Ethical p2p client question

I was playing some Genisis games last night o an emulator and I begane to think of a question on the ethics of software downloads.

There is a ton of games and other software that the companies no longer make and/or support. Take for example Doom 2, Id no longer makes that game anymore because they're working on other projects like Doom 3, etc. This concept is called "Abandonware" for all of you non-geeks out there. So my question is, should it be ok to download items on a p2p network that the companies no longer make anymore but if you went back five or ten years you'd have to buy it with cash in hand?

Well it is legal to download them if you paid cash in hand for the game many a year ago, kept the game but sold the player. Then emulation is a legal option so you can play it again, cool eh?

It's up to the company who made the product. They do what they wish, to a certain extent, otherwise we don't have capitalism.

it's fine to play something you paid money for once upn a time, like Baloki says.

as for everything else, so long as you delete it from your computer less than 24 hours after download, you're still fine. but the fineprint says nothing about the backup CD's. :D

That is a brilliant concept Joel, however I dont like paying for things I can get for free. I dont think downloading stuff like games and music is unethical. Its putting a dent in the outrageous salaries these companies are making and that lets them know what it feels like to be "the common man". I dont think theres a thing wrong with it.

It's certainly not legal. Unless a company puts something into the public domain, their copyright lasts for, what, 70 years? I don't know how long exactly, but even the copyright on Atari games has yet to expire from what I know. It is legal, however, to back up something you purchased yourself, from what little I know of copyright law. I bought FF1 10 years ago or so. It would be legal for me to backup my ROM to my computer, if I had the means to do it. Is it legal to download a ROM someone ELSE backed up? I don't know. Even if the data is identical, I don't know if it still classifies as "backup". If you didn't ever pay for the game though, it's illegal to own it.

As far as ethics, if you pay for something, I think you have the right to do whatever you want with it, including copying an NES cart to your computer to play it that way. So far as downloading games you never paid for, you're taking the product of someone else's hard work and owning it and using it without compensating the person who created it. If you believe in human rights, specifically the right to own property, and the right to profit from things you produce, then it isn't ethical, no. A person should be able to decide how their own work is distributed. I can't decide for you that your game should be free just because I want it to be, unless the law says otherwise.

Now some people want to change copyright law to make copyrights expire much much sooner. For example 10 years. Some people argue that if a person can't conceivably make profit from something any longer, it should be make public domain so that society can benefit. If I write a really good book or video game, and I die 10 years after it's created, I can't even GIVE my consent to let that book or game enter the public domain any longer. And so eventually it will just cease to exist in any form; the law will protect my work right out of existence. If NES went out of business tomorrow, for example, old NES games would still not be public domain, so far as I know; they would NEVER be public domain, and if people respected the law, NES games would cease to exist, once all the current carts deteriorated and stopped working.

as for everything else, so long as you delete it from your computer less than 24 hours after download, you're still fine --DeBlayde

Sorry, that's pure myth, so far as I know.

Its putting a dent in the outrageous salaries these companies are making and that lets them know what it feels like to be "the common man". I dont think theres a thing wrong with it. --Enoki

So, say you were selling a car you own, and you decide you want $40,000 for it. Someone decides your price is too high; does that mean they can take your car for free, to teach you a lesson?

You have no RIGHT to own games and music. You have the right to buy it at the price people sell it for, and you also have the right not to pay for it, i.e. not to own it. You have no right to get everything you want for the price you want to pay.

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Originally posted by Enoki
That is a brilliant concept Joel, however I dont like paying for things I can get for free.

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I can get a lot of things for free. I want a new bike. I'll steal it. I want some pasta. I'll steal it. I want Call of Duty for the PC. I'll steal it. It's the exact same thing; you take something you haven't paid for. The fact that it's easier to get away with downloading something instead of stealing it physically doesn't make it any less morally wrong.

The 24 hour thing is a unique loop-hole in UK law (and UK law only as far as I am aware), that anything you borrow or download may be used legally for 24 hours for testing and demonstration perposes.

Also, if you are dead Dr. Unne (following on from the example) and people do break the law and distribute your materials, then (this is again in the UK) there is no-one to follow up the problem. As only the copyright holder may sue.

Another silly fact, if you die your heir gains your copyright.

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Originally posted by Bernhard
I can get a lot of things for free. I want a new bike. I'll steal it. I want some pasta. I'll steal it. I want Call of Duty for the PC. I'll steal it. It's the exact same thing; you take something you haven't paid for. The fact that it's easier to get away with downloading something instead of stealing it physically doesn't make it any less morally wrong.

