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Has anyone else noticed this explosion of content!?


Trinity

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https://archive.org/details/@sketch_the_cow&tab=uploads

I was just sort of messing around on Archive this evening and happened to notice a few new issues of Gamefan that has been uploaded. Going through it all, this guy/gal had uploaded VIRTUALLY EVERY ISSUE OF GAMEFAN back on Valentine's Day! He/she has also uploaded a bunch of Gamer's Republic, Play and others! Just sift through what this guy/gal has uploaded in the past two months, it's unbelievable! Anyway, I know GF isn't allowed here, but I thought I'd mention this for anyone interested. Between Archive, here and Old Game Magazine's(Kiwi's World) and Gamefan, EGM and GamePro, my retro-gaming magazine dreams have come true! :)

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5 hours ago, Trinity said:

https://archive.org/details/@sketch_the_cow&tab=uploads

I was just sort of messing around on Archive this evening and happened to notice a few new issues of GameFan that has been uploaded. Going through it all, this guy/gal had uploaded VIRTUALLY EVERY ISSUE OF GameFan back on Valentine's Day! He/she has also uploaded a bunch of Gamer's Republic, Play and others! Just sift through what this guy/gal has uploaded in the past two months, it's unbelievable! Anyway, I know GF isn't allowed here, but I thought I'd mention this for anyone interested. Between Archive, here and Old Game Magazine's(Kiwi's World) and GameFan, EGM and GamePro, my retro-gaming magazine dreams have come true! :)

I'm glad for you that you found some things you like.  It's a shame Sketch the Cow doesn't say where they steal their scans from so we could give credit where credit is due.  Well, I mean, we already know where a bunch of them came from (hint: it rhymes with "metronags").   Hell, some of the magazines they've uploaded were mags I scanned myself.  But alas, Mr or Mrs Cow doesn't bother utilizing the "scanner" field when uploading mags, so aside from the issues such as ours that still have the Retromags credit page attached to the end, it can be hard to discern where they originally came from.

So go ahead and download Gamefan or whatever else if you like - it doesn't really matter if you download it from the original source or from a mirror site like archive.org.  But please don't think "Sketch the Cow" had anything to do with scanning or editing the mags they posted, and for god's sake, don't go overboard thanking them for their "efforts."  You should, however, feel free to drop Mr./Mrs. Cow a line asking where they originally found the files so you can thank those people properly.

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Well, listen man, I hate to do it to you..but it goes back to my whole "people have scans of Gamefan and are too scared to post them" thoughts from a while back. This guy wasn't scared to do it, and if he'd of contacted me, I'd of posted them for him. Hell, I am going to convert them to CBZ and add them to my Archive.org collection just to have a backup in case his stuff ever gets pulled.

Now, for the other stuff, like Play or Gamers' Republic that you guys do scan and post, that he has managed to gank from this site, I can see and support what you're saying. A lot of them look like the "r"(I'm assuming it stands for "review") versions, which makes me wonder how he got a hold of all these in the first place.

At any rate, I didn't mean to bring up a sore subject; I just saw and started downloading before running into issues where I could tell how/where he was acquiring them.

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:lol: The only thing that bothers me about what you're saying is the suggestion that anyone, anywhere, is afraid to post magazine scans.  Trust me, fear is not EVEN a factor.  We don't post them here simply because that's our policy.  Just as we don't post mags scanned by other sites, which is similarly against policy.  But NO ONE cares if those mags get posted somewhere else, and many of us are grateful when they are.  The only thing keeping anyone from posting them anywhere else is indifference or laziness.  I personally have no interest in magazines about video games, but if we were asked to remove one of our computer game mags from our site, I'd probably upload them to archive.org myself to make sure they remained available.

Nothing I said in my first reply has changed.  I understand that you're grateful to this guy for uploading some mags you didn't already have.  But please be aware that this guy didn't make those scans - he got them from somewhere, and probably from somewhere that still exists online right this minute.  So rather than thank him, it makes more sense to ask him where he found them, so you can thank those people instead.

