Tieing this into comics from yet another angle, it’s similar to how some stories are told with paper-thin pastiche versions of characters owned by someone else – Squadron Supreme, Marvelman, Supreme, and many others.

And yeah, if the companies are making games available in new formats, that’s a great way to satisfy the consumer desire and make new money.

I can remember the late 90s having Sony crackdown on Playstation emulators while ones for the previous console gaming generation’s Super Nintendo were widely available. It’s been interesting to see the first generation of children who grew up with gaming consoles and early pc games reach the age of nostalgia. More and more gaming companies are dusting off twenty year old properties and repackaging them for mobile phones/tablets, browsers, or as downloadable console games. I suppose there’s no way to roll back the wide distribution such games once were allowed, but game publishers are characteristically ahead of the curve compared to most other media. Who’s going to bother hunting down ways to make such ancient software run on modern equipment when you can just pay a buck or two on the device you’ve already got in front of you? No customer friction = free money.

Of course with business software, older versions sometimes just flat out don’t have the functionality or compatibility with other devices one would need and so most times aren’t worth using even if one could get them for free. It is often important to keep such software somehow so that data written in proprietary formats isn’t irrevocably lost in the future, cf. the digital dark age. Companies go bankrupt and/or can’t be relied upon to open-source their obsolete file formats (if they even remember they have them).

All of this contrasts with other media in that the rate of decay is so much slower, lessening the need for immediate preservation. The earliest decades of films and tv shows are probably much more likely to disappear (or already have decayed) than most printed works from the same time.

Ralf, I’m guessing you don’t agree with this article: http://boingboing.net/2012/01/27/software-piracy-is-vital-to-pr.html

There’s also the justification that they’re acting as a kind of archivist, “preserving” material that may otherwise be lost.

But the Amiga pirate’s stories has links to comics with the interviews iFanboy.com recently had with comic pirates. They talked about how people burned out of the pirate scene. Internal politics. The drudgery of scanning in the comics or of color-correcting them. Suddenly, the thrill of sharing and collecting becomes an albatross around the pirate’s neck.

Someone is always lined up to replace them, though. (The same could be said for comic book writing and art jobs, eh?)

( http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/01/sopa.html#comment-243072 )