Is it? Steam does it all the time. Afaik they only completely remove games (meaning you they get removed from your account), when they break some TOS stuff.
As for Blizzard themselves (since this article is about Warcraft 1&2), they still offer downloads for old titles. I can just download Warcraft 3 or Diablo 2 right now, even though they’re remastered, and the old versions not for sale anymore.
Yes, but if you already had it in your account you can still download it, which is the same thing GOG is doing, so not sure what all the fuzz is about.
Going forward, even if a game is no longer available for sale on GOG, as part of the GOG Preservation Program, it will continue to be maintained and updated by us, ensuring it remains compatible with modern and future systems.
Yes… But actually no. For these games, sure, they’re committed to update the dosbox, but for more modern games there’s nothing that can be done on GOG since if the binary breaks for windows lack of backwards compatibility, they’re done because they don’t have access to the code. This works for these games because they’re being emulated, so they can maintain them by extracting the ROM and updating the emulator.
IMO what Valve is doing is leaps ahead, Proton can be used to maintain even broken binaries by providing compatibility with older versions of binaries from Windows. Not to mention the runtime library shipped with Steam for native titles.
It’s always mind boggling to me how GOG does something which Steam is already doing (sometimes, like this, they do a worse job at it), yet they get all of the credit as if they’re revolutionizing the way the industry works. Allowing people to download a game they bought, even if delisted, is the standard, and Proton is a much better preservation tool than whatever GOG is doing behind the stages, because it’s open source and if Steam ever goes under it will continue to exist, whereas on GOG solution you depend on GOG for it to keep working.
Backward compatibility in Wine is generally superior to that of Windows, as newer versions of Windows can force users to upgrade legacy Windows applications, and may break unsupported software forever as there is nobody adjusting the program for the changes in the operating system
Valve’s has been financing the development of Proton (and wine), so their efforts are to improve an open source tool that can be used and enhanced by anyone, which among other things provides excellent compatibility. That is a much better commitment to preserving games than choosing a handful of titles and updating their compatibility layer when the old one breaks. In other words, GOG is choosing a couple of games to update their emulator periodically, Valve is financing the development of an emulator for old games. The two things are not even in the same league for how much they help preservation of old games as a whole.
As for the question of windows users, I don’t think wine runs on Windows natively, but I assume one could use WSL as a stepping stone. In any case GOG’s method also doesn’t address Linux or MacOS users, so I don’t see how bringing platform into the mix makes any difference.
I’m all for platform level comparability (one of my major gripes with xbox BC was that BC of original xbox and 360 titles was implemented per-title and while some were supported most of the library was left behind).
But from a pragmatic perspective my home PC has always been Windows and preservation efforts that allow me to run the games I know on the hardware I am running will mean more to me.
I support the principal and encourage the cross platform efforts but its unlikely to mean much to me personally until its bundled in with a plug and play solution like Batocera.
I’ve edited my initial comment to reflect that not everyone will share my priorities.
preservation efforts that allow me to run the games I know on the hardware I am running will mean more to me.
You mean software, your hardware is perfectly capable of running Linux+Wine. But again, this is a very personal response, my personal computer is Linux, therefore what GOG is doing means less to me by your own definition, which is why I don’t think it makes any sense to try to bring platform into the table. In fact, since apparently they’re responsible for the DOSBox version that a game uses, and there is a native version of DOSBox for Linux, this means that the decision of the game not being available on Linux is entirely on GOG.
Imagine Valve was financing an emulator, and GOG was compromising themselves to keep a binary updated with the latest version of that emulator whenever problems appeared on the old version, which of them is doing more for the preservation of games? The only difference is that the “emulator” Valve is financing is not the same as the one that GOG is using.
I’m not saying that there isn’t value in what GOG is doing just because it doesn’t affect me, but as is they can only help preserve DOS era games, so investing in DOSBox and hosting the ROMs would be a much more valuable approach (half of it they’re already doing, they do in fact host the ROMs, you just get 50 extra copies of DOSBox in the process). What I’m saying is that I don’t understand why everyone thinks they’re so great for doing what they’re doing, they could be investing in getting wine to run on windows which would be a much better effort for the preservation of games for your platform.
Sure, Valve deserves a lot of praise for their work, but do they offer offline installers for their games? That and (mostly) DRM-free experience makes GOG superior to me. It leads to smaller library and less new releases, of course.