Also, btw, the "r" you see on some of those issues taken from Retromags actually means "rescan."  Those are all issues scanned years and years ago when our quality standards were less strict.  They no longer meet the standards of our site and have been flagged with an R to remind us that they are in need of a rescan.

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Well, and I feel bad, I don't mean to paint you into a corner here..but if we were to ask the guy to post where he got said scans, would you be comfortable if he put "Retro Mags" for the Gamefan and other scans? That's where the fear thing comes in to play. I mean, Dave won't care if you're not hosting them here, he's just going to be pissed to see that they're out there being distributed. Now, it's important to note that I'm not mocking you for being mindful, as RM would have a lot to lose if Dave were to come calling.

How about this: When I convert and post them all as CBZ/CBR, do you want me to put "Retro Mags" as the scanner? If not, and you want credit given, who should be credited?

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7 hours ago, Trinity said:

Well, and I feel bad, I don't mean to paint you into a corner here..but if we were to ask the guy to post where he got said scans, would you be comfortable if he put "Retro Mags" for the GameFan and other scans? That's where the fear thing comes in to play. I mean, Dave won't care if you're not hosting them here, he's just going to be pissed to see that they're out there being distributed. Now, it's important to note that I'm not mocking you for being mindful, as RM would have a lot to lose if Dave were to come calling.

How about this: When I convert and post them all as CBZ/CBR, do you want me to put "Retro Mags" as the scanner? If not, and you want credit given, who should be credited?

First of all, very few of those GameFan issues came from Retromags.  We stopped scanning them a long long time ago when Dave asked us to.  I don't know where they came from - which is sort of the point.  I'd like to know, if only to be able to acknowledge whoever it is for their efforts.  What I DO know is that the guy who uploaded them to archive.org is not the person who created the files, so I see no need to thank them for anything.  They obviously come to our site (if just to take our scans), so they could have just as easily (moreso, actually) posted a link in our forums to wherever they found the mags in the first place, thus saving themselves the trouble of uploading everything to archive.org and also allowing us to acknowledge whoever is actually responsible for scanning them.  If they truly are unavailable anywhere else on the interwebs, then I suppose they do deserve some thanks for making them available again, though it's still a bit dickish of them to not acknowledge where they came from.

But again, you bring up this complete non-factor of "fear."  Trust me, no one here or anywhere else is afraid of Dave.  We used to host Gamefan.  He asked us not to (which is within his legal rights to do.)  At that point, we had two options.  One, say "OK, sure Dave.  We'll take them down."  Or two, "@#$% you, Dave.  We'll do what we want with your mag."  We chose not to be assholes.  Not out of fear, just because...well, we don't want to be assholes.  Some people have no problem with being assholes.  For example the type of person who mass uploads other people's files without acknowledging where they came from.  And there are places for those people and their files, but there's no room for them here.  And that's fine.  The world needs a few assholes to keep things interesting.  :) And as a result, anyone who's interested has access to Gamefan.  There have been Gamefan issue available at archive.org for quite a while now, and now there are even more.  Everyone wins but Dave, and I guess that's his problem.  If he was able to force their removal, I have to assume he would have done it a long time ago.  Perhaps he asked archive to take them down as he did with us, and found out that in life there are people who respect your wishes, and there are people who don't.  C'est la vie.

To be honest, there isn't much need for us to be acknowledged by this guy uploading our files, since he isn't actually removing our credit page from the end.  Anybody who reads to the last page knows the file came from Retromags.  But the origins of the other stuff he's uploaded are harder to discern, since Kiwi's World and wherever those GameFans came from don't put any identification on their files (which is too bad, in my opinion, as it makes it easier to tell different scans of the same mag apart.)

I'm not exactly sure what mags you're talking about uploading, but I assume you're strictly talking about Gamefan, since there isn't much point in uploading stuff that's already available to download here.  And like I said, very few of those GameFans came from us, and none of them have been available here for years.  So seeing as how they aren't hosted here and haven't been for a very long time, it doesn't make much sense to credit Retromags as the source.  If the actual scanner was known then crediting them would be fine, but we don't include that info anywhere in the scan, and that information is no longer in our database, so it might be hard/impossible to do so.

