GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders

Paczynski says they once hired a private investigator to find someone living off the grid in the UK. He had unknowingly inherited the rights to several games, but was super supportive of "preserving his family's legacy" when GOG tracked him down.

So, it happened once. And they hired one private investigator. Not that it isn't interesting, but why exaggerate everything?

Remaining quotes from article:

"To be perfectly honest, it's harder than we thought it would be," Paczynski explained. "What we've found out is that games and how they work has deteriorated way faster than what we thought. And we are not talking only about the game not launching. We are talking about more subtle things as well, like the game not supporting modern controllers, or the game not supporting ultra-widescreen or modern resolutions, or even a simple thing like not being able to minimise the game, which is an essential feature today."

Pacyznski says digital rights management (DRM) features are especially frustrating to circumvent, which means they're working as designed. Heck, some rather famous games are unplayable without third-party patches because of DRM — any old Xbox-to-PC that's saddled with a "Games for Windows Live" log-in comes to mind.
Pacyznski suggests that triple-A developers remove DRM from games after a few years to make life easier for future game preservationists. Of course, this will never happen because executives don't care about preserving games.

GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders
that's not exaggerating anything. it's merely saying it has happened at least once before.
- Okay, so grammatically, in perfect tense we can use plural to mention a thing that has happened at least (or exactly) once? Wouldn't using a plural imply multiple, when the known fact is singular?
- "investigators" is plural tho so that is indeed wrong

Years ago, I worked for WEA Record (Warner Bros), and one of our labels was Rhino Records, who liked to release great reissues and compilations of our-of-print albums and artists.

They did it by the book at first, getting permission from the copyright holders, who were happy to see their stuff back in print, and get royalty checks again, especially since most of them were getting older, and didn't mind an extra income stream as they headed into retirement, even if it was small.

There were some cult classics that they wanted to release, but couldn't find the copyright holders. After a while, they decided to go ahead and release that albums anyway, but put the royalties into escrow. When/if the rights holder came forward, their royalties would be waiting for them.

It seemed like a reasonable, moral way to handle the situation, unlike the way record companies usually do business, which is to just steal as much as they can, and if they get sued, bury the plaintiff in expensive litigation. Rhino Records, and the people who worked there, always seemed like a relatively honorable outfit, by comparison.

There were some cult classics that they wanted to release, but couldn’t find the copyright holders. After a while, they decided to go ahead and release that albums anyway, but put the royalties into escrow. When/if the rights holder came forward, their royalties would be waiting for them.
Yeah...
Having gone out for drinks with enough people who deal with financial fraud and the like, here is how that plays out:
Q1: Yeah, we are doing our due dilligence and all royalties go into this account
Q4: So they totally don't know we have their money, right? Would any of them miss it if we just kept it?
Q5: We've updated our royalties program and sent out letters to everyone involved to let them know if they want to opt in to our new awesome program
Q6: Oops, we now only put a fraction of the royalties into this pool and the rest go into profits
Q8: Hey, Fred is retiring. Let's just empty out the escrow account and blame it on him if anyone ever notices
- Well if you went out for drinks with people, I'm sure the record company is evil after all.
- aka the OpenAI playbook
  uh oh openai bots and ai-fanbois don't like hearing that rofls

I’m trying to buy 50% of my games on Gog because they avoir DRM and 50% on Steam because they’re great Linux supporters.

Still I can understand why Steam is ahead in terms to f sale as GOG has some progress to do.

90% of games on steam are drm free. The only "drm" for most is a single dll that loads the steam overlay and cloud API. Remove the dll and the game is drm free.
Hell most games also support just adding a txt file to the root folder with the appID which just disables the "drm".
Outside of extremely large triple A games you basically don't have a single game on steam that has mandatory drm.
- While that's true, GOG also is intended to let you download an offline installer. If GOG dies, you still have the game, as long as you saved the installer. If GOG changes the terms of their service or software, they have little leverage.
  There are ways to archive Steam games, but it's not the "normal mode of operation". If Steam dies, you probably don't have your games. If Steam's terms of service or software changes, they have a lot of leverage to force new changes through.
  Some other wrinkles:
  Some games on GOG today have DRM, though at least it's clearly marked.
  I also agree that Valve has and continues to do an enormous amount to support Linux gaming. I used Linux as my desktop back in the days when Valve wasn't doing Linux, and the gaming situation on Linux was far more limited. It's hard to overstate how radical an impact Valve's support has had.
- How do you know if a Steam game is DRM free or not?
  How do you install such games without Steam through Linux? Is it just an .exe and you click on it as I haven’t done it since probably the early 00’s?
- Where download link?
I'm more like 90/10, because GOG still refuses to port their Galaxy client to Linux. At this point I don't even really want to use it since Heroic is good enough, but it really sucks feeling like a second-class citizen, compared to Steam, which goes out of its way to provide a top tier experience on Linux. I'd even be fine with them adopting Heroic as an officially-supported client (provide links and whatnot on the website next to Galaxy), I just need some indication that they care.
Most games I own on Steam are DRM-free anyway, so I'd be supporting GOG more out of principle than anything.
- I just use lgogdownloader, which is open-source, or for a single game, the web browser.

I should support them more

https://www.gog.com/en/patrons
Launched the other day if you want to throw a bit of money to their cause
- Why not just buy a game instead? That doesn't provide as much money to GOG, but it also rewards game devs for providing DRM-free games.

ah the ol' IP PI trick

This is my time to shine

Now do Black and White

If only they could solve the rights problem with No One Lives Forever.

http://nolfrevival.tk/
No idea if safe or not.
Dammit you beat me to it!
posted the exact same thing... loved those games.

I'm just waiting for the day they get the rights to the games No One Lives Forever 1 & 2 from back in the early 2000's.

Loved those games, especially 2... 60's setting, female spy protagonist.... Excellent games.

Honestly, it might be better to just do a new, similar game in the same genre and theme. NOLF is pretty long in the tooth now. Hard to compete with current shooters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Operative:_No_One_Lives_Forever
The Operative: No One Lives Forever (abbreviated as NOLF) is a first-person shooter video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Fox Interactive, released for Windows in 2000.
That's a quarter-century ago now.
It was followed by a sequel in 2002, entitled No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way.
Almost as long.
I mean, I don't think that the actual IP from those games is necessary to make a similar game to scratch the itch.
I’m pretty sure they’ve been on GOG for a while now.
- The games are listed on GOG, basically as games that have existed but they are not available to purchase.