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Sure it does, the people who you stole the bike and pasta from don't have a bike or any pasta anymore. The company you stole Call of Duty from still has the same number of copies in stores as they did before you downloaded it. Doesn't make it terribly right, but it's not nearly as wrong as stopping someone from eating/riding/selling(if you stole from a store) something.

Just because no one cares about you breaking the law, doesn't mean it's OK to do it. Maybe the State would prosecute you for breaking copyright law if the copyright owner is dead, I don't know. I do imagine that legitimate companies, say a book company, would refuse to mass-produce a 50-year-old book from an author who died but whose copyright still exists. I imagine that if Sony wanted to remake Pong in 1024-bit 5-D graphics for the PS3 and knew they'd make a million dollars off of it, they still wouldn't do it, because the copyright is still there, even if the business that created Pong originally no longer existed. If the law was different, then things might be different, and we might be enjoying many more and varied sorts of products.

Or Pong reproduced in 12 billion infinate ways, its all too much. The future could be so different in so many different ways, yet for us it still seems the same in every respect, how unusual....

And stealing bicycles, that happens alot round here, people should buy bike locks.

The company you stole Call of Duty from still has the same number of copies in stores as they did before you downloaded it. Doesn't make it terribly right, but it's not nearly as wrong as stopping someone from eating/riding/selling(if you stole from a store) something. --MecaKane

So what if you went into the local bookstore, took in a laptop and a portable scanner, and started scanning all the books in the store. The book store still owns the books. You just got the books for free (in digital format). Do you think that'd be theft either?

What if you went into a research facility, found the plans for a brand new top-secret car engine, and took digital photos of all the plans, and then left and used them to make your own engine. Do you think that'd be wrong? The original company still has their plans, after all. You didn't "steal" them in a physical sense. You just have a digital copy.

EDIT: Oops.

Apparently, stealing is OK, as long as you don't feel like paying for the item. We're sort of like 21st century Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich and all, except we don't give to the poor.

I think having a digital copy of something ok because it will never be as good as the physical exiting item. I mean I have a few dozen mp3's from Symphony X on my Harddrives but I would still go out and buy their CDs because the actualy physical item has a better value so after buying it I have a better satisfaction of owning the item.

Think of it this way lets say that as I grow up and I die, what happens to all of my stuff that I dont want buried with me? It gets given to somenbody else, and I'm long dead so how on earth would I know if some random stranger is taking it? Thats what I feel about abandonware. Lets just say that if Im done using something, somebody else can have it, hence forth with abandonware, Id is completly done with Doom I and no longer makes it anymore.

I think you got our posts and/or messages mixed up, Unne. x_X

Yeah that wasn't my post. :aimsmile:

If you cared about copyright laws, I think you should just avoid copying things altogether. If you're allowed to do whatever you want with something you own, why is there 'unauthorized reproduction' laws? Does it only apply when you are going to profit from it? I don't think so.

or ya could just move to Japan!
six years ago when I was in Highschool studying law, it came to my attention by way of professional lawyers and one Superior Court Judge that Japan maintains no copywright laws. This point was brought up by some big stink or other made about keeping japanese folk out of tech shows and the like because they'd copy the design, take it home, and sell it there, effectively closing off the market of the millions and millions of people in Japan.

the situation may have changed, though.

Of course you're right Dr Unne. However, even though something may be legally wrong, in someones perception it may still be ethically right. I think that perhaps this topic was made to discuss if Emulation is 'ethically right'. Seeing that this site encourages emulation, it's a fair point.

The concept of 'abandonware' is complicated. Should people download games which are no longer profitable? Well, theres a fine line between profitable and non-profitable. Square continue to make profit from their 'back-catalogue' Final Fantasy games-they have re-released them on PSX and from what I've heard may do the same on PSP.

This is an extremely difficult moral subject, and one that is very real and very current in the world today. Piracy is killing the music industry, and, as high power modems come into use may do the same for games. It is highly possible that in the future that T1 and T2 modems may well also allow for piracy of profitable games (ie-ones that would be on current release).

This means that as well as the legal issue, another point you may want to think about is that you may be incouraging a culture that may, one day, kill the digital industry. Piracy will grow, and may one day create a situation where electronic data programs become unprofitable. If games become unprofitable, then who will program them in the first place?

