Why History Needs Software Piracy

January 27, 2012 8:54 PM

Why History Needs Software Piracy: How copy protection and app stores could deny future generations their cultural legacy.
posted by homunculus (53 comments total)

The folks who run Good Old Games, purveyors of older game software, note that the companies they license products from not infrequently supply them with games cracked and packaged for distribution (long ago) by warez scene release groups -- these releases being by far the best, and sometimes the only, archived versions the copyright owners have on hand.
posted by killdevil at 9:06 PM on January 27, 2012 [31 favorites]

When I was a young software developer and in the thrall of the Windows operating systems and applications there would have been no way known I could have afforded Visual Studio, Office 4.3, Exchange Server, NT3.5,3.51. It's how I learnt my trade. And I suspect my advocacy for MS based business applications has earned MS far more than me accessing pirated copies.

For years the key for MS software was 438 1234567 - I still have my WIN311 and Win95 hard drives. I might boot them up and let the memories flow.
posted by mattoxic at 9:09 PM on January 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

I think allowing indie developers to distribute software on a massive scale, untouchable by even the largest distributors even a few years ago, outweighs the "what about archivists" issue. As he mentions in the article, people do rip ROMs and proprietary formats. People also pirate iOS app store apps. No copy protection or lock down is going to prevent people who are determined. Indie developers can now make a living selling apps and games for 99cents a pop. App stores, by allowing a developer to focus on developing software and not having to worry about getting boxes into stores, enable this.
posted by Ad hominem at 9:09 PM on January 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

People can and do pirate app store apps which makes this argument rather pointless.
posted by Threeway Handshake at 9:13 PM on January 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

Mattoxic - Pssst! If you want to do some MS development I've got your filthy wares here. Don't tell anyone!
posted by Artw at 9:15 PM on January 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

I really enjoy the music metaphor for why culture needs to be free. We had folk songs from Scotland, Ireland, and England mix with a diversity of African traditions here in America. Song borrowing, instrument borrowing (see the banjo), and melodies flowing freely. We start to see the documentation of this in the earliest recorded American music. Blues had borrowed lines and lyrics, and groups like the Carter family gathered songs and made them their own. Writers like Woody Guthrie based songs like This Land is Your Land on previous melodies. Then, American rock & roll just sort of grew organically out of all of that. If we tried to stop people from copying songs and ideas - it would have been detrimental to the promotion of the useful arts, to paraphrase the Constitution.
posted by Pants! at 9:17 PM on January 27, 2012 [10 favorites]

Of course there was a huge, and not entirely successful, struggle to see that people get paid for some of that, which is the other side of the coin.
posted by Artw at 9:19 PM on January 27, 2012

God yes, app stores? Copy protection? They're the worst!

On an unrelated note, can someone post a link to the Gmail source code? Can't seem to find it for some reason...
posted by AlsoMike at 9:23 PM on January 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

It took Borland to get MS (and other vendors---I'm looking at you Watcom) to stop charging gazillions of dollars for development environments. GNU, GCC, didn't really exist in a simple form and were really hard to get anyway. Self-hosted development was unaffordable when I was going through school. Turbo C was the first real development environment I could afford for PC hardware hackery.

Then I discovered fsp sites, and the world became my oyster.
posted by bonehead at 9:37 PM on January 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

Aren't future generations already being denied their cultural legacy? I mean, I talk to people all the time who have never played Jumpman on the C64, or any of the first 6 Ultima games, and there was this one guy at work who had never heard of Tempest.

Surely it's going to be hardware and OS and storage development which keeps anyone from the future from having any clue at all about earlier software development.

Yes, I know there are ways to run these things on current machines, but most of them are pretty kludgy, and with all the bright shiny things that make new pictures and noises today, who is going back to earlier times to explore? Not many, if any.

The brilliance with the vinyl record is, it's a static storage medium. You can buy new albums today and play them on the exact same equipment you play albums from 60 years ago. And people do this, all the time. The mp3 seems to be a standard now -- perhaps it will be around in 60 years and people can use the same players to play music from now just as well as they can from their present. But software and games and such? I just don't see it happening. Even if there wasn't copy protection and app stores.
posted by hippybear at 9:44 PM on January 27, 2012 [3 favorites]

Visual Studio 2010 with 1 year msdn is 11k. It is kind of amazing even large corporations pay, and pay we do, since for 10 seats you could hire another developer practically.
posted by Ad hominem at 9:47 PM on January 27, 2012

On an unrelated note, can someone post a link to the Gmail source code? Can't seem to find it for some reason...

