Ah, *beep* - I try to work and chat with you. 
But you know what I mean. 
At 6:30? Hm, glad to be relaxing at home instead.
I have to disagree with them getting deleted because of the archiving aspect of it was super important for the future of obscure gaming…
Yes, my working hours are aligned with the working hours in the US. The good thing is: No alarm clock is torturing me.
1 Like
Not me either.I have one set at 6:50 just in case but I just wake up around 6:20/6:30ish and I leave for work between 7:15 and 7:30 (maybe 7:40 in rare cases).
I could also choose to do the whole thing an hour later if I wanted to.
The more I learn about the evolution of copyright law over the years the more comfortable I feel about crossing the line in those cases where the game is clearly abandoned.
1 Like
There’s the legal line and there’s the moral line. Downloading a CD rip instead of ripping it yourself: obviously moral, since 2014 illegal (in the Benelux).
Meanwhile, borrowing from your neighbor or the library and copying or ripping, fully legal, but for a new CD perhaps morally questionable.
Is it? 
It is here. I don’t know what the rules for home/private copies are in Italy.
Home copies are explicitly legal under the Dutch/Belgian model, while (commercially) spreading copies is punishable by law. Only the copyright holder is allowed to do that.
In Belgium, you’re not allowed to make a home copy of a library CD that was released fewer than six months ago.
You’re not allowed to share links to illegal content through messaging services.
You can find a slightly outdated summary for Belgium here: http://nex.be/muziekpiraterij-onderzoek/
For the Netherlands, see http://www.iusmentis.com/auteursrecht/nl/thuiskopie/
We explicitly pay for the right, too.
But except for some minor details it’s all fairly similar under Benelux-wide rules.
Here’s a thesis about it: http://users.skynet.be/tijs.laurens/theorie/thuiskopie.htm
Thank you for this material. Interesting, but, uh… unbelievable.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to discuss ethics.
But I have some -say- technical issues I must mention:
-
the second and third documents, about Netherlands, are extremely clear. You CAN copy your neighbor’s CD for personal use, but you have to pay an incredibly small tax.
The first document about Belgium might be outdated, but it is unclear, too. It states that you can make home copies for your CD, but only if you own the original, and you can’t give the copy to third people. Which is the rule in all the European Union, as far as I know. But, in the end of the document, it says that -from 2003 on- in Belgium you can make home copies and share them too. -
It seems this rule didn’t exist back then, when the most obvious form of piracy was the domestic one. It seems to me that when the internet wasn’t well known, if you copied floppies and CDs, well, you were considered a pirate; but then (from 2003 on) with the widespread of contents on line,
your countrysome countries decided somehow to “condone” the home piracy to concentrate on sanctioning other kinds of piracy. -
The rule says that you can copy a CD or DVD, BUT you can’t hack its copy protection system. This is a nodal point in my opinion. In fact, from the nineties on, almost ALL media (software, films and music) had some sort of digital copy protection. All the tools you can find online to rip and burn CDs and DVD, explicitly hack this protection, pleading the “fair use” of the domestic copy. BUT, again, this refers to the idea of “domestic copy” ouside Benelux, as I explained it: a copy that a owner of the original makes for himself. If you apply the rules of Benelux, the use of such tools is illegal, since they violate the copy protection system of the original media. Under the rules of Benelux, you can copy CDs and DVDs ONLY if they don’t have a digital copy protection system, thus you can legally copy an infinitesimal fraction of the circulating contents.
-
In the documents you provided me with, I didn’t find any explicit mention of the fact that the copy protection system must be digital. So what about physical protection systems, like code wheels, red gel decoders, word hunts in manuals and so on?
If you follow the law strictly, without trying to interpret it, you must aknowledge that in benelux making a copy of -say- a MI floppy IS LEGAL, but then you should telephone to the owner of the codewheel to ask him the right answer anytime you wanna play!
So, my CONCLUSIONS
In Italy (and, as far as I know, in most of the World) you can’t copy any media to share with others, but you can copy for yourself if you keep the originals.
In Benelux you can’t copy a media if that means hacking its copy protection system, nor for yourself, neither for sharing. So you can’t have a personal copy of your DVDs for example, even if you keep the originals. You can basically xerox a book if you want, since this doesn’t require the hack of a copy protection system; you can copy old software that doesn’t have a digital copy protection, but then you can’t play with it if you don’t want to infiringe the law about the copy protection hack.
So, actually Italian and European laws seem paradoxically less restrictive then the ones of Benelux.
I’m likely not fully up-to-date on the current laws of Germany, but as far as I know, you are allowed to make copies of legitimate sources for personal use, and that would include stuff borrowed from the library. It’s not allowed to break effective copy protection, though, and I think software has some different rules applied on top. In exchange for that “privilege”, there’s a fee on blank media, storage, printers, etc. that is collected by shady organizations that distribute part of it to some of the more prominent rights-holders and use the remainder to finance their management’s luxurious lifestyle.
Yes, this was mentioned in one of Frenzie’s documents. It made the example of Germany.
I find this unbelievable too.
I mean: if I copy a CD protected by copyright, why shoul I be OK just paying a ridiculously small fee to the owner of the copyright, insted of paying the right amount of royalties? And why should I pay also a ridiculously small “tax”? To who? And what if I use the CD I bought for my holyday pics?
It seems to me a bad law. But it is my opinion only.
1 Like
I don´t think that applies in this case, only to stuff you bought yourself, not rented.
It’s a compromise that no one really likes. Copyright-owners don’t like it, as they get too little of the cake. Manufacturers of the affected goods don’t like it, because they have to pay the fee (which they must negotiate with the aforementioned shady organizations). Consumers don’t like it, because they pay extra for storing their holiday pics on CD.
