If the crackers didn't pass their work to anyone, it wouldn't get out there... So I very much doubt they are as innocent in distribution of their "work" than you make it sound.
Likewise, these statements are just as flimsy as those on ROM sites where they claim you "must delete a ROM within 24 hours if you don't own it". It's just a lame attempt at trying wriggle out of any legal responsibility that their actions may have. If they really felt so highly of the games and the related developers, then they wouldn't make the cracks in the first place (or at least not until the game is several years old and actually in need of one).
But no. Let's be honest here, they only make cracks in an attempt to get "fame" at being the first to do so and then invariably "leak" their cracks out to wherever so that others can use it.

if the developers of a game use a crack to crack their own game then i call that irony.
I mean the original crackers had to reverse engineer and violate copyright in order to create a cracked exe in the first place. so a developer then using their that cracked exe in their own product wouldnt technically be violating any laws. kind of like if you watch a thief break into your car and then you go ahead and break into your car just for the heck if it... it might make you look like a goose but its not illegal or immoral
secondly im sure all contracts that GOG have with the software publishers/developers explicitly say that all product must be drm free. knowing this im sure the publishers wouldnt have a problem with the product being cracked by the gog team if they were too lazy to provide drm free versions themselves.
thirdly.. your paying for the right to use the game.. cracked or not.. if you buy it off a store shelf or through gog your still purchasing the legitimate right to use the software and sending money back to the publishers so they can make more games. if you download cracked torrent files your not supporting anyone and potentially risking having the copyright nazis chase you down..

Note that most RPGDot content can still be accessed via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Why buy here ?

1. Reverse engineering software to create a crack isn't illegal so long as you don't intend to create additional copies of the software to distribute. As most countries give the right to "modify software as much as needed for personal use".
2. The aforementioned modifications belong to the copyright holders regardless of who made them, so the companies are well within their rights to use the cracks.
3. Agreed, downloading the software for free or buying an extra copy someone made is like buying a book that has had it's cover removed (reported unsold and destroyed) from a book store, the people who deserve the money for the product get none while the people who are merely selling it keep the profits.

Hmm, I've had a lot of trouble getting some of the games working on my own without a floppy drive....oh wait, do you mean pirated copies?

Yeah pirated copies... just like the one sold here.

GOG obviously sells Arcanum with the publishers permission. Whether they use a crack is merely a matter of pragmatism. Why spend time building a copy protection free version when the work has already been done for you years ago by some cracker. And the crack was used by a lot of people, so it's been tested. All for free.

Which is why Abandonware sites serve a very important role in preserving these games. If EA were to sign up with GOG one of the first titles GOG will ask for is System Shock, if EA have 'lost' it somehow then they probably would simply download it from an Abandonware site and they will probably take any hacked .exe as well. Then of course the Abandonware site would have to take down that very download and provide a link where the game can now be bought.
Sure I can see why people who frequent these sites would be appalled by this but at the end of the day EA are within their rights to do it after all EA never released the game as Freeware and never consented to having it distributed like this.

Actually I agree that in most countries modifying an exe for personal use would not be considered a violation of the law.. however as soon as you take that modified exe and then upload it for other people to use then technically you are publishing a copyrighted work without the owners permission. Now the modified portion of the exe which the cracker created could be considered under copyright however the rest of the exe is still protected under copyright law also and owned by the original publisher.
so a cracker would have a hard time trying to sue a publisher for using their works and yet a publisher would find it much easier to prove that the cracker took their work and distributed it without consent. in the vast magority of cases the EULA of software will have provisions in it which state that you are in clear violation of the terms of use if you try to circumvent the DRM protection.
im am not advocating that this is how copyright law should work merely stating the facts.
I think the vast majority of publishers do not try to prevent the illegal distribution of their older (10 year+) products because its far too costly to police and also those older products do work as a form of free advertising for their newer products. I know plenty of people who have played pirated older versions of games only to go out and buy the latest one because they wanted to see the developers make more games and because they knew they were getting a quality product that they would enjoy.
there is nothing worse than spending $60 dollars or so on a brand new release only to find out that its a buggy dud piece of sh$t... this is what I find appealing about GOG the fact that you can wait till the games are so cheap that it doesnt even matter if you dont enjoy it all that much because you only paid a bag of peanuts for it.
by the way GOG fix your image verification on posts its only works half the time piece of crap....

Log in, rather than posting anonymously, and there is no image verification. That also makes it more likely that someone will take the time to reply to your post. When you post anonymously, you can't see if anyone has quoted you, and so you are much less likely to notice. This, in turn, makes it more unlikely that anyone will bother to reply to what you have to say.

So you're saying that... cracks are bad because if they weren't bad then they wouldn't exist in the first place? That entire argument is a meaningless tautology.

I think you need to reread what I wrote.

Thats my point. It's neither illegal or immoral for EA in my example to take the downloaded binary and the cracked no-cd patch and then pass that on to GOG while flipping the finger to the people who uploaded and cracked it in the first place. It is exploiting it but they are doing nothing wrong by doing it. If Activision did indeed take the no-cd and pass that on to GOG then they haven't done anything wrong. The .exe belongs to Activision modified or not.