You can't. And now you have no way of running Gmail's old UI. It's gone forever, unless you're an engineer at google. That's the whole point.

It's probably true that a lot of cloud only games right now will probably disappear forever at some point, stuff like Bejeweled blitz, of EA (the new owners) stop supporting it, although it might be theoretically possible to pirate and hack the .swf files.

I'm sure archiving at large companies is much better now then it was 30 years ago.

Visual Studio 2010 with 1 year msdn is 11k.

Microsoft actually understands the importance of getting their dev tools in the hands of students. A lot of schools actually have free licenses for students to get basically everything as far as their enterprise/developer stuff goes (not Office, and obviously not Halo :)
posted by delmoi at 9:51 PM on January 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

I've often thought that if we're going to collectively grant creators, authors and artists a monopoly on sale of their own work---copyright---we should ask for a fair and reasonable expectation of availability as well. If someone wants to buy or license a copyrighted work, it should be possible to do so, always.

If a copyright owner can't offer a work for sale within a reasonable time period---say a couple of years---then they would fall into a compulsory licence regime. The works would be licences out under standard terms at fair market rates. This could all be run privately by not-for-profits, who would function only as a distributor with royalties going back to the rights-holders. Royalties for unknown rights-holders would go into a pool for some purpose. Artist pensions maybe?
posted by bonehead at 9:53 PM on January 27, 2012 [16 favorites]

A lot of schools actually have free licenses for students to get basically everything as far as their enterprise/developer stuff goes (not Office, and obviously not Halo :)

I can't speak for all of the schools, but both of the schools I've been associated with have offered free Office.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:58 PM on January 27, 2012

MS is big on licensing agreements where they throw absolutely everything at you - so it's a fair old outlay, but you get a lot for it. They tend to scale up well as well.
posted by Artw at 10:00 PM on January 27, 2012

I can't speak for all of the schools, but both of the schools I've been associated with have offered free Office.

I got Office 2010 for $9.95 due to my employer being involved in their Home Use Program. So it's not just students that get a deal.
posted by marble at 10:02 PM on January 27, 2012

Turbo C came out in 1987. Get offa my lawn.

Seriously, the great deals like MSDN mailing out a fistful of CDs with every piece of software MS had every quarter didn't start until the mid 90s. I think Borland had a lot to do with that.
posted by bonehead at 10:03 PM on January 27, 2012

Microsoft actually understands the importance of getting their dev tools in the hands of students. A lot of schools actually have free licenses for students to get basically everything as far as their enterprise/developer stuff goes

Yeah, That is how I bought my first copy of Visual Studio. There is also Express now, As well as BizSpark. For startups that may want to use a microsoft stack.

MSDN is kinda worth it. It has umm..Windows 7 ultimate, SQL Server 2008, SharePoint 2010, VS 2010. All the legacy stuff like Windows 3.1 16 bit, Crazy stuff like Services for Unix, Microsoft Mappoint (which I actually used once).
posted by Ad hominem at 10:07 PM on January 27, 2012

This whole argument over app stores and copy protection feels strange. One side says "intrusive copy protection and vertical control inhibits innovation", the other side says "app stores give small developers easy distribution", and they seem to think they're disagreeing with each other. But there's no reason you couldn't have an app store without heavy restrictions and DRM–at least, no technical reasons.
posted by vasi at 10:41 PM on January 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

When is the last time any of us used Visicalc?
posted by gjc at 10:49 PM on January 27, 2012

Crazy stuff like Services for Unix

That's a free download anyway. Oh, and it's not crazy if you have to use Windows for some small number of things but are damned if you're going to implement CIFS on your storage network just so it can access files. Of course an even better solution-- for countless reasons -- is to only run windows in VMs, and have the host expose selected network shares to the Windows guests. Then it doesn't matter what network filesystem it supports.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:00 PM on January 27, 2012

But there's no reason you couldn't have an app store without heavy restrictions and DRM–at least, no technical reasons.

