I use vintage camera lenses a lot and hate collectors. They drive prices up so they can keep their perfect lenses in a room somewhere like this guy and his “do not upload” folder. To me it’s perverse. Thoses games could be being enjoyed by people but this guy has to squirrel them away.
I understand that it's their right to do whatever they want to with their "treasures" but the point of a lens is to take photos, the point of a game is to be played, the point of music is to be listened to.
These are digital assets though. Him "squirreling" them away doesn't deprive anyone else from having their own copy to play.
Maybe you're complaining that he didn't distribute copies for others to enjoy, but copyright law would make him a criminal for doing that, why should he take that risk?
It's funny that this guy would is considered a criminal for making copies of these games, but once they are old enough and lost forever by the original copyright holders he's suddenly a hero for having these old copies. Copyright law is fucked.
> These are digital assets though. Him "squirreling" them away doesn't deprive anyone else from having their own copy to play.
But the collector in question very specifically didn't want other copies to exist, and threatened to never upload rare games again if it were shared outside the small, private community:
> According to a screenshot uploaded by Saint, the private collector threatened to pull the entire folder of content from the directory and stop uploading games altogether if anyone leaked Labyrinthe
He very, very specifically wanted to deprive others.
So? What if it was a short story or a poem? Do we have the right to read it? If someone doesn't wish to share their work, that's their own prerogative.
Copyright law is a mess, but there are archival services, like the Internet Archive, that can effectively advise someone on how they can, in a way that does not cause one to risk legal liability (a problem much more real to the average person than generally-theoretical and mostly-breathless chances of criminal charges) to them, preserve those artifacts for the future.
We recently had a magic the gathering old cards discussion internally. People were showing off their collections, many of which were in the mid five digits price range (full beta power etc).
People keep those things in bank vaults. If they play for fun they just use proxies. The odd time they go to a real tournament they take out the cards and use them.
To me the desire to collect these things doesn’t take away anything. It is still a game, but it is also something to collect and enjoy just owning something rare for some, and that rare thing happens to also have other utility.
The point of a thing can be multifaceted, and collection is as valid as any other point is, to me at least.
I sympathize with you a lot (owning a number of vintage lenses for several systems myself, though I have to admit I rather heretically mostly prefer the new-ish stuff!)
I guess, however, the collectors can just as validly suggest that they hate photographers who USE (and, hence, run the risk of scratching, chipping, breaking, whatever a classic lens which really, really belonged in a collection!) the lenses they'd rather collect...
Besides, if it wasn't for those pesky photographers ooohing and aaahing about how lens such-and-such was fantastic, prices would be oh-so-much-lower for those true lovers of vintage optics, the collectors... :)
In uploading the game to Mega, it’s possible the folder will be pulled from the internet. But in doing so, the person advanced the interests of game preservationists worldwide by leaking the this game and others.
If the leaker had any bit of sense, (s)he would've copied everything first.
“It's a weird situation because this really is not a great way to be preserving games, just collecting things that leak out,” he said.
There's a similar situation with availability of service information for appliances, cars, laptops, phones, etc. --- a lot of it is out there if you look hard enough, but almost all of it comes from leaks.
Either way, archive.org is certainly a very good place to put things like this.
> If the leaker had any bit of sense, (s)he would've copied everything first.
One assumes so, but it's hard to know the specifics here; if it was on some sort of proprietary forum, there might not have been an easy mass-download option. Maybe there was some sort of credits system. Maybe it was on a tenuous internet connection. If was a private torrent site -- the article's not clear but does mention bittorrent -- none of these restrictions would be that unusual.
I'm curious what the deal is with the 'collector' who had all these rare games. Was he just hoarding them? How did he come across them? It sounds like he didn't like having his collection spread to a wider base.
According to the YouTube video embedded in the article he wanted to sell the game and he was afraid that the price would drop when the rip were available outside of the private torrent site.
I know we've lost a lot of big movies from the early days of cinema because Hollywood studios didn't think of archiving the films, or even the scripts, responsibly but I thought we'd learned from that.
Yes, most developers did save a copy but there often there was little thought to proper archive storage. This means the media degraded in storage, lost during moves or thrown out accidentally. For an example see this story about Prince of Persia https://www.wired.com/2012/04/prince-of-persia-source-code/, I've seen others over the years but don't have links handy.
Not thinking of proper archiving proceedures is also exactly what happened with movies (and TV, the Dr. Who missing season was an ebarassing case of this).
I know that studios exists to make money, and that they do that by controlling the distribution of the media, but it’s very sad when parts of our culture can get lost like this even though it’s preventable.
If they didn't make it illegal for home viewers to make their own copies then its possible that we wouldn't have to rely on studios doing proper archiving.
As it stands now most preservation projects start looking for copies of work once the copyright has expired, which is long enough for many things to already be lost, unless copies are found from so called "criminals" who made their own archives in violation of copyright law.
Could work 20 years ago, but now? Games (software in general) is usually patched at insane rates (which version to keep? All of them?) and most games don't work without internet anymore (and you can hardly mandate archiving or never-released-server-software).
Sadly, I don't think there is a reasonable way to do this...
and you can hardly mandate archiving or never-released-server-software
Why not? A hypothetical preservation law could require the submission of all servers, assets, and instructions required to make the game useful. Doesn't matter which version as long as the submitted package is usable as a whole.
The Library of Congress similarly receives a copy of every book published in the United States, though they don't permanently keep a copy of every book.
There's also cases like the Star Wars Holiday Special, where the creator presumably has it archived but doesn't want anyone to see it again. I believe all of the available copies are from people who happened to record it, which led other people to splice together fan edits in an attempt to create the highest quality version.
I thought Dr. Who's missing episodes wasn't because they didn't think of proper archiving and it degraded, but because they literally overwrote the tapes with other stuff.
If the company goes out of business a lot of times everything will be sold off and saving the assets of a game that didn't sell enough to keep the company in business isn't a priority, especially in decades past when no one thought about preservation.
I understand that it's their right to do whatever they want to with their "treasures" but the point of a lens is to take photos, the point of a game is to be played, the point of music is to be listened to.