Hahah, I'm getting downrepped... Nice to see the towers are alive and firing.

Well, why waste time re-doing work that is done? If they have the go ahead it makes sense to focus their efforts on Win 7 compatibility issues instead of recreating a crack that already exists.

Also, like you, I thought all long-timers here knew GOG used .exes cracked by the scenes.
GfWL on Fallout 3 is completely optional. I played without it and used nothing but the base installer that came on the retail DVD. So kavazovangel is actually wrong. In the US suing a site inking to sites that explain how to remove DRM has been successful successful in the past and doing it yourself is contravened under the DMCA. I'm not saying it's right or that I like it (it pisses me off), but there's a lot of legal issues surrounding this right now and congress has passed no laws to clear them up (instead they're working on SOPA, and The Senate already passed PIPA, to further fuck us over).
This is actually (hilariously) untrue in the US. All source code is copyrighted by default in the US. So if even a trivial amount of code was written to implement the crack that portion of the code is copyrighted by the author of said crack.

However, it would be surprising anyone of said cracks trying to assert their legal rights in this regard (and not even for the irony and hypocrisy involved, but for reasons of incrimination) so one can get away with redistributing them without regard to the crack author's wishes (though many of them could be argued to come with the implicit rights to redistribution).

there are some forums in which the mere use of the word 'crack' gets a thread locked and/or the user banned. i wish this were one of them...

By that logic, you just got banned.

".. you have to shoot at the crack in the wall to proceed"

would also get you banned.

I'm glad it's not one of those forums :P

I think even Bethesda themselves stated that you can launch Fallout 3 via the exe instead of the launcher in order to bypass SecuROM because it was causing problems for some people.

Well, I don't know how it's done in US but in EU you cannot legally protect actions/work which is not legal in the first place. For example, if someone's work is just slightly modified plagiarism, "author" has no copyright to it.

It doesn't matter they had to write something on their own. If they didn't have any legal rights to do that, court would never sentence in favor.

Get over it already, the legitimacy of the word "crack" is only heresy insomuch as it is defined by the rights' holder and legal system, not an extremity in absolute terms like murder and rape. It's as if the mere mention of the word is moral blasphemy to you.

That's fine and I concede to the previous thread being of poor judgment. Two things to mention were that I brought up the mention of certain sites (though I didn't provide links to them) and the discussion of where to acquire them - all of which I thought were fine given that GOG uses them in some games, but arguably not, since there are nuances in the two cases that may lead to adverse results.

I understand your frustration. I was reading the thread, as well, and was kind of taken aback by the thread lock. But you have to try to understand the company as well. We all know that they're against DRM. We know that they know that we know that they use cracks in some of their games. So why would they lock the thread? As others mentioned, it probably has much to do with the legal issues surrounding cracks. Yes, the legality of those cracks can be debated, but by locking the thread, GOG is able to avoid any risks they take on by leaving everything to go on as is, including such things as negligence, promoting illegal activity, and whatnot (as I said, it's debatable but the risks exist nonetheless).

Edit: Oops, too late.

Despite what the DMCA says, using a crack is not necessarily illegal in America as suggested by this court ruling:

http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/07/23/29099.htm

"Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the (Digital Millennium Copyright Act's) anti-circumvention provision," Judge Garza wrote for the New Orleans-based court.

Terminate affiliate accounts associated with abandonware sites; then I will take that justification seriously.

why should they terminate anyone? they did not terminate the guy who said he pirates games right?
that's only when you actually can't use the program you paid for at all. even ubi's constant net connection drm is not sufficient to trigger this clause.

Who's that?