I may be wrong but I think the Android market allows you to post apps without DRM. Looking at this the DRM is an API you can use. So if you have a game you could use the DRM service to see if the user has a license after your app loads. But if you don't do the check, your app should run just fine.

I know on current android phones apps can be stored on the SD card, I'm not sure where they're stored but it's possible you could just copy them off. If not, if you root your phone you can get the files easily. If the App doesn't use the DRM services, it should work on another phone (I think)
posted by delmoi at 11:09 PM on January 27, 2012

Oh, and it's not crazy if you have to use Windows for some small number of things but are damned if you're going to implement CIFS on your storage network just so it can access files

It does NFS? I thought it was the userspace POSIX stuff Microsoft Microsoft did to get government contracts and the Interix stuff. Makes sense, TIL.
posted by Ad hominem at 11:15 PM on January 27, 2012

Perhaps equally importantly, I unofficially had some documentation. During our office moves and reorganizations, the document situation became increasingly dire. I would wait days to get something mailed to me, after tracking down a series of merged document libraries, some of which were halfway through the digitization processes. Paranoid corporate management also had rules about anything relating to trade secrets, which meant anything relating to the polymer process at all, which made it hard to work while visiting contractors' offices.

…

My job now was to smuggle these documents back into the company. I would be happy to just hand them over. But that doesn't make any sense to the company. The company officially has these documents (digitally managed!), and officially I don't. In reality, the situation is the reverse, but who wants to hear that? God knows what official process would let me fix that.

— Institutional memory and reverse smuggling .
posted by migurski at 11:31 PM on January 27, 2012 [4 favorites]

Also, LOCKSS.
posted by migurski at 11:38 PM on January 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

I mean, I talk to people all the time who have never played Jumpman on the C64

May be a slight derail, but: THIS GAME IS EXCELLENT. The pinnacle of 8-bit computer platforming. So much wit and ingenuity.
posted by JHarris at 11:48 PM on January 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

Services for Unix was a free add on that allowed you to implement nfs and extend active directory schemas to support it. I never got it working, and I think it's been retired anyway.

Microsoft do offer their software for a song to education these days, and have for at least a decade; we pay something like 30 quid a pc per year for office and windows and the server CALs. We also get various licences for free for server 2008r2 and visual studio to give to students.

Fairly smart of them, because business pay far, far more, even if its cheaper than retail. Get em while they're young, etc.

Most android apps don't implement device drm; a friend and I regularly exchange apks of apps one of us has bought to try out. But then we either buy them or delete them. If they don't do something you want, no point wasting space; and if you do want it it makes sense to buy - cheap - so you get updates via the market. I used to use the 24 hour trial window for that, but they reduced it to 15 minutes a while back, which is a bit too short to trial an application in.
posted by ArkhanJG at 11:50 PM on January 27, 2012

Discounts for students. Any struggling adult trying to make a living can piss off. We don't care, we don't have to, we're Apple. Or Microsoft.

But then, I abandoned Microsoft largely because they changed too much and rendered my student-bought Visual Studio, and all the work I had invested in writing tools, useless, by changing the software. Between that and security threats and DRM hassles, I dumped Microsoft. I even tried Apple, and found I absolutely hate OS/X, finding it dumbed-down. Now Ubuntu is turning to shit.
posted by Goofyy at 12:06 AM on January 28, 2012

I have a Gold Edition box of the original Supreme Commander that I just tried to reinstall last week when I felt like waging massive war. Denied. I can't install the software I purchased because it now says my code is invalid.

This being the UK I think i might contact amazon and try to return it even though it has been a few years since I bought it as it is clearly not fit for purpose and I think it is reasonable to expect to be able to install it.
posted by srboisvert at 1:00 AM on January 28, 2012

Copy protection/apps stores creates barriers to entries and therefore increased prices.

If one buys more expensive things which create record profits for their Corporate owners do not be shocked that your computing use costs you more. Part of being a sharecropper - you are poorer and the land holder you are working on is richer.
posted by rough ashlar at 3:47 AM on January 28, 2012

Candy Train. The old, good, not-stupid-hard-broken-app-store-version of Candy Train. Gone, forever. Alas, alas.
posted by gracedissolved at 3:52 AM on January 28, 2012

if you root your phone

You have to have a device that is rootable.