Steam also offers DRM-free games, and they don’t hide them behind a closed installer. I don’t like installers since they’re yet another moving part that can break, e.g. an installer built for windows 95 might not work even though if you were to extract the game binary from it it would work, so having an installer could make a game less compatible.
The ideal form of distributing games is compressed folders, I recognize this is less user friendly, but it is the format that most preservation effort uses (e.g. zip of a ROM, instead of an installer that installs the emulator+ROM like what GOG is doing).
I’m also not shitting on GOG, I believe they’re a good company, although I’m not their target audience since they refuse to sell me games I can play on my Linux machine. I’m all in favor of DRM-free and wished they would be more strict about it, that could convince me to buy some stuff from them. I did bought games from them in the past until I grew tired of almost no game having Linux compatibility and them not offering an official client, plus I noticed that some games had DRM and that was the last straw for me, because of I’m going to be buying maybe DRM-d games, might as well do it while giving money to a company that cares about my use-case.
I think GOG should be praised for some of what they do, particularly by their anti-DRM stance (even though they’re not 100% behind it). But what annoys me is that people seem to praise them as if they were doing this amazing work that no one else is doing, when most of the stuff people get overly excited about is just a marketing move and Steam is usually doing much better work in that regard, but is usually cited as the bad guys by the people who drank the GOG Kool-aid.
It used to. I haven’t used it in years, and I’m no longer sure if it still exists or where to find it if it does, since the UI has changed a few times over the years; the last of which was less than a year ago and it really overhauled everything. But also, so many games can literally just be copied from their install directory and work on another machine without Steam or cracks. There’s no good way of knowing which ones without trying it, though. At least not to my knowledge.
I've noticed that GOG now puts banners on what's a classic game and what isn't. I think they should split some parts of the site where one section is entirely classic games and the other is just DRM-free versions of current games.
Just remember to not play League of Legends. I’m pretty sure that game is designed to trick you into thinking you are having fun, but what is actually happening is everyone in team chat is yelling at you and you are probably yelling (at least privately) too.
Source, every LoL player I have ever been on voice chat with
I played for years very casually and had fun +80% of the time i would say. When you have a character you like and just enjoy the playstyle. It feels good to do what needs to be done as that character.
Unfortunately, my friends play it and I’m often roped into playing it with them. My advice: The game is greatly improved if you disable all forms of interaction with other players. Chat is muted by default now, but I’d also recommend muting pings and emotes. No form of interaction is ever positive in that game.
Even then, their matchmaking algorithm seems to be designed to hand an easy win to one team and just switches up which side you’re on enough times that you won’t quit.
I used to use Game Genie to make replays of already-completed games more difficult. By getting more entertainment from what I already had instead of buying new games, I was obviously stealing from the game publishers.
When the current copyright comes from books, wouldn’t plugins or transient changes/cheats be like taking side notes with a pencil on their individual copy?
Are side notes and annotations copyright infringements?
I would love to see them argue that taking snarky side notes, which change the tone of their words, is copyright infringement.
Who ever thought of this?? "Cheats are copyright infringement" is such a stupid sentence..
Not to forget the base line: if it's not in a competitive environment, what the hell do they care if someone wants to play an easier Elden Ring, or skip the 'grind 100 hours for this materials' part??
I remember when a friend of mine got that and showed it to me and I thought it sucked because it made the games too easy, but never in my life would I have thought anyone was infringing copyright by using it.
[His] opinion asserts that manipulating transient data generated during gameplay through third-party software does not infringe copyright according to the EU’s Computer Programs Directive. This distinction between protecting a game’s code and the temporary data it generates is a very significant one for all developers of game-enhancing tools.
The Advocate General also highlighted that the variable values in question are not original works of the game’s author but result from player interactions and game progression, which are unpredictable and dynamic. Since they depend on unforeseeable factors, these values lie beyond the author’s creative control.
That is an interesting distinction, the code to generate your health total is copyright but the actual health value you modify with cheats is not.
I mean, this is a pretty normal distinction afaik (human vs non-human creations; afaik non-human creations almost always have any human copyright claims voided when challenged).
