Thread: Albion - legality advice needed
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lukash is offline lukash
2010-04-10 , 09:56
Posts: 111 | Thanked: 110 times | Joined on Mar 2010
#9
Originally Posted by mmurfin87 View Post
Albion was owned by Blue Byte Software which was purchased by Ubisoft in 2001. Ubisoft owns the copyright to the game and downloading it off the internet without paying for it is illegal.

That said, there is NOTHING illegal about making a program that will install a "valid" copy of Albion to your n900. By valid I mean that the user MUST provide !!!!! ALL !!!!! Albion files and your program just installs those files to the n900.

Since your goal seems to be to make it easy for the user to install it, your best bet to do this and stay legal is to make a program that takes a valid CD or .iso file and install it, but make the user provide that file or cd. Then any copyright infringement is placed on the user.
That's not a bad idea... except that the N900 has no CD-ROM drive The ISO is a bad idea because not only would the user have to create it (more work) but I would also have to make dependencies on packages to read it and go through that extra work myself too.

Also, I'm not sure what's involved in making it work with just the CD (I can't test it as I said), but the original instructions (for GP2X) say you need to install the game on your PC (on linux you'd need dosbox, on windows it may work natively, not sure), copy the files over and change a path in a configuration file. And I'm not sure what version of the game is on the CD, maybe you'd need to patch it to get the latest one. A lot of things can go wrong here and I'm not very patient in providing support unfortunately..

Or you can just download it, rename one file and it works (that could be done automatically, unlike the above).

So you see that no legal owner would want to go through all that hassle with the CD when there is so much easier way...

Also note I am myself (not sure about Maemo in general) only interested in EU laws, I don't care about the US ones... I'm not sure if its different or not.. So providing a downloader even with a disclaimer would be illegal, in EU too?