Workbench disks/Kickstart inmages, can we lift the ban on them?

[FOL]

Originally Posted by Minuous

Well, I already had ten good reasons for hating Cloanto, it's eleven now

What a stupid comment, go moan in the other thread, this isnt a "we hate cloanto thread".

Next he will be saying "Ten reasons why I hate Hyperion".

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by cosmicfrog

whys that Minuous ?? would you care to list them

Well, I'm having trouble finding that post, I may have deleted it. But from memory it was stuff like: (1) including "crippled" version of OS3.5/3.9 which has obsolete files in it, I get a lot of bug reports etc. which turn out to be that they are using that crap and think they have proper OS3.9 and wonder why some OS3.9 software doesn't run; (2) including a poor quality rip of the Deathbed Vigil instead of the digitally remastered version; (3) omitting most disks of a full Workbench set; (4) including obsolete version of WinUAE instead of current version; (5) some of the included games don't run correctly with the provided configurations; (6) getting eg. medical sites shut down; (7) including pirated versions of games in their package and then claiming they are original/legal versions; etc. Maybe some of this stuff has been fixed up in the meantime but judging by this thread it doesn't seem so.

[mrbob2]

Anyhoo, i think that obtaining rights to distribute games from the original publishers is virtually impossible as all the software companies went bust/were bought out/disolved 20 years ago, ocean, us gold, thalamus, pysgnosis, bullfrog etc etc to find out who owns the rights to all the old games would be a nightmare and cost probably millions in legal fees to get every game, which would take hundreds of years of research.

I think the same applies to people "aquiring" games without owners conset. Will ocean (or whoever owns the rights) to midnight resistance REALLY take me to court for downloading the game? no. Never happen.

Same with kickstarts though, i have them all. Thier easy to find and cloanto or whoever wont really care as everyone who owns WINUAE has workbench and kick roms as thier needed to use the program. Im pretty sure with copyright as far as music goes, after 50 years it becomes copyright free. So around 2030 we should be legally be able to do as we please!

Hurrah for 2030! :-)

[kolla]

Originally Posted by mrbob2

Same with kickstarts though, i have them all. Thier easy to find and cloanto or whoever wont really care as everyone who owns WINUAE has workbench and kick roms as thier needed to use the program.

Sure, but that was never really the problem.

The problem is that it is "illegal" to distribute kickstarts with updated software one them. The lack of support for big disks is one of the big gripes with OS3.1 kickstarts, and today it is technically quite easy to create updated kickstarts with updated scsi.device and filesystem that would make these problems vanish. A lot of people would happily buy OS3.9 kickstarts as well. However, this is not "legal".

Also it would be great if people who do updates for OS3.x, icon.library, workbench.library, graphics.library etc. could distribute them witout resorting to inconvenient solutions like binary patches.

[MethodGit]

Originally Posted by mcb

At least one of the games listed in the 2005 version has been removed due to international rating considerations. The 2009 list was specifically tested to be as children-safe as possible.

Mike

Now you got me intrigued as to which game you're referring to. Looking at that list you linked to, I'm going to guess Sword Of Sodan?

[Minuous]

Next he will be saying "Ten reasons why I hate Hyperion".

Not at all. Why do you assume that I would have a problem with them, have they done something badly?

Originally Posted by MethodGit

Now you got me intrigued as to which game you're referring to. Looking at that list you linked to, I'm going to guess Sword Of Sodan?

IIRC there was an exemption for games which predate the introduction of the censorship system.

[andreas]

Originally Posted by mcb

In short, what would you (the readers of this thread) do if you were the publishers of Amiga Forever?

The same as I must have been stating 4571367 times in various threads:

finally release an Amiga Forever Lite version!!

...meant for people that:

- want to own LICENSED kickstarts
- want to own LICENSED workbenches
- do not want anything else, since they can download the rest free of charge

Your product(s) is/are made "artificially expensive" by cramming looots of additional software on them which must be paid for.

Since some will only need/want the KS / WB stuff, they might bit-torrent themselves everything in the end anyway, because they get frustrated that they have to pay for extra software they didn't ask for (nor be in need of, even).
So in the end, you'll end up with no money at all in your pockets!

Though you could've worked wonders with a slight and clever change of business policy!

A change I've been waiting for over 5 years now.
In vain.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by andreas

finally release an Amiga Forever Lite version!!

...meant for people that:

- want to own LICENSED kickstarts
- want to own LICENSED workbenches

I could be wrong (It's been known to happen, but only on days whose name end in "y"), but I don't believe they can...