Imo what makes this special is how precise he’s being. If I understand correctly, he’s basically saying that the code for the health bar is a human creation and protected by copyright, but while the code to change the health value might be human-made, the actual values are machine-made and not under copyright (there’s probably a lot of nuance I’m skipping over, but my understanding is that’s the gist of it).
I’m not explaining it properly. Imagine instead of 100 hp, there is apple bananas. That isn’t really a mathematic representation in the same way that the cheat code can change. It would be a copyrighted work of art. It wouldn’t be trivial to build an hp system to do this (in fact it would be a large undertaking), but I am not asking about practicality, just what the law would find.
No, no it wouldn’t. You’re still using math, you’re just using a different language. If apple bananas becomes apple pears after being hit by a bullet, you’ve changed the value. That is what math describes. You cannot avoid this. This is how computers work, and math is just another language to describe things. Even if every health value is a string, you still need to keep track of which string is currently in use so that you know when to kill the player. That requires math. That is what they’re talking about. It is not the in-game health indicator that is public domain, it is the actual health value in RAM that is generated and modified during gameplay.
It is better this way. Copyright is already abused to hell and back, if they expanded copyright to cover this kinda stuff then it would potentially destroy things like right-to-repair as companies could claim copyright infringement on anything that modifies their code.
Computers work with 1s and 0s. We have decided as a society that certain combinations of those equate to being copywritable. This ruling seems to be saying the result of a calculation cannot be copywritable? Wouldn’t creative tools like movie editor or photoeditor disagree? So then is the ruling actually saying these specific values used in this instance are not copywritable, changing the health to 100 for e.g., because there is no human creativity in the result of that value?
So if a programmer used an original work of art to define the state of health in the actual code, and verified the value matches the 1s and 0s that represent that work of art (thus it only ever comes down to boolean check in the logic side, and the value of the variable is never set to something simple like 0 to 100, it was using a huge amount of RAM and a very slow comparator operator.
Well, I think both are human creation, you are using the machine and the game to create something new. In that sense, a save game file could also be under the players copyright. Lets say a Minecraft world for instance.
What this is saying is that the Minecraft world would not be under copyright, but anything the player built in that world would be. So you can’t copyright the world itself, but you can copyright any human-made constructions in that world.
This is wholly preferable to the alternative options which could result in things like being able to copyright AI-generated works (applying his logic to AI, they’re basically saying you can copyright any edits to an AI-gen image, but not the image itself because that was AI-gen).
I meant minecraft world file which stores the chunks the player explored and potentially modified. And I said “could” not “must”, it depends on if hits a certain creative threshold.
If the player decides to teleport around while creating a dickbud or whatever by just the explored chunks, that could meet it.
If someone selectivly openes quests to use the open quest markers on a map in an RPG to create a dickbud, that cloud meet it as well.
The save game could tell your individual story through the game, that cloud meet the threshold as well.
Also, because the unmodified minecraft world is randomly generated, it would not be under anyones copyright.
With AI, there could also be made an argument that the selection process might make it copyrightable. Like if you take a picture of a interesting looking cloud. The clouds might be semi-random, but you selecting a specific one reaches the threshold.
A Minecraft World isn’t, not even if you draw on it with exploration as the world was generated from a random seed.
It is random, and unpredictable. You could maybe make an argument from reusing the random seed… But since the ability to turn the seed into the map isn’t something a human can replicate without Minecraft I think it also fails the test for copyright.
Nature is often random and unpredictable, but the process of selecting a interesting POV and taking a picture of it is still copyrightable.
I wouldn’t be so sure that if you discover a seed, that can be transformed using minecraft into a world with very interesting and specific properties, could not be under copyright protection.
In fact movies, pictures and books are specific numbers on a digital storage medium as well, that are transformed using a codec. That isn’t something that can be easily replicated without that codec.
I am not a copyright lawyer, but I think there are precedences where just the selection process from a stream of (semi-) random number, pictures, sound or events alone can produce copyrightable products.
Yes, and you have copyright on the photo - not the layout of the plants and trees in it, nor even the angle of the subject. Someone else can go with a camera and take their own photo without touching your copyright.
Much like with digital files, the copyright is as it is a non-random transformation of a mostly replicable media product. People don’t have a copyright on numbers, even if their 5000 trillion billion digit number happened to turn into a 1960s Disney short if you run it through the right compiler.
