Why History Needs Software Piracy

[TradeDraft]

I found this very interesting saying that people who keep copies of there very old games/software as they are very hard to find.

Look at the old Floopy Disk/Tape games that would be hard to find and use now.

Article Here:

http://www.technologizer.com/2012/01/23/why-history-needs-software-piracy/

Your Thoughts on this and Article?

 

[d33my]

Thanks for the link, interesting article. I think the author overstates the 'heroic mission' of pirates. I doubt when the majority of people pirate a game they are thinking they're doing it for the good of human society. As a call to arms it just seems to be encouraging more piracy, which could ultimately lead to even stricter DRMs.

I also think he overstates the importance of having access to the software in order to draw meaningful historical conclusions. The examples he give don't really back up his argument, IMO. When he talks about Mario, he wants to know answers to questions like “Why did people wear T-shirts with pixelated mushroom people on them?” and “What games, exactly, did Mario appear in and why?”
I don't really see how being able to play Mario would do for the historian in answering these questions; videos of the software preserved elsewhere would be useful, and there are actually quite a lot of books that future historians could refer to if they were interested in the cultural impacts of gaming.

His second example: "For example, they could run the AtariWriter word processing program on an Atari 800 emulator to reproduce a document from the 1980s in a way that would explain its format"
I'm not really sure of the historical benefit of an excercise like this. Perhaps in the future there might be a time when such an excercise is crucial but I'd say it's overkill to comparing it to losing works of literature. This is where my counterargument is probably weakest, obviously everyone will have differing opinions on how culturally relevant certain things are.

I think there are some good points made on trying to retrofit existing copyright laws to new forms of digital media however. And it does make you think a bit about where all the info we have accumulated is currently stored, and what might happen to it in the future.

 

[TradeDraft]

Agree that Most People looking for Old Video Games/Software just want to use them as to bring back memories.

We would get Stricter DRM’s anyway. The Government want total Control of the Internet.