When it came into effect, all the arguments you just brought fourth, and more, were made against it, but when has common sense ever triumphed over stupidity?
1 Like
Could you quote where you think it says this? That would be distributing, which to the best of my knowledge is always illegal. Unless you’re merely talking about sharing a copy within your family circle, e.g., I make a copy of my Michael Jackson CD and give it to my wife, which isn’t distributing.
That would be an incorrect definition. Piracy is the illegal distribution of copies. Copying isn’t piracy.
You can clearly recognize copy-protected CDs by the fact that they’re not in fact CDs, i.e., the absense of the Compact Disc logo, and the fact that plenty of CD players have trouble playing these CD-adjacent media. (Of course, the drives you might use to copy said copy-protected CDs have no issues whatsoever.) I haven’t seen any such fake CDs in years. Anyway, such “CD” copy protection is legally irrelevant because it’s trivial, see below.
The criterion is whether the copy protection is “trivial.” All that you mentioned is trivial by any definition. DVD CSS is technically trivial as well, but not legally trivial. Most digital protection isn’t legally trivial. (It’s annoying when words like trivial don’t mean what you think they mean, but oh well.)
It’s a compromise and extension on reproright. Copiers have had reproright levies for decades.
Yes. I meant exactly that. Obviously you can’t commercially distribute, but you can share with your friends according to that law. Nobody says how much “small” your “small” circle of friends should be. There’s nothing worse than shady laws.
We’re saying two different things.
I was saying that -say- in the eighties, the only way to get Maniac Mansion without buying it into a shop were:
- Buying a pirate copy on the black market
- Copying it by yourself from a borrowed original.
The latter was far, far, far the most common way. It was/is called “domestic piracy”, and it is a debated field still today. But it is a fact that, when there weren’t clear laws that ruled that field, the developers considered “piracy” the domestic copy from a borrowed original.
The anti-piracy protection (codewheels and company) were intended to fight THAT kind of piracy. The domestic one. The distribution of illegal software on the black market relied on cracked items, which came out a few days after the release of the game.
I wonder if @RonGilbert or @David were in favour of the copy (from borrowed originals) of their games, back then. I don’t think so. I think they considered it a form of piracy.
If somebody wants to consider that form of privacy a “lighter” form of it, and has some country laws which seem to support that idea, it is all another matters. It is an ethical matter, which -as I said- I don’t wanna discuss here. 
And in fact I really don’t understand the meaning of “trivial” you use here. I even looked the word up in some dictionaries, but I still don’t understand.
It seems to me that this law that allows domestic copies “but”… with so many “buts”, leads to too many interpretations.
If we have to discuss on what is and isn’t illegal and the text of the law leaves room for interpretation, it isn’t a good law, in my opinion. But it is still a matter of opinion, I admit.
The fee in Germany is there to compensate piracy: The money is collected by a non-profit organization that is paying the money straight to the artists (and at the moment only in some cases to the publishers).
And yes, all Germans have to pay for the (few?) pirates. Even if no one likes this compromise: Without this fee only famous artists could “survive” in Germany. That is especially valid for writers, authors, journalists and independent film makers.
/edit: To clarify that a little bit: In Germany the manufacturers of printers, copiers and (re-)writable CDs have to pay the fee. (Because they make it possible to create copies of copyrighted work). So it’s neither a tax nor has each German to pay that fee. But the manufacturers get that money back from their customers with higher prices - so at the end the customers of printers, CDs, etc. pay that fee.
1 Like
If in 1987 / 88 / 89 I hadn’t had a pirated game copy of Maniac Mansion or Zak McKracken for Commodore 64, I probably wouldn’t have known their existence, until years later.
I first played the pirated copies (it was legal back then, there was no software legislation), and only after a few years, I’ve searched and purchased the original boxes.
There’s nothing “shady” about it. Your household is a clearly defined legal entity. Your “circle of friends” could only be potentially regarded as a familial entity if you’ve been living together for years, like in Friends. A draconian legal system that doesn’t leave any room for that which is clearly the case would be decidedly unjust, but at the same time, if you don’t have the paperwork like a civil partnership to back it up, don’t count on it.
On the contrary, one or both of my Maniac Mansion or Zak McKracken manuals explicitly said that I should make a backup copy of my floppy disks for daily use so that I could keep my original floppies safe and sound.
I vehemently disagree that a law requiring interpretation makes it a bad law. Only fascist laws offer superficial clarity. Proper laws have a functioning legal system and tradition to interpret them.
The real-world side of this particular set of laws is very simple: whatever you do within the privacy of your own home is either explicitly allowed or fully tolerated due to simple practicalities. Whether a particular act technically is or isn’t legal is simply irrelevant in practice. When in doubt and you want to make absolutely sure you’re technically within the law, either research the topic and make sure or just don’t do it.
Besides voting for representatives, I also vote with my money by buying at places like GOG and Qobuz whenever possible. But I’m pretty sure I’m also legally in the clear as per the Computer Programs Directive by using my backup CD-R of Warlords II Deluxe instead of the singular CD-ROM, no matter what some voices might try to claim to the contrary. But like I said, whether my backup copy of Warlords II Deluxe technically is or isn’t legal is wholly irrelevant in practice.
You don’t need special software legislation. In the Netherlands they were simply covered by the authorship law of 1912.
I do notice that EEC directive 91/250/EEC says:
Whereas computer programs are at present not clearly protected in all Member States by existing legislation and such protection, where it exists, has different attributes;
I guess Italy was one of those member states.
1 Like
But this is an exception - how many people did that actually?