I understood that they only owned to right to distribute kickstarts that will only work with their emulator (hence the pseudo encrypted kickstarts).

I agree that it would be nice tho, for someone to still be selling those so we can buy them new. Yes, it wouldn't make someone a lot of money, but then again, it wouldn't cost a lot to do that (software images only, and PDFs of the manuals).

And they wouldn't have to worry about it leaking to the Internet, because that's already happened. ;-)

They could allow ROM burners to provide real kickstarts legally, as long as they get paypal'd $X oer ROM, etc...
Just so the people who want to be legal can be...

But I don't think any of that is Cloanto. I think that's Hyperion, isn't it?

desiv

[TCD]

Originally Posted by desiv

I understood that they only owned to right to distribute kickstarts that will only work with their emulator (hence the pseudo encrypted kickstarts).

'Their emulator' is WinUAE and it works fine with the encrypted roms, as long as the 'rom.key' is present as well. So no need for the whole package if someone just wants to use it with WinUAE (not sure about other UAEs though).

[desiv]

Yes, the phrase "their emulator" was bad wording.

I only meant that I believe their license for the roms\workbench was only to be used in their distrubution.

I don't believe that they can sell the unencrypted roms.

Desi

[gilgamesh]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

not sure about other UAEs though

E-UAE and its derivatives work with Cloanto's rom.key, too. I never tried the original UAE.

[TCD]

So for those who want to do legal emulation a pack with just KS and WB for a fiver would be cool. Which was suggested several times and like andreas said nothing came out of it. Also don't think that there's a licensing problem with unencrypted roms, but since noone seems to know anything about that license it's a tad hard to tell for sure

[gilgamesh]

The Magnussoft Amiga Classix come with unencrypted KS ROMs after all.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by gilgamesh

The Magnussoft Amiga Classix come with unencrypted KS ROMs after all.

Finding them illegally has never been a problem. ;-)

;-)

desiv

[TCD]

Yarrr!

[Allen1]

Aarrr shiver me timbers jim lad

wasn't the main licence mayhem about version 4 upwards ? probably not.

I know that you can buy a 3.1 rom and accompanying disks cheaply and any other rom etc at a reasonable price from decommissioned machines.

So basically getting hold of real legit Roms isn't hard at all and they are not interfered with as in the cloanto Roms. It has also been mentioned about the internet being the place to find unadulterated Rom images and that is very true. In reality whether the clean Rom images are included or even the workbench floppy disks etc in a package is not so important because of the ease of locating things via Google. It really is about time that this licence silliness ended, after all the dog that guards it has no teeth and apart from barking loud or humping your leg, what can it do even if it could prove someone had passed on those images. Starting legal action on the average bloke is simply never going to be financially viable and would probably be thrown out before it ever got started.

I don't mind spending good money on something that deserves it but realistically how many times are you willing to pay for the privilege of a very expensive licence as in the Amiga Forever series. One time is more than enough, anything else is plain daft and there are more deserving Amiga projects out there that actually do things for the community instead of milking the licensed cow dry.

[Cloudane]

They already have a "Value Edition" for €9.95, seems reasonable enough to me? It could probably do with a 3.1 kick for supporting newer games, but it's a step in the right direction. In most cases it's cheaper than getting a real miggy and transferring the image

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Cloudane

They already have a "Value Edition" for €9.95, seems reasonable enough to me?

Not really IMO. Like you said, it's still missing workbench and kickstart versions. How much effort is it to make a package of all KS & WB (or at least the ones for the quickstart options), put it on your site and sell it for a fiver?

[Cloudane]

Wouldn't make them much of a profit then

Of course, ideally the whole thing should be open sourced for everyone's enjoyment, but the powers that be are determined to make a profit out of it for as long as there is even a single person interested. That's within their rights so it's a moot point really and it's just a question of who is making enough of a profit to justify continuing (instead of sitting on the rights to the OS and doing nothing so that nobody gets to enjoy it) without going to the opposite extremes and charging like a wounded buffalo.

Given that the Amiga seems to be mostly in the latter camp (£110 for a barely established OS, £380 for a motherboard to run it, and all the shareware bits and pieces you need that are set at high end boxed retail style prices, or good 3 figure sums to boost classic machines) I'm just glad to see something at a price that is almost fair.

[seuden]

"Amiga for everyone"!!! They'll always be a problem in obtaining the roms for free, legally. Let's face it tho, we still have to pay for The Terminator film if we want it legally so what evs.

EDIT: Can't wait to play Amiga games on my PS3.