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Date:         Wed, 16 Dec 1992 17:10:17 -0500
Reply-To:     PARADOX@DEPAUW.BITNET
From:         PARADOX@DEPAUW.BITNET
Subject:      cracks and stinks and pirates

WARNING: this is a long post about just what the subject: line says.  so if
you're a hard core gamer who grudges time spent away from the dungeons or
from the cockpit or whatever, you'd probably feel better deleting this and
moving on.



On 16 Dec, 92,  a Louis said:
>>  All you can think of is getting a new crack for
>>  the newest game you illegally copied.

Just for fun, I retrieved the list of postings for 1 Nov - 7 Nov.  There
were 167 messages, 2 asked for cracks or the like, 37 were about technical
detaails, ftp, zip, and so on, 8 were uncategorizable, and the rest were
directly about the subject matter of the list.  Surely the above remark is
overstated.  And one of "cracks" was a question about Moraff's Revenge,
which sure isn't one of the latest games.  And I don't recall anyone ever
having said "I just illegally copied this great game..."  The description
given contains an unwarranted and unjustifiable assumption.


>>  I don't want to have anything more to do with any of you.


Tht's what the SIGNOFF command is for.

>>  There is a law against making copies of commercial games

Actually, the laws have to do with copying certain copyrighted material.
"Commercialness" has nothing to do with it.

Today Chainsaw said:

>>Well, but he was right!

As I have showed, he wasn't.


>>I am also angry about all those assholes that make illegal copies!
>>They are the reason why we have to pay more than
>>40 bucks for a decent game.  I am tired of those fucking parasites that
>>take advantage of us honest game buyers.

To think that pirates cause software prices to be as high as they are is
questionable.  I happened to have been in Malaysia when they enacted, at
the US's urging, stronger copyright protection.  In the period prior to
enforcement, the press was full of the above argument: the rampant pirating
was causing foreign software prices to be inflated to take account of the
lost revenue.

(Pirating was rampant; it was almost impossible at a run-of-the-mill store
to find ANY original software whatsoever.)  Now things are much more
"civilized" there; pirated programs are hard to come by.  Not impoassible,
but the casual looker in almost all stores is doomed to disappoinment if
he's looking for illegally copied disks.  And the prices of the legal
copies?  Higher than before and far higher than the prices we pay here.
(they have new excuses for the high costs, of course.)

A friend of mine there runs a small travel agency.  He financed a vacation
in the US by purchasing programs for his office at Egghead Software.
The savings more than paid for his airfare!

Games cost what they do because people are willing to pay those prices for
them.  It's as simple as that.  If you don't like paying so much, wait a
while, the list's always got people getting rid of games they no longer
want.

And don't be hard on all people who crack.  Personally, the most fun I get out
of games is figuring out how to cheat them.  I actually finish very few
because the fun goes out after they are defeated.  And my 13 year old
daughter has learned a lot of technical stuff about computers by figuring
out file structures and so on.  It's a great impetus to learning, to have
your favorite character "unfairly" destroyed, and then work intensely to
"save" him.

For some reason, my children love Phantasie, which few of you probably
remember -- an Apple game ported to the PC in 1983.  Our documentation is
in tatters, and if the program asks the wrong question, there's no choice
to reboot, crack, or ask for somebody's help.  Even more irritatingly, it
asks questions in the middle of a session, not at the beginning.

And then there is Origin's Bad Blood, which if you make a mistake in
answering the beginning question, messes up disk writes, so that
nothing ever gets saved to the disk from any application that runs after it
unless you reboot.  Bought used, the registration in someone else's name,
no longer on the market, what's to be done except crack it?

Especially at this time of years (finals, I mean) it's good to be a lettle
less on edge than usual, don't you think?


Yet another Louis,

Louis Smogor <paradox@depauw.bitnet>
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
Subject: (no subject given)