No honor amongst thieves.

I miss the days when pirates did it for the love of the game.

With movies more so than with games, the piracy scene and the organized/commercalized bootleg scene were never far apart. Few people sit in a cinema with a camcorder "for the love of it", while many people will do the same thing for a few hundred bucks.

Cam: Some regular at audience-level aims a camera at the screen, usually with poor results. Easy to detect when the person in the next row gets up to go to the bathroom, if nothing else.

TS: "Telesync". Usually an inside job by a projectionist or similar, often with excellent audio (but sometimes not). Camera is usually very stable with an unoccluded view; these can be hard to detect if a viewer isn't paying particularly close attention.

Screener: Once upon a time, people with influence in things like the Academy Awards were sent physical copies of films to watch and judge a film at home. These copies were called screeners. Not as often a thing these days (with limited-access online streaming being a largely-solved problem), but they could be both very high-quality and very early. Sometimes, they included things like a periodic scroller or crawler that informed unaffiliated viewers that they were not allowed to be watching the thing they were watching. Sometimes, they also had one-off watermarks that were intended to show the source of a leak[1].

In the realm of leaky films, screeners were/are usually the superior format by a wide margin.

[1]: https://waxy.org/2014/01/ellen_degeneres_walter_mitty_screen...

They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.

Will EA sell me Need for Speed Underground 2? Nope! They won't even acknowledge it exists on their website:

https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed

Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu.

I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.

I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:

If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work or is no longer for sale in a manner consistent with its original form of sale, people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work.

So I can go to the store and buy any of these? No? Huh. Sounds like this is largely untrue for most films ever produced commercially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_St...

But sure, let's go to more modern examples. Are all of these easily acquired "new" these days?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...

Us, Pirates: “We each do it for what we lack most.”

Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with other or additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.

I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.

In case it wasn’t clear before I very much support piracy. What I don’t like is people making up high-minded reasons as window dressing. The percentage of people doing it for “legitimate” or otherwise “good” reasons is very, very small. On the other hand, I also don’t think online piracy inflicts enough harm for it to be necessary to make an excuse.

Obviously not to the degree of long term professional archiving but I do think it is a form of preservation to a greater degree than an average home user doing 3-2-1. The greatest risk of loss comes from people not resharing all their content when the private trackers disappear.

donations are a form of "thank you", completely voluntary

A company like EA, being known for protecting their critical assets, should not accept that someone is stealing their content from 22 years ago and then even asking for donations.

we should write to EA legal team asap.

/s

"I think it might be quite risky for them to ask for donations, might get them into more trouble"

Just because this game is old, does not mean they (nfsu2 [dot] xyz) own the rights to redistributing it which is what they are doing. Both the copyright for this game and the company is still live.

Even asking for donations is going to get them into trouble as well as inviting the rights holders to contact them directly.

So I don't think this site will survive for long. EA's lawyers have access to insurmountable funds which make this cat-and-mouse game disadvantageous to projects like this who are even showing the intention of asking for some form of financial contribution of support (money through donations).

> Help, bugs and questions: our Discord. > Rights holders: legal (at) nfsu2.xyz.

I wonder if the email just goes to /dev/null

Consider a tricky grey area: you have a patreon for your youtube channel and expect most people to be donating so you can keep making videos (you get maybe, $50 a month). You also make random mods on the side. One of your mods blows up, and you get a bunch of attention. Which includes donators giving you hundreds thanking you for the mod. Are you now taking "blood money" because your tip jar for youtube content now has financial incentives to make more gaming mods?

I personally treat the tip jar as such. As long as you're not saying "pay me this much and I'll make X mod", I'm donating to a person, not a potentially morally grey cause. Maybe the Nintendo lawyer disagree with me, but that feeling has always been mutual.

I'm sure this project took a lot of work and effort, but legally/morally speaking that's beside the point of where the value is and who should be charging money for it.

Would this website still be popular if it was just an online emulator that was capable of playing NFSU2 in the browser, in theory, so long as you uploaded your own legal copy? I'm not sure so many people would be visiting it or posting about it, to me 100% of the value of this site is just being able to play a great game that other people made, for free. The actual emulator itself is almost irrelevant to the value, if you get what I'm saying.

Would many people visit a movie piracy site if it didn't actually have any movies but just had a blank video player that was capable of playing movies, in theory, if you uploaded one you already owned?

The stupid part was paywalling the latest version of the emulator behind a patreon subscription (it wasn't even effective as anyone could share the latest release) which opened them up to being taken down by nintendo although it was likely they would have been taken down anyway just because the switch 2 was nearing launch and they didn't want switch emulator developers to get started on the switch 2.