Hmm. Can you define abandonware for me? I thought abandonware is the stuff that a company officially releases to the public after it ages to the point that they're not fussed anymore. FFII, for example, is NOT abandonware, even though it's no longer in production.

Is that right, or is abandonware merely something that's no longer being produced?

If that's right: Abandonware is perfectly free and there is no ethical issue.

If that's wrong: There is an ethical issue, although I'm personally not too fussed. I prefer to purchase my software though, or better yet, find something that's free. I don't like having to crack things.

If games become unprofitable, then who will program them in the first place? --Harmless Pigeon

People who like writing games, probably. Look at Linux. Just a bunch of dorks who like to program, so they do. Who wrote this website? Who runs this message board?

So far as other software, in a computer ethics class I had to take, we discussed the possibility that writing software might be handled like medical and scientific research is handled today. That is, a lot of it is done by universities, or paid for by government grants. Computer science is a weird mix of science and industry, so it's hard to figure out where it should go; is it science? Is it industry? It produces "products", but computer programming is also a realm of mathematics. When you own a program, you really just own an algorithm, or a huge string of 1's and 0's. Computer programs and data can be easily copied because it's just "information", and information can be "copied", i.e. learned, by as many people as have access. But computer data is also something tangible and material, in the sense that computers produce music or games or video. It really is a mess, but computer science is literally still in its infancy. It'll all get worked out somehow, for better or worse.

BoB: I don't know. I think abandonware is what you call things that were never officially entered into the public domain, but that the company just stopped producing and they don't really care about it any longer.

This isn't anything official as it would have been submitted by an everyday internet user, but it seems accurate:

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Taken from UrbanDictionary.com
n. . software that is no longer sold or supported by the original publisher / developer, often found as free downloads on the internet because it cannot be obtained elsewhere. Not legal, but often seen as morally acceptable because the company that made it is no longer selling the title, nor releasing it as freeware, therefore abandonware is "keeping the game alive", so to speak.

eg. Doom II is not abandonware because id still sells it, while The Incredible Machine is not sold, therefore is abandonware.

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Seems it is illegal. I guess what I was describing in my previous post was just another form of Freeware.

EDIT: Going by the above, I think that it should be legal for people to download abandonware, as otherwise it could be seen as impossible to purchase. It's an interesting ethical debate.

But these abandonware products are no longer being made by the companies. I recently downloaded Fatal Fury 3 for PC, that game hasn't been in circulation for about 8 years, the company (SNK) declaired bankrupcy about 3 years ago so if the product were sold on a market SNK would not make any money. Doom II is no longer being produced, there for it is abandonware.

Speaking of this, woot my Halo for pc i downloaded illigeally finished about a hour ago! *gives cookies to teh interweb*

Good job ripping off a company of $50. You sure showed them why they shouldn't charge you money for a game they produced. After all, Microsoft is evil, so that gives you all the right in the world to steal from them.

That's just wrong, man. If I knew who you were, I'd report you to the police for stealing.

That's like saying if a book is out of print it's ok to get it from a library, take it to Kinko's and copy and bind a whole new book for yourself. If something isn't sold anymore, you have to go find one used. You can probably find something cheap on eBay.

Downloading un-ethical? Why because the companies producing the music/games are losing a little money. Heres my view on the downloading of music at least. Lets say I want the song "still frame" by Trapt, and thats the only song I want. Whos the bigger thief? Me for downloading this one song, or the record company for forcing me to pay $19.99 for this one song plus 14 or 15 other songs I didnt want in the first place?

I don't really care whether it's ethical or not. I do a lot of things that are unethical... Uh... Yeah.

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Originally posted by eestlinc
That's like saying if a book is out of print it's ok to get it from a library, take it to Kinko's and copy and bind a whole new book for yourself.

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Well why not? If it's out of print for good and that's certain, then it's your own time, money and other resources you're putting into making that new copy for yourself, and as long as you're not selling it on for profit or whatever, then as far as ethics go (perhaps not copyright, but that's seperate), I don't think there's a problem. Or perhaps we shouldn't even copy information out of books at the library even by pen and paper, which is a lot more common method of reproducing such information, and also occurs with books not out of print :p

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Originally posted by DocFrance
Good job ripping off a company of $50. You sure showed them why they shouldn't charge you money for a game they produced. After all, Microsoft is evil, so that gives you all the right in the world to steal from them.

That's just wrong, man. If I knew who you were, I'd report you to the police for stealing.