Yes, and you have copyright on the photo - not the layout of the plants and trees in it, nor even the angle of the subject. Someone else can go with a camera and take their own photo without touching your copyright.
A work is original if it is independently created and is sufficiently creative. Creativity in photography can be found in a variety of ways and reflect the photographer’s artistic choices like the angle and position of subject(s) in the photograph, lighting, and timing. As a copyright owner, you have the right to make, sell or otherwise distribute copies, adapt the work, and publicly display your work.
So if someone intentionally reproduces a picture, they violate copyright, IIUC.
In the case of minecraft, I think a case can be made, where the “picture” is the minecraft world, and the creativity is the selection process by the artist. The artist chooses their angle, position, lighting, etc, in this case they choose properties of the world, maybe by visiting thousands of them, using seed search machines, or other reverse engineering tools etc.
I all depends on if the artist can raise their work above just the random noise they get as an input in a creative way. I am not saying that all minecraft worlds (or save games for that matter) are subject to copyright, but since we are dealing with blurry lines of copyright, it is possible.
IANAL, but I think if I would look into case law, I would find examples for both options, in some cases the “selection process” was enough to demonstrate creativity, and in other cases it wasn’t.
You are correct it isn’t about the numbers, it is about the artistic and creative product that is copyrightable, which, in case of digital art, is represented as numbers, and distribution of those might be punished by law.
I am just saying that digital art can be more that just still or moving pictures and sound. It can be a world space the artist prepared for you where you can move around.
About the section on the law, I would read it just as stating what is covered under copyright, and not what isn’t. I also just mentioned what original work is, not describing derived work.
First, we’re talking cross duristicion, since I was using the EU ruling above.
Second, I’m wondering if what that US page means is that a non-original work doesn’t get copyright protections, or that non-original work is itself in breach of copyright? Maybe I should go digging to find out.
I agree deliberately designed digital worlds are artistic creations. Just that randomly generated ones are not.
You’re probably right that legal examples on both sure probably already exist.
The crux of the matter for me is the question wherever “the selection process” alone is enough to create art or not, and depending on my mood I fall to one side or another on that question. Not specifically if it is under copyright or not, because that sort of follows from that.
Artists often use randomness in various parts of their creation process, what is really required is the human element. Is a picture of a cloud, that speaks to the photographer in some way art or just a picture of a random cloud?
I guess this has to be decided on a case by case basis, therefore I cannot completely exclude it.
I agree with all that. The edge cases are tricky and there’s no easy answer.
A painter flicking or splashing paint on a canvas presumably makes something with copyright protection.
Does an accidentally statically impossible basically impossible to tell apart version accidentally made by someone flicking and splashing their own paint infringe it? I’d hope not but can’t really argue for a rule on it that doesn’t involve believing stated goals/mind reading.
Guess not a thing us mortals/non-legal professionals can ever answer.
This makes sense to me, and is in line with recent interpretations about AI-generated artwork. Basically, if a human directly creates something, it's protected by copyright. But if someone makes a thing that itself creates something, that secondary work is not protected by copyright. AI-generated artwork is an extreme example of this, but if that's the framework, applying it to data newly generated by any code seems reasonable.
This wouldn't/shouldn't apply to something like compression, where you start with a work directly created by someone, apply an algorithm to transform it into a compressed state, and then apply another algorithm to transform the data back into the original work. That original work was still created by someone and so should be protected by copyright. But a novel generation of data, like the game state in memory during the execution of the game's programming, was never directly created by someone, and so isn't protected.
This raises a rather sticky situation for the coming years. I have been seeing more and more posts about developers using GPT generated code in various projects. If a game is made and it is found that GPT was used for some parts of the core code, does the whole project lose its copyright?
I don't see how this wouldn't be derivative work. I highly doubt a robust, commercial software solution using AI-generated code would not have modified that code. I use AI to generate boilerplate code for my side projects, and it's exceedingly rare that its product is 100% correct. Since that generated code is not copyrightable, it's public domain, and now I'm creating a derived work from it, so that derived work is mine.
As AI gets better at generating code and we can directly use it without modification, this may become an issue. Or maybe not. Maybe once the AI is that good, you no longer have software companies, since you can just generate the code you need, so software development as a business becomes obsolete, like the old human profession of "computer."
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