Comment by dfxm12
1 day ago
Oh, no! Anyway...
Seriously though, break a law that no one is interested in enforcing? What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
ETA: This aside from the fact that you can buy a used copy and play it...
> What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
What we're doing here is complaining about the bad law. And complaining about these companies, but it's bad they even have the ability to cause this deadlock.
I assume the community goal would be to find out who owns the rights and get them to either use them or give them up formally and bless the community project?
Used copies won't be around forever, it would be better to have a proper community version.
The background is that Night Dive tried to do this back when they formed, but it turned out to be intractable for a number of reasons including no one knew who actually owned it.
What is "a proper community version"?
Something like what happened with UT99 and the original Unreal: the source was made available to a dedicated community group (who continue to push out patches for the games), and when the games were no longer commercially useful, they allowed them to be posted on the Internet Archive for free access.
The rights holder can give permission to use the assets and IP let the community basically own the game. Marathon and Project Aleph is a good example of this where Bungie gave it up, and so the open source version of the engine has fixes and things now.
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> Seriously though, break a law that no one is interested in enforcing?
I wouldn't put it past any one of the companies who think they might maybe have some rights to the game to sic their hired copyright goons on gamers who aren't too careful about how they go about pirating the game, their ISPs, and anyone else they think they can threaten into a settlement offer for a few bucks.
The copyright enforcement regime has no morals and they're happy to make it your problem to prove in court that they don't actually have the rights the material they claim was infringed. When a bunch of record labels sued Cox for a $1 billion in damages Cox eventually found that the labels never had the rights to many of the songs they were successfully sued for.
They were willing to threaten Nightdive. I certainly wouldn't call them disinterested in enforcing the copyrights they may or may not have.
> What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
It may not bother you, but there are many people who would prefer it if they didn't have to break the law to play the game. Used copies won't be around forever, at which point those people will be SOL.