Did anyone ever get their hands on the WCP DVD?

[Pedro]

I know LOAF got his hands on the WCM toy rapier, did anyone manage to talk themselves into a copy of the WCP DVD?

 

[TC]

It's been tried, and almost happened a couple of times... but not yet.

 

[Timmy the Tooth]

I didn't know one existed, why didn't they release it that way to begin with?

 

[TC]

There's never been a huge market for the format for games... Prophecy was going to be released later with another of Creative's Encore kits (Encore 6x, I believe). It wasn't, for some reason, although an unenhanced version of Freespace was.

 

[Ripper]

No.

 

[Pedro]

Thats a crying shame It only really occurred to me because of Marios recent work but if we had the DVD version converting it to DivX and distributing it in much the same way as Academy wouldn't be too difficult and would certainly make a nice compliment to the hi-res patch. I'd be more than willing to churn out a few dozen CDs to that end.

 

[TC]

Originally posted by Pedro
Thats a crying shame It only really occurred to me because of Marios recent work but if we had the DVD version converting it to DivX and distributing it in much the same way as Academy wouldn't be too difficult and would certainly make a nice compliment to the hi-res patch. I'd be more than willing to churn out a few dozen CDs to that end.

There's no way in hell EA would let people do that.

 

[Preacher]

Originally posted by TC
There's no way in hell EA would let people do that.

Contraire; AFAIK, so long as you burned them for "personal use", and didn't attempt to sell them for profit, you'd be OK legally. Givin' 'em away to a few friends seems to be a perfectly "personal" use to me...

 

[Pedro]

And even if not, its not like we'd be distributing the game, we'd be distrubiting an upgrade to the video quality, it'd be rather bizarre if EA decided to make a big deal about offering a video quality upgrade and not entire epsiodes of WCA to which we have no previous version.

 

[Timmy the Tooth]

Originally posted by TC
There's never been a huge market for the format for games... Prophecy was going to be released later with another of Creative's Encore kits (Encore 6x, I believe). It wasn't, for some reason, although an unenhanced version of Freespace was.

In a couple years CD-ROMs will go the way of the big black actually floppy disks then everything will be DVD format.

 

[T8H3X11]

Originally posted by Timmy the Tooth
In a couple years CD-ROMs will go the way of the big black actually floppy disks then everything will be DVD format.

In a sense you are correct, but CD-ROM's and DVD-ROM's are basically the same format except DVD-ROM's a much higher storage compacity.

 

[ChrisReid]

Originally posted by T8H3X11
In a sense you are correct, but CD-ROM's and DVD-ROM's are basically the same format except DVD-ROM's a much higher storage compacity.

And actually.. partially because of this potential "forward-compatibility," life of CDs might be extended. It doesn't really cost much different to burn a game to several CDs or one DVD, and right now CDs have a much bigger audience.. and because they'll work on DVD players of the future, companies have an incentive to continue to use CDs.

 

[LeHah]

Originally posted by Preacher
Contraire; AFAIK, so long as you burned them for "personal use", and didn't attempt to sell them for profit, you'd be OK legally. Givin' 'em away to a few friends seems to be a perfectly "personal" use to me...

Um, no. The personal use is backed by a law that states you can copy software for yourself just in case you lose the original some how.

 

[Delance]

This "personal use" thing is reason to a lot of debate. In the US, recent laws like the NET act and the DCMA made this increasingly more difficult and restricted. The constitutionality of such laws is under question by some people (like the www.eff.org). It really depends on what country you are in, however the US copyright industry successfully influencing other countries to adopt more strict legislation. My end-course monograph in law school was about copyright and Internet, so I researched a lot about this. For people who are interested, I suggest reading “Digital Copyright” by Jessica Litman.

 

[Filler]

with some software you are given the right to make a backup solely for yourself. Distribution is still very illegal.

 

[Delance]

That depends on license, really. If its open source, copyleft, etc, there should be no problem.

This "copy" and "distribution" thing is complicated. For the purposes of the law, when you install a game you are making a copy. When you play a game, you load part of it into the computer RAM, so you are making a copy. Theoretically, if a friend plays a game on your computer, it could be considered illegal use. This line of thought has been argued in court, and won in some cases (not with game, but with other software). In fact, the notion that using software requires the user to copy part of it to the RAM is the one adopted by the people who wrote the DMCA.

 

[TC]

In the US, the right to have a copy of a program resident in memory, as well as the fair right use of a single backup copy, was legislated a number of years ago. The 'copy in RAM' argument that was made was before this.

 

[Delance]

It's not that simple, TC. The DMCA allows the copyright holder to regulate how you'll use the copyrighted material. So, a DVD may force your play to display advertising before a movie. Circumventing this would be a crime, due to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. Now, what legitimate this right to make such act of circumvention illegal? The concept that, since you have to copy digital media into some form of memory, the copyright-holder can regulate it.

Also, you can make a single backup copy, but you can't circumvent the anti-copy protection with any cracks or outside material. Why? While you can, yourself, crack a program in order to make a legal backup copy, the tools (ie, cracks) are illegal tools. So unless you are a cracker, you can't make backup copies if they have a copy-protection that is a little harder than usual.

 

[TC]

I'm quite aware of that actually... I was commenting more on the RAM cases you were mentioning, that haven't been a legal problem for quite a number of years.

 

[Delance]

Well, certainly no one is going to jail for playing a game on a friend’s computer, if that’s what you mean. But the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA are in part based on the idea that holders can control the use of their material. And why? Because of the "Ram thing". So they can control how you watch a DVD, but not how you read a book.