the great depression by a bank that itself failed. What's the goal of convincing the bank that they own some land? Is this a case where the original bank foreclosed on the property, resold the surface while carefully keeping the mineral rights, and then failed? And the current owner of everything-but-the-mineral-rights is fully aware of not possessing them? If you determine that someone else is the owner of some land, and they deny it, you can just start doing whatever it is that you want to do on the land, and you'll become the owner.
- 1y ago

phendrenad2 1y ago

A weird quirk of the system. PIs are the only private-sector way to get certain kinds of information about people, including corporate entities.

jccalhoun 1y ago

Link to the actual article instead of a page summarizing the article: https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/when-we-launched-resident-evil-on https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/when-we-launched-resident-...

namrog84 1y ago

I briefly worked at Microsoft xbox back compat where we made the Xbox OG and Xbox 360 games work on Xbox one and newer generations and I know the PMs spent considerable time and effort doing similar things for the earlier Xbox games to be allowed for us to have them work on newer Xbox generations. It's really surprising that sometimes IP changes hands enough in some cases the owners might not have even known they owned something. I think the legal and permission always definitely one of the harder problems. I know music in some games were also particularly challenging, a few games had to have sound tracks removed or replaced.

fluoridation 1y ago
Why would you need permission to make a game work on a newer platform? Were the changes made to the code of the game, or of the console?
- handoflixue 1y ago
  A lot of contracts are for a specific release, and a lot of IP gets contracted out (music, art, sometimes even game engines). Especially for music, it's not uncommon for the license to be very specific: you can use our music for this particular game, on this particular console, released in this particular region.

ChuckMcM 1y ago

Sigh, "bought" a copy of Dark Reign which I had a lot of fun with back in the day, but is doesn't run. Click on 'Play' and it briefly says "Syncing 0%" then the play gets shaded for 3 or 4 seconds and then lights up again like it has never been selected. Not a lot of direction on the 'support' page about where to go from there. So not a great initial experience.

wizzwizz4 1y ago
Monitoring system calls (on Windows, that's a type of DLL call) is a good way to debug confusing processes that only last for a few seconds. I expect the launcher is launching some program, which is saying "I started successfully!" and then hitting an error state before it draws a window, so the launcher concludes you must've finished playing. Sysinternals Process Monitor ("procmon") is your friend.
opan 1y ago
Can you get more info by launching the game from a terminal? Also, shot in the dark, but maybe try the solution from this old thread: https://www.gog.com/forum/dark_reign_series/dark_reign_2_not_launching https://www.gog.com/forum/dark_reign_series/dark_reign_2_not...
- ChuckMcM 1y ago
  Good thought. Managed to get the game to start although without sound which makes it a bit challenging. An acquaintance suggested I just cons up a virtual machine running XP (or Win98) and do it that way (I've got the original media so presumably that could work). Will check with GoG on their sound blaster emulation.
- ChuckMcM 1y ago
  And it definitely seems to be the audio stuff. Got the game to start but no audio, and that lack of audio persists for everything until a reboot. So something is hanging up in the OS.

Animats 1y ago

This is why copyrights should need registration and renewal. They used to, and things dropped out of copyright when nobody paid for the renewal. There's a similar problem with mineral rights. US states register land ownership, but not mineral right ownership is not as well tracked. Litigation over abandoned mineral rights is not rare.

yardstick 1y ago

Special shout out to the No One Lives Forever (NOLF) series of Spy-parody FPS. Stuck in rights purgatory for 25 years now. https://www.thegamer.com/no-one-lives-forever-the-operative-legal-issues-explained/ https://www.thegamer.com/no-one-lives-forever-the-operative-...

3eb7988a1663 1y ago
Which inspired someone to straight up offer it for free[0]. Essentially saying, "If you own the rights and have a problem with it, here is your chance to do something about it" That being said, I am not sure why an interested party could not make their own knock-off version of the game. The game is a parody 60s James Bond with a female lead. Would anyone care if it was functionally the exact same game, but everyone was wearing a funny hat? [0] http://nolfrevival.tk/ http://nolfrevival.tk/
- justsomehnguy 1y ago
  Then it would be a game with a funny hats - maybe a good game but with a funny hats and not the original one. You can look Freedom approach to that idea. I tried it a couple of times and as someone who had it in original way, in DOS 6.22 and wtih ESS Blaster - it doesn't click for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_modding#Freedoom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_modding#Freedoom

cynicalsecurity 1y ago

I play on Linux only. It's a shame GOG doesn't support it.

senectus1 1y ago
lookup heroic launcher. all gog games run just fine signed into that.

emergie 1y ago

Lame journalism. If they're struggling with spelling of basic surnames like Paczyński, Brzęczyszczykiewicz or Gżegżółka then what will they do if they come across harder ones like Stółzpowyłamywanyminogami or Chrząszczbrzmiwtrzciniewszczebrzeszynie.

encrypted_bird 1y ago
/s?
- ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago
  I actually think perhaps not.
  - encrypted_bird 1y ago
    That is unfortunate.
- SSLy 1y ago
  More like irony, perhaps.
- throaway1988 1y ago
  Gog is Polish

skopje 1y ago

Call me naive but I think that's some good news.

atum47 1y ago

Most voted comment on the last YouTube ad, which I liked by the way: where's the Linux support? I support gog, I've been buying games from them for a long time. By yeah, where's the Linux support?

tmtvl 1y ago
That's a weird comment. I'm on GNU/Linux, I can just go to the website, log in, go to my library, and download any game I want. What part of it isn't working for you?
- atum47 1y ago
  I'm just echoing the sentiment from the community https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/release_the_gog_galaxy_client_for_linux https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/release_the_gog_galaxy_c...

GaryBluto 1y ago

As much as I like the idea of GOG, it annoys me that they don't offer versions for the original hardware, as it would take little effort for them to do so.

skopje 1y ago
Agreed. Playing VGA games in a DOSBox is nice, but I recovered my 386sx clone from my parents' garage that still boots DOS 6.22 on 5-1/4 floppy and I very much wish I hadn't given away all my disks (diskettes :) before I moved.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
I was annoyed that I purchased Civilization III, and it came with a readme saying that by default it would launch the game with all expansions, but if I wanted to play an earlier, unexpanded version (which I did), I could just go to the install directory and start the earlier .exe. They don't actually package the earlier .exes. You get one choice.

charcircuit 1y ago

>Of course, this will never happen because executives don't care about preserving games. It happens with Denuvo because executives recognize licensing DRM software costs more than the revenue the game brings in.

Anamon 1y ago
I guess we really have to thank the developers of Denuvo then for choosing that licensing model, although I'm sure game preservation wasn't their primary reason for doing so. If it's a one-time licensing fee, it's the removal that costs additional money, which, of course, no publisher would spend on an old game.

throwaway21015 1y ago

Living off grid after getting the rights to two video games.

Anamon 1y ago

I'm surprised nobody asked -- does anyone know which games this off-the-grid Brit had inherited the rights to?

greatgib 1y ago

For me this is the "business as usual" asshole move of GOG. If there is no clear owner, and no one claiming right anymore, then it is abandonware that we can all profit of. But now Gog will actually spend lot of effort to make the intellectual property alive and so killing abandonware that is their competition in the end. When a game is still sold through their platform, it can't claimed to be abandoned as it is still in the market generating revenues. And in the example they give with the PI it is even worse. You don't do this in the interest of the creator that needs to be rewarded for its game but some distant relative that had nothing to do with it...