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Only millions of people are doing it. That doesnt mean its right, but still. Single me out why don't you. You can say you have never downloaded anything illegal? your windows is liget? you have no downloaded music? you have no downloaded videos? your computer is 100% free of copyrighted things, even such as small things like immages. You know i could report you for your avatar, because the screenshots you took them were property of Squaresoft.

eest: No it's not. In fact, that analogy is invalid because Halo is still being sold - didn't it just come out for PC? Besides, wouldn't you have to pay Kinkos money to make all those copies?

Enoki: Agreed, if one person downloads twenty dollars worth of music, the company is only losing $20. But if one million people do that exact same thing, then the company is losing twenty million dollars. That IS a lot of money. Besides, there are several services out there that allow you to download one song from an album, usually for a buck a song.

TG Cid: Yes, my version of Windows is legit, and I have nothing downloaded onto my computer (music, videos, ROMs, etc) which I do not legally own in physical form. My avatar was one of the avatars I could choose from this site, and I use it under the impression that this site has the permission to use it. If I'm at fault for copyrighting an image, so is eyesonff.com.

Square is not selling pictures of CG Cid with a smoke in his mouth. Nor are you or eyeson trying to make money off of it.

Suggesting that that's illegal is god damn stupid.

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Originally posted by Thunder God Cid
Only millions of people are doing it. That doesnt mean its right, but still. Single me out why don't you. You can say you have never downloaded anything illegal? your windows is liget? you have no downloaded music? you have no downloaded videos? your computer is 100% free of copyrighted things, even such as small things like immages. You know i could report you for your avatar, because the screenshots you took them were property of Squaresoft.

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Just because millions of people are doing it doesnt make it right, and furhtermore you just prooved a point. Its only fifty dollars for you, so its no big deal. Then times fifty by one million and you have the amount of money that company just lost because of imulators. And some people dont download music. I know I dont. I bought my copy of windows at market value, and images are taken from google. Its not illegal to copy images from the web. They are free, and the company looses no profit from it. In fact, they actually gain profit from it because people come to their sites to get stuff and increace advertising values.


Downloading un-ethical? Why because the companies producing the music/games are losing a little money. Heres my view on the downloading of music at least. Lets say I want the song "still frame" by Trapt, and thats the only song I want. Whos the bigger thief? Me for downloading this one song, or the record company for forcing me to pay $19.99 for this one song plus 14 or 15 other songs I didnt want in the first place?- enoki

Well, what you just did was wrong. The company made it that way so you had to buy their cd. If you dont like the price they put it at, you dont have to buy it. You can just go without untuil you get over it and decide to go buy it with money you earned. And furthermore, isnt it un-ethical that you get payed for working? I mean, you get paid 5 dollars minimum per hour, so after 4 hours you have enough to buy that cd. Its not that hard to go get a job unless your under 16. THen just do housework. Making money isnt a hard task.

Hrmm. My point. You say that getting a job and getting that money isn't hard. I say, getting online and downloading it from a bit torrent site isn't hard either.

Yes, but it's illegal.

It's easier to kill a person than to reason with him. It's also easy to beat your girlfriend up instead of being rational about the unplanned pregnancy. I can go on.

Just because it's easier doesn't make it right, or sane.

But the company who makes this crap don't support nor make it anymore. They can't resell it nor make money off of it anymore so downloading it is about as leagal as finding a workable copy of the same title lying on the sidewalk.

see, abandonware as you call it is where my analogy applies. If it's out of print, you just need to find a used copy. If you are concered with ethics, that is. You could also figure out who was the lead designer of the game and mail him $10, perhaps, if you must download it.

But still the person you buy it from makes profit, and denying them of that profit eventually leads to decline in buisness and if this happens enough, than that company can go out of business. When everybody used Napster and Kazaa, they thought it wouldnt matter because it was only a few songs they downloaded. But their songs coupled with 2 billion other people creates a huge decline in record sales that majorly effected their business.

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Originally posted by eestlinc
see, abandonware as you call it is where my analogy applies. If it's out of print, you just need to find a used copy. If you are concered with ethics, that is. You could also figure out who was the lead designer of the game and mail him $10, perhaps, if you must download it.

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If it's truely abandonware though, the used copy is on the server you found and download it from - either that, or that copy came from elsewhere that eventually leads to a used copy - it must come from somewhere after all :p

yea, but there is a difference between buying a Suikoden PS disc on eBay and downloading a ROM of it to play on your playstation emulator.