Now you could drop the coin to buy a developers phone, but then you are limited as to who your provider can be.

Freedom of choice isn't free.
posted by rough ashlar at 3:53 AM on January 28, 2012

Now Ubuntu is turning to shit.

The ownership has the idea if you get rid of the command line what they have will be a popular as Microsoft.

You are now living that dream.
posted by rough ashlar at 3:56 AM on January 28, 2012

Ubuntu is introducing what they are calling the HUD to replace the menu bar. Kinda like "you guys like using the keyboard so much? Why don't you use it for everything!". It is an interesting concept, but I'm not sure who it is supposed to help.
posted by Ad hominem at 4:21 AM on January 28, 2012

If the HUD is half as good as KDE3's katapult or KDE4's task runner, then it will be great. I hate the current state of human interfaces where you are expected to have both hands in the keyboard and one hand in the mouse.
posted by CautionToTheWind at 4:48 AM on January 28, 2012

I hadn't seen that HUD thing before; it looks brilliant. Making all the menus in every GUI application accessible via the keyboard and searchable? Yes please.

Only complaint I have with it as demonstrated in that video is that it's a bit ugly. Hopefully they'll pretty it up a bit before release.
posted by JDHarper at 4:53 AM on January 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure who it is supposed to help.

Management's (correct) POV that the growth will be in non-keyboard/non-mouse interfaces.
posted by rough ashlar at 5:13 AM on January 28, 2012

With regard to App Stores (Apple in particular) I can give a reasonably clear-cut case where "alternate means of procuring software" has helped me in particular.

I use a first-generation iPhone as my "go to sleep" device. It's deactivated, but still handles wi-fi, so I can watch movies on it, and load apps to it, etc.

I have a Netflix account. I often use my old iPhone as a Netflix player, so as to listen to movies while I fall asleep. Well, the Netflix app is notoriously slow and buggy. So it seems they decided to upgrade it. So far, so good, except that the new version will only work with iOS 4+, which cannot be installed on my 4 year old phone.

Common sense says: "just keep the old version of the player, and don't install the new version." Well, that's fine in hindsight, but the problem is that the next time I ran the Netflix app, it "helpfully" suggested that a new version was available, and that it would behoove me to install it right away. I clicked to approve the install, and suddenly I am stuck with a non-functional version of the software. The new version won't run, the old version has been eradicated, and now I'm stuck.

Now, I'm sure there was probably some "user error" on my part which contributed to this mess, but I'm a pretty darn good directions-follower (as illustrated below) so I can't help but thinking I simply fell through a crack which simply neglected to mention that iPhone G2 users ought not to upgrade their Netflix app, despite the enticing official notifications.

To make a long story longer: I'm awfully glad I had a "jailbroken" iPhone, and thus had access to archived, outdated versions of iPhone apps to install. (non-legally, of course) We're talking about a free app here, but for some good reason, someone had seen fit to archive previous versions of it on a file hosting site, even though the "official" app store only offered the newest (incompatible) version.

My Netflix app is back up and running thanks to piracy, and Netflix will continue to get my monthly payment, despite the fact that I had to resort to a third party simply to preserve the status quo.

Just throwing in my 2 cents, at least with regard to that part of the article.
posted by ShutterBun at 6:45 AM on January 28, 2012 [4 favorites]

Copy protection/apps stores creates barriers to entries and therefore increased prices.

I'm not entirely sure this is true.

It used to be that if you wanted to purchase, say, the official Scrabble computer game, it would run you something like $50. You buy it from the Apple App Store, and it's $10. For a while, around the end of last year, it was 99 cents.

Angry Birds is, what? $5? 10 years ago a game like that would have been $20 if not more.

The App Store model has changed pricing structure for a couple of reasons. One is ease of delivery and lack of packaging. If you don't have to ship boxes of physical product to stores and/or create a specific web page for people looking for your product, then your prices are lower. A second is a centralized place to buy software which is right on each and every device for which the software is intended. The ease of access leads to increased sales which in turn means that the prices can be lower -- volume of sales = lower price per unit.

