Why are we all not doing this and making loads of money

[whabang]

Lemmink wrote:
stuff

I agree with most of what you said, there is no harm done from downloading a bunch of games from the Pirate bay; however, selling the stuff for profit is defenitely hurting the sales of products like Amiga forever. Mind you, the seller is actually breaking the law, and thus get an uncompetitive advantage to companies like Cloanto, who do their business legally.

To prevent this thread from becoming a flame-war about file sharing, I have created a thread on whyzzat about file sharing and software piracy. Let's take the flame-war there instead! ;-)

[redrumloa]

I don't think anyone buys Amiga Forever because of the licensed ROMs. People pay for the nice out of the box package Cloanto has created. I don't think that any pirated software will hurt cloantos sales by 0.01 $ (unless it is AmigaForever itself of course).

I'd have to differ with this statement and yes I mean Amiga Forever. In 2004 I personally sold exactly 100 official copies of Amiga Forever. If my company lasted longer than it did, I'm sure I would have sold more. Most of the people buying this pirate CD are getting it for the pirate roms and emulator and I'd also venture to say many of them are unsophisticated buyers who do not understand what they are buying is illegal. Every copy of this pirate CD sold is likely a copy of Amiga Forever that will never be sold.

As I've said before, I personally don't have a problem with truly ancient abandonware being available online for download. I do have a problem with selling pirate compilations, especially when it includes commercially viable software.

[Trev]

Truly. Pick up Amiga Forever, which is a great package in and of itself (and which I've been using/buying since the first pre-release), and then head on over the Back to the Roots, Cinemaware, or some other authorized distributor and have a ball. Most of the best stuff is freely available these days.

[whabang]

Shameless off-site thread promotion.

[Piru]

@Trev

It looks like the link Piru posted, http://elbox.com/download/mediator.zip, is an archive created by Adam Kowalczyk, so in this case, it's both Adam and Elbox that are in violation of the GPL, unless the source code is readily available from Adam.

Elbox is distributing it, so Elbox is responsible for providing the source code.

Also, since the archive does not include offer for the source code (or mention of GPL of any sorts) it's already a violation. In such cases the license does not apply and the distribution falls to regular copyright law, in short: copyright infringement (each author of linux kernel holds copyright to their work).