Is Suikoden under Abandonware though? If it is, and once it is, then I don't think there's a big difference between getting only the bits of the product you want how you want, and getting a complete physical copy with manual etc. which one might not be interested in. Yes, you're creating a new copy of part of the product, but again, if it's abandonware, even if it's not legal, I don't see a problem ethically or morally in doing so since it's of no interest to the original makers.

If anything, I think buying a used copy would be morally worse since the person selling it to you would be the one getting paid for it and making money off an abandonware product, and probably at a higher price than the maker might have originally sold it due to the product's rarity.

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Originally posted by Enoki
Downloading un-ethical? Why because the companies producing the music/games are losing a little money. Heres my view on the downloading of music at least. Lets say I want the song "still frame" by Trapt, and thats the only song I want. Whos the bigger thief? Me for downloading this one song, or the record company for forcing me to pay $19.99 for this one song plus 14 or 15 other songs I didnt want in the first place?

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Unluckly I do think your wrong there now as you can buy the track seperatly from hundreds of different sites, legagly. Because you can now pay for downloads, example, cokemusic.com

So from an ethical stance that comment is no longer valid as you don't have to pay for a whole CD for one track.

Hmm.

If a program gets made by a company, you have the developers and the publishers. If both developer and publisher no longer exist, it's abandonware unless the game was moved to a different company or something. If there's nobody around to pay that $10 to, what do you do? Just not get the game because of the fact that they went bust before you wanted to get the game?

Or maybe if a company and publisher go bust like that, then it's automatically considered freeware? I don't know.

A perfect example of abandonware would be X-COM: UFO Defense (if anyone's ever heard of it), or perhaps even FF3j. Neither game is being produced or sold by the original company.

Yeah, but Square Enix still has the rights to FF3j and whatnot - that was merely a name change after two companies joined together. My last post was clearly asking about things that don't fall into that category =P

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Originally posted by Enoki
Downloading un-ethical? Why because the companies producing the music/games are losing a little money. Heres my view on the downloading of music at least. Lets say I want the song "still frame" by Trapt, and thats the only song I want. Whos the bigger thief? Me for downloading this one song, or the record company for forcing me to pay $19.99 for this one song plus 14 or 15 other songs I didnt want in the first place?

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I'd just like to point out that you are killing artists when you do that. You like that artist-so why not help him out be buying his cd? If everyone downloaded an up and coming artists work-that would kill the artist.

I'd also like to point out that there is no such thing as 'abandonware'. I know I used it-but I was using it _ethically_-legally, there is no such thing.

Just because ID software don't profit from Doom 2 right now _does not mean that they will not profit from it in the future_. Therefore you are braking the law when you choose to download and/or distribute it.
Unless a game is declared free to download or copyright runs out (which I'm under the impression that it doesn't) any software is illegal to download.


edit: Just a minute-I think I'm choking on my own hypocrisy.

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Originally posted by Vincent06 But their songs coupled with 2 billion other people creates a huge decline in record sales that majorly effected [sic] their business.

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Hello, I would like to see the sales figures you used to research this post, as I would take issue with this statement.

Honestly, just because it's the Internet people think they don't have to cite sources. :rolleyes:

i believe sales of records have gone up. then again, that could be misleading too since with population growth, inflation etc, perhaps they haven't grown as fast as they might have. still, I think downloading songs helps the record industry because it's a way to sample what you might like to buy.

If record sales have gone up, then the backruptcy of various record giants in the GTA (greater toronto area) doesn't add up. I don't think record sales have increased at all, which is why the RIAA is complaining.

if they want to sell more records, they should lower prices.

I also don't think they're taking into account that some people will download just because they can - if that option wasn't there, doesn't mean they'd go buy the CD otherwise, they'd just do without instead, so I don't think people downloading songs and sales of records are perfectly inversely directly linked, as seems to be the idea the record companies seem to like to push about in their own defence.

In fact, as mentioned earlier, it's could also possibly the opposite since some people can sample what they might buy later on. Really though, there's too many factors going on to say that downloading definitely hurts artists, and you'd expect the RIAA and co. to focus on the negative sides of downloading and overlook the positive sides, since as far as they see, it means money to them if they win.

The other problem is that every major record label owns every other one, so it is such a large company anyway that it can do pritty much what it wants. Which I feel is a little (even a tad) of an unetical approach.