You might argue that, with the 30% premium being charged by Apple, prices could be 30% lower without an App Store. But given what I've witnessed re: software prices, they're already about 1/5 of what they were pre-App Store, so I'm not sure it's logical to conclude that it is the presence of such a store which is holding prices at an artificially high place.
posted by hippybear at 8:25 AM on January 28, 2012

I could be remembering this a bit hazy, and encourage someone to go look it up...but I thought the government itself kind of made this point didn't they? Wasn't one of the only official exemptions from the DMCA ever granted by the U.S Copyright office designed expressly to allow for the defeat of copyright "protection mechanisms" for archival preservation, such as by historians or librarians?

Not that I like to say anything remotely positive in a sentence with "DMCA" but I seem to recall this actually happening at some point, right?
posted by trackofalljades at 8:25 AM on January 28, 2012

Angry Birds is, what? $5? 10 years ago a game like that would have been $20 if not more.

though 5 years ago it would have been Flash and free.
posted by Artw at 8:27 AM on January 28, 2012 [2 favorites]

I mean, I talk to people all the time who have never played Jumpman on the C64, or any of the first 6 Ultima games, and there was this one guy at work who had never heard of Tempest.

That's a curious mix of excellent and terrible examples. Jumpman (which, yes, is still fantastic) and the Ultima games can be enjoyed with emulators very, very, near to exactly as they were on the the C64.

On the other hand, I don't think anyone's making the vector monitors anymore that allowed Tempest to have such perfectly straight, non-aliased lines. And trying to play it with gamepad thumbsticks (or worse, a mouse & keyboard), is not at all like playing it with an arcade spinner (which is almost as hard to find as a vector monitor).
posted by straight at 9:09 AM on January 28, 2012

The brilliance with the vinyl record is, it's a static storage medium. You can buy new albums today and play them on the exact same equipment you play albums from 60 years ago...But software and games and such? I just don't see it happening. Even if there wasn't copy protection and app stores.

Theoretically, records are still around 60 years later. In practice, we've lost a significant number of recordings from 60 years ago. On the other hand, video games are, in practice, extremely well preserved. I don't know about the app scene, but if you consider arcade machines, console games, and computer games, we've managed to preserve almost everything and you can find it on the net and almost always at least get it running if not play it exactly as it was.

Online-only games like Flash stuff, or MMO's, or the way Blizzard is making essential parts of Diablo 3 server-side like an MMO, and maybe eventually that OnLive thing are changing this.

Even online-updates can screw up our access to history, like the example of the old Gmail interface. Is it still possible to play the original Team Fortress 2 (without hats or other updates) on a PC?
posted by straight at 9:23 AM on January 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

Well, this is some purple prose for what is a far less glamorous gig.

I am that person who gets games dumped. I'm the person who finds games and makes sure they get copied--once you get past games that have some sort of nostalgia or reason to be dumped, a lot of games simply get lost. The situation is really akin to the movie industry: we only have 20 percent of all releases from the 1920s available today. If you didn't have the equivalent of a blockbuster back then, it's probably lost. I refuse to let this happen for video games.

This all costs a lot of money. Retrieving games and making sure their contents are dumped, their documentation archival-quality scanned and their legacy remembered doesn't come for free. Although I have tried to work with academia to get grants or scholarship money for this preservation, it's a hard sell and I have yet to get any institution fully on-board. There are private donors who are willing to help, but it depends on what you're trying to get. I will be releasing an undumped prototype from a popular video game franchise in a month or two. I have had no issue getting the cash to make that happen. The problem comes when you're needing to do far more banal preservation.

For example, close to 25 years later, not all Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games have been dumped. There's still close to 30 cartridges that have never been dumped or circulated. However, no one is interested in doing this. I have a hard time telling people that it's important to have a Japanese copy of Awesome Possum or Marble Madness dumped for preservation. This is to say nothing of things that are hard to dump, such as discrete logic arcade games, or even the video game industry's ignorance of its own history--try talking to someone about electro-mechanical games. You'll get a lot of blank stares. It's hard to get people to understand the industry is a century old and the world did not start with Spacewar!

