This reminds me of a semi-friend I knew in highschool, dude really thought he was a cool guy and everyone was always up his ass even though he was a huge jerk all of the time (like a wannabe Tosh.O kinda style). For some reason I let him borrow my WC2 Battle chest and after a few months I asked for it back and got only one disc that was so thoroughly scratched it never even registered.
Started hanging out with him like a decade later when he moved next to my bestfriend, got to tell him I thought he was a piece of shit in school because of how he treated my stuff but doubt he actually cared or really remembered.
Interestingly, had a meth head who was visiting my roommate for some drugs (had taken shit from our place in the past) who borrowed one of my vhs sets while I was at work (was thoroughly pissed thinking it was gone forever), he brought it back the next day and had even wiped down and fixed the broken flap on the box. I try not to judge people borrowing stuff because of that and only let people borrow items I'm ok with losing and wouldn't sour a relationship over.
I modded my Wii and loaded the sucker w/ n64 emu, ds emu, gc emu & practically the whole catalogue of games to follow suit. 3 years later and I've only ever played Animal Crossing and Bionicle Heroes...
and then we all decided optical disks aren’t as easy as little thumb drives.
I just couldn't watch The Hobbit on linux, i guess because the new keys used aren't leaked yet (Video too new) or my drive (running a whole fuking VM) is too new, who knows?
Now imagine what they would've done with thumb drives? Just a remember; SSD are still running a blackbox firmware emulating a HDD.
Only if your backup (or restore) process circumvents the DRM. But, yes, fuck the DMCA.
On that subject, copyright is a broken system, and I don't think anyone should feel compelled to participate in it anymore. You should try to compensate creators, but copyright theft is just the norm for corporations now (not just LLMs either, legal fictions have let Disney justify not paying on some of their licenses) so you do you.
Brass cleaner, a microfiber cloth, and some elbow grease can fix any scratched disc. Apply liberally, rub in a circular, outward motion (against the "grain", i.e. against the pits where the data stream is stored). Repeat until disc works again.
I had a friend who didn't take very good care of his games. When the game would stop loading, he'd let me keep it. They always came back to life using the Brasso technique. Got to enjoy a lot of free Xbox games thanks to him. Halo 2 was an especially memorable experience. My brother and I got many years of entertainment out of that one.
This is why I refused my mom lending out my dvd. She get mad, forgetting she taught me not loan out your stuff. She had huge VHS collection and now and then someone would borrow one and never return it.
I'm a 40-something year old man now but your comment gave me flashbacks to my childhood stuff getting destroyed by the kids of my mother's friends, who she would just let "borrow" my shit.
My friends actually took good care of borrowed CDs. My older brother, on the other hand... One time I handed him down a PSOne (back in 2006 i think, he was never big in videogames, but he played once in a while) - the dense fucker kept a thesaurus on top because he couldn't figure how to close the lid (there was a small, bumpy part next to the open button, you had to press the lid there so it'd click close). That almost fucked the actual clicky thing