Do you respect copyright?

We do respect copyright.

No disk images are, or will ever be on the site unless a copyright holder has given us express permission to distribute them.

There are members in the organisation who were in the games industry, and so it is not surprising that we feel very strongly about this. In fact, we have gone out of our way to try to protect the rights of the copyright owners. For more information on that, have a look at the licence agreement that comes with the IPF user library.

This project is specifically aimed at archiving a digitally preservable form of the software for the future. The preservable versions can be used by people who own the original games where:

• Their disks no longer work
• They no longer own the hardware to play them
• They find them more convenient

Copyright owners can also make use of these digital copies of the originals, and we have a special license that will enable them to do that. Indeed, various companies and ex-developers of games have already contacted us to see if they can use our images for their own purposes and/or public distribution. After all, producing an authentic digital copy was not previously possible. The point is that the copyright owners are in a prime position to benefit from our work.

Now people no longer have to fear the (lack of) durability of their floppies, as long as a good version of the game has been found and preserved. This will in turn aid historians documenting the meteoric rise of digital entertainment using authentic sources.

We have developed the technology to overcome the technical problems in backing up and writing back the Copy Protection.

We also know who owns the game and who does not. We can see when a game has been commercially duplicated or written on a home system, so it is very easy for us to tell if somebody owns the original item or not. Therefore they have a right to own a preservable backup, in whatever form that might be. There are still complications to be aware of in some countries, but that right is certainly a moral one, even if it is not always proven in the legal arena.

Being involved with this project demands a huge amount of work in both technical and administration departments, and we currently do not have the resources to find and contact all the companies and individuals that own the copyrights. It is very probably not even possible since most of those companies have either been dissolved, or are owned by other companies that often do not even know they hold the copyrights.

However, it is very unlikely that the companies and individual developers involved with producing these games would express objections to our preservation plans, none have so far. If nothing else, it would likely mean that the only copy of their game(s) that are around in another 20 years are cracked copies. We do not count these cracked copies as games “saved”, but games sadly mutilated.

There were thousands upon thousands of commerical games released on magnetic media, over 5000 on the Commodore Amiga platform alone. The thought of even one game being lost forever is a scary thought, and would remove the choice for everybody.