I hope so, as I bought this in error (dlc) and I'm abandoning it in the hopes that it serves some purpose for someone, somewhere, at any point in time!

DLC: Drox Operative: Invasion of the Ancients: 5ACDF-4FEF3-89DC8-D1D8B

Naturally it requires the base game before you can claim the DLC, meaning i can't redeem it (yet)...

I know, sorry, I purchased it in error and found out afterwards... When I'm having a few, dlc means "drink less cognac"!

Jebus, why are you dropping codes in a discussion thread? There are places for that shit. People drop their trash anywhere these days.

Enjoy, and if it doesn't apply to you each and every time that things are not to your liking, try to grow a bit.

The world has many things in it, and if not your way, or mine, grow up a bit and allow for a world that exists outside of yourself.

To the word of the law? NEVER!
Technically, practically, piratically? YES yes yes, ALWAYS!

At first 28 years does seem a little short. But when you think about it that does more than adequately cover the vast majority of copyrightable material. Do you know if there was an upper limit to how long the copyright period could be extended? Or was it purely a matter of sending out the applications every 28 years?

Back then you got one extension and most folks never bothered to get that extension. I think it's like 80% of the things being kept back from the public domain were never the subject of an extension. Or at least 80% of the things that were registered to begin with. It's probably even worse if you consider all the things that were never registered.

Consider the fact that most of the things covered under copyright are just not valuable much beyond that time. Most books make their money back within a few months or never will. Movies likewise are rarely profitable if they haven't made their cost back within the first year.

There probably are some works that require longer periods of time to become profitable, but so much is just not relevant a decade later. Just look at all those "awesome" TV shows from the '80s which are barely watchable now.

The whole point of copyright, at least in the US, is to enrich the public domain so that the creators can turn a profit on them in the short term. A lot of things like Movies and games wouldn't be profitable otherwise. But, any of those things that need more than 28 years to pay themselves off are probably not going to do it in 56 or a hundred years either.

The copyrights are set the way they are so that corporations like Disney can continue to demand payment for things they did decades before. Increasingly decades before their target audience was even born.

I enjoy referencing this video...

A real problem with copyright is that it's based probably more on something that can easily be duplicated in bulk vs one at a time. Paintings hold no copyright because you make and sell one and only one painting. People who make takes and chairs can't claim copyright on them, and instead sell them individually as they are made, so it's a 1:1 ratio of work. Music and Books had to be copied by hand and took a very long time.

With the coming of the printed press, someone could create a book, then have it copied a thousand times very quickly, and sell those off for a profit, only having to write it once. Movies, music, media, games, digital art, etc, these all go on the same idea that it's easy to duplicate and thereby copyright is more relevant because it's much easier to make a profit by mass production or ease of copying 1:1.

But seriously, the relevance of the material quickly goes out. Within 3 years books are usually out of print when you're buying physical copies, games they stop producing after like 6 months, and the relevancy of a game is the lifetime of the system, or generally it seems 5 years. Same for just about everything else...

Man, that video sure depressed me :(

Um, paints have a copyright, virtually every form of expression has copyright. The only exceptions are things that aren't recorded. So, you can't copyright performances, just the recordings of the performance.

Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci was before copyright started, and long before technology could capture such performances or before the printed press or copy machines, but if you wanted a painting you got a painting, not a replica or items made in bulk. Yes everyone honored his work because like an artist, he signed his work to mark it as his (which we could then identify), but he didn't make money years and years after he sold his painting... Or am i wrong?

The idea of copyright is a nice thing, but it's current perverted form is an ugly mass of festering bile. It's not to stimulate creative works, but to punish anyone for being creative on anything halfway resembling someone else's work, or prevent another's work entirely because copyrighted items never go into the public domain anymore. Only corporations have anything to gain by long copyrights, milking them long after the creators of such works is long dead...

This is the real problem. We now have rights holders who profit off work they weren't involved in. Copyright should protect the creators of a work, not someone who bought out a studio the creators once worked for in 1986.

Abandonware = Giant fuzzy gray/grey area of doom.

The way I see it, there are cases where one can actually claim abandonware. Not exactly often, but the failings of services like the Virtual Console have made me more open to the terms under what one can claim as.

To clarify, I set a few easy criteria.

DAZZLE, an old DOS screensaver is true abandonware, seeing as not only had it been out of print for over a decade and its code untouched since the 90s, but in 2008, the company that had made it, Worldwide Microtronics went through a tax defunct and ceased to be. Abandoned in every sense of the word.

The original Exile Trilogy, of whom the Avernum Hexology is a remake of is living abandonware, openly acknowledged as having reached the end of its software compatibility, and trying to recode it to add compatibility probably isn't worth Jeff's time. It is soft abandoned, in that the company is still alive, and there is code that is actively touched (Blades of Exile has source code).

Then there comes the absolute 'fuzzy grey area'. The company is alive, but the game is out of print and unsupported. But the problem is, the company doesn't care that they have the right to a sparkling gem. Like say in the case of so many properties obtained in mergers, acquisitions, or working on a second party basis. This mostly pertains to the area of console games.

Or a company somehow managing to acquire the rights, like Bethesda getting Fallout from Interplay, when Bethesda just got permission to make use of the franchise to make Fallout 3.