It's presented as a sale, I take it as a sale.

Not related to GOG but how's this for a mindfuck on the subject. See Example 3. http://slworona.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/cognitive-dissonance-in-the-music-business/

Makes me wonder how serious these companies are when they claim they want to "help" the artists. They certainly don't want to help potential customers so that leaves one more entity left.

No, it's not just that. It's also, and this is important, a monopoly on performing a work, on making derivative works, or on any right subsumed under the magic words "all rights reserved".

You own the medium that a copyrighted work subsists in. You never own the work.

And yes, attributing a work to yourself is plagiarism, not infringement. But making a derivative work without license or fair use is infringement, and selling it as your own may raise it to deliberate, criminal infringement.

I fucking can't STAND IT when people use a lower-case o. It drives me nuts!

For all intents and purposes you do own that copy of the work and that's what's important. The only thing you don't own is the copyright and that's fine because you're free to do just about everything you want with it (that copy) anyway. Calling it anything other than ownership muddies the issue far more than just calling it what it is: ownership, with the small caveat that the copyright belongs to somebody else.

Performance rights are so weird and bizarre I'd rather not get into them here. Suffice it to say it's not strictly forbidden as you seem to imply it is.

The problem is that legal definitions like "ownership" property and such have very specifc laws and regulations based on such definitions. Therefore you can't simply "call it that" or see it that way. My limited understanding of american law prohibits me from making a fiting example, but I could give you some nice mindfucks of german law.

But...

that is excactly were consumer protection laws come in. The average consumer can't know that a game can't be a good. Therefore a lot of princibles which are to be used for the consumer purchase of goods are applied to buying games (digitally).

But legally speaking it is excactly like cjrgreen described. The law doesn't care very much if you like it or not...

Hopefully virtual machines (or emulators) will solve that problem, a bit like DOSBox.

One can hope, but given that Windows is proprietary and the code is closed, I wonder how technically or legally feasible it would be to provide a faithful emulation for it.

Maybe the emulation of old hardware on which it would run would be feasible though.

Yes, I'm fine as long as I am able to install my legit Win98SE (or whatever OS) in it. And the "emulator" does not have to be necessarily free, it'd be fine to me even if MS was selling a Win98SE virtual machine separately, or licensed it to someone like GOG, or whatever.

Many past emulators rely on some proprietary stuff, e.g. the ROM for Playstation emulators, Kickstart ROMs for Amiga emulators etc. For some of these, the legit commercial emulators are available (e.g. Amiga emulation, Mattel Intellivision etc.).

I would like that governments would restrict this licensing (digital goods) stuff to the following non-alterable basic types in order to strengthen consumer rights:

1. For non-interactive content like books or music or single player games: The license is valid forever, can be passed on, can be traded freely, does not require any third-party authorisation whatsorever.

This would mean, it's essentially on equal terms with goods, if you define the copy as a good. And also essentially DRM free.

1b. The validity and resellability can be limited for lending purposes (however only short time periods < 2months).

2. For interactive content like multiplayer games: The license is valid for at least a certain period (>2 years), otherwise the seller will compensate the buyer in all such cases for the loss (loss = missing time / total contract time x original transaction value). Trading the license and passing on is allowed. Third-party authentification can be neccessary, however damage due to wrong refusal must be compensated financially including a premium fine (50% more than the value).

The reasoning behind this: If we are renting a service then do it right with a fixed time window and legally enforcable services.

I am probably dreaming. But maybe in 10 years.

As is DOS, and as is Windows NT, yet people have managed to create FreeDOS, DOSBox, Wine, and ReactOS.

Two of those are operating systems in their own right, and two are translation layers or virtual machines. Wine doesn't (yet) run on Windows - and I don't know how complete its support of Win9x is, I believe the project has been focusing on WinNT for the most part - and ReactOS, lending much of the work from Wine, aims to be a replacement for the Windows NT series, not Windows 9x.

I suppose it makes sense in a way.

You don't have to look at the insides, just figure out how things work from the outside and replicate that behavior perfectly.

Hackers do it all the time.

It might even make it more legal if you don't look in the code.

It's called "clean room" development, and it's essential when you must duplicate the behavior of code you can't copy.

There's a distinction between "function" and "expression" in copyright. You can copyright expression. You can copyright a way of expressing a function. You can't copyright the function alone (though Apple keeps trying).

In a lot of cases where somebody has made a compatible or work-alike program, the key question is "did you copy any of the original code?" If you wrote the code in a clean room, you're safe. If not, you have the onerous task of proving that any similarities came about because that is the only way to express the necessary function, or that they are pure coincidence.