If you think that things are any better today in terms of preservation or sense of history, you're dead wrong. It's rare to find a company (if it's still around today) that has more than ten years' backlog of their works. I've been contacted by companies to give them copies of 2001-2002 press kit CDs.

And yet, I am the very type of person targeted by SOPA/PIPA. Oh well.
posted by Hot Like Your 12V Wire at 10:05 AM on January 28, 2012 [17 favorites]

seriously? mindless entertainment twaddle is a "work" now?
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 11:05 AM on January 28, 2012

I'm responding entirely to derails here, mostly because I don't have anything to add about the subject of the FPP -- I agree entirely.

This is to say nothing of things that are hard to dump, such as discrete logic arcade games, or even the video game industry's ignorance of its own history--try talking to someone about electro-mechanical games. You'll get a lot of blank stares. It's hard to get people to understand the industry is a century old and the world did not start with Spacewar!

<blank stare>

Just kidding, although it should be emphasized that these things are not what many people would consider to be video games, which relies on a computer component. There are ways to present images that do not involve electronic logic, but a casual, or even an interested observer, wouldn't categorize those with the likes of Pong. To some degree this is an artificial distinction, sure, but so are all distinctions ultimately.

seriously? mindless entertainment twaddle is a "work" now?

Sure is, bunky. Glad I could clear that up for you.

I hadn't seen that HUD thing before; it looks brilliant. Making all the menus in every GUI application accessible via the keyboard and searchable? Yes please.

I look at that and think, wow, Ubuntu used to be pretty great but now it's like they're actively searching for ways to mess it up. That stuff is nice so long as you don't make it the primary way of interacting with applications and the OS.

Here are the problems I see coming with the system shown off in that video: 1. it turns basic functionality into an Infocom-style game of guess-the-word, 2. by combining application-level functions with OS-level functions, a given app's useability can be degraded by merely having another program installed on your machine, 3. because those programs can litter the menu with lots of little unrelated items which crowd out the item I'm looking for, 4. which is made even worse because the list of found items is so short, and 5. AwesomeBar-style searches for things work great if it's something you do all the time, but if it's something you've never done before often prove to be not helpful at all.
posted by JHarris at 12:27 PM on January 28, 2012 [4 favorites]

Ah, I thought it was just a new feature; I didn't realize that it was a *replacement* for the menu bar. That seems like madness, especially for people who use the mouse more than the keyboard. I have a tablet PC running Ubuntu; hopefully the HUD can be toggled with the traditional menu system.
posted by JDHarper at 4:33 PM on January 28, 2012

Yeah, it seems a bit daft. Might be looking around for a different linux flavour soon.
posted by Artw at 4:46 PM on January 28, 2012

Yes, I know there are ways to run these things on current machines, but most of them are pretty kludgy, and with all the bright shiny things that make new pictures and noises today, who is going back to earlier times to explore? Not many, if any.

I work to get CivII, Monkey Island 1/2 and Frontier working on whatever new system I get. To me, most of the bright, shiny new games are like saying Home Alone 4 is all you need because it must be better than the original movie.
posted by bystander at 4:53 PM on January 28, 2012 [2 favorites]

Xubuntu is sticking with tradition, and gets all the same support as the other 'buntus.
posted by LogicalDash at 2:33 PM on January 29, 2012

Monkey Island 1/2

Did you also complain about the VGA remake of MI?
posted by Threeway Handshake at 8:54 PM on January 29, 2012

Did you also complain about the VGA remake of MI?

I'm not complaining that new stuff is released, just pointing out that it doesn't make the old stuff unwanted. And I didn't think the new voices etc. in the remake added to the game - I still prefer the DOS based point and click and read for that game.
I didn't like the newer Willy Wonka movie as much as the Gene Wilder one either, but few people would say the old version isn't being looked at because a remake happened.
In any case, I like Tim Freedman's latest cover better than Billy Field's original, so I'm not always a luddite.
posted by bystander at 9:21 PM on January 29, 2012

Hot Like Your 12V Wire, have you heard about the MADE video game museum in Oakland? If not, you ought to get in touch with Alex. I think you could help each other.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:37 PM on January 29, 2012