 

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The guy I have been dealing with, as far as I can tell, is the actual scanner and he was exceptionally clear about keeping his name off the interweb. He also gave me the name of the staff member he acquired the digital files from and I have no reason to doubt him.

His scans are a little rough as he was pushing them out as fast as he could scan them. I've been editing the Gamers Republic issues before putting them online as I prefer mags a little more refined but heck, the fact I have every issue of Play, Gamers Republic and the Gamefan's is somewhat of a miracle to be honest, so I am stoked. Even if no-one else ever scans them at least they are available in eminently readable condition. Big high five to this dude IMHO. :notworthy:

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I've never read a single issue of any of those titles and probably never will, but I thank him in principle.:P

Not sure what he's worried about with having his name appear online, though.  Unless you mean actual actual name, and not just whatever stupid screen name we all use (privacy is no joke these days).  You could even make up a new screen name just for your uploads if you're concerned about any of your friends finding out you're a nerd who still reads video game magazines.

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9 hours ago, KiwiArcader said:

The guy I have been dealing with, as far as I can tell, is the actual scanner and he was exceptionally clear about keeping his name off the interweb. He also gave me the name of the staff member he acquired the digital files from and I have no reason to doubt him.

His scans are a little rough as he was pushing them out as fast as he could scan them. I've been editing the Gamers Republic issues before putting them online as I prefer mags a little more refined but heck, the fact I have every issue of Play, Gamers Republic and the Gamefan's is somewhat of a miracle to be honest, so I am stoked. Even if no-one else ever scans them at least they are available in eminently readable condition. Big high five to this dude IMHO. :notworthy:

He's right to be scared too; Dave will come after whoever he can find, trust me on that one.

Now, as to why he and Game Informer seem to throw fits over distributing old issues of magazines they themselves refuse to sell or make available, I don't know. Game Informer, I can live with out. It has always been, and will always be a magazine they gave away damn-near-free with purchases at FuncoLand. The first few years were alright, but like every other mag they just became a shill rag for Sony later on. Gamefan, on the other hand, was solid all the way through. Granted, we had to put up with Monkey Boy Rox and his blatant bashing of anything non-Sony, but the rest of the staff really seemed to give everyone else a solid shot. It was definitely the only place to find quality Sega coverage. Now, I have almost every issue of Gamefan, the actual mag, as I did EGM and GamePro, but I am tired of lugging around 80lb boxes of mags everywhere I move to, and it's nice to have my entire collection on a portable HDD or bits of it on tablets, phones, etc. Gamefan was the last holdout in terms of finding them digitially. I honestly don't care where Sketch "stole" them from, I am with Marktrade in that it's for the good of the community that they are now available.

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2 hours ago, Trinity said:

He's right to be scared too; Dave will come after whoever he can find, trust me on that one.

A bunch of those Gamefans have been available at archive.org for over two years now.  Surely Dave can't be the last to know if he's as tenacious in defending his rights as you claim?

2 hours ago, Trinity said:

I honestly don't care where Sketch "stole" them from, I am with Marktrade in that it's for the good of the community that they are now available.

This is where we disagree and is my only vested interest in this entire conversation.  I don't care that Sketch uploads other people's mags.  From what I can tell, he uploads them as is and doesn't butcher them like Sega Retro/Retro CDN, so he's essentially doing nothing more than creating mirrors (albeit in PDF form).  I have no problem with that.

What bothers me is that by not acknowledging in any way where the scans came from, it perpetuates the "I could care less where they came from" attitude that you and frankly most of the members of "the community" have.  The ungrateful "gimme gimme" attitude, if you will.  As someone who contributes hours of their time every single day to this site, it bothers me that "the community" is basically 99% mute leechers.  It's why members of our site like TOLUST are so awesome.  That guy doesn't download most of the mags I scan, since he doesn't have any interest in Japanese mags.  But whenever he downloads someone else's scan of EGM or Gamepro or what have you, he always makes a point to say thank you.  It's such a simple act of courtesy, and yet it's so rare in this "community" that he stands out as exceptional for doing so.  Hell, go to that dude's profile and check his content - he's got around 200 posts and damn near all of them are thank you notes :lol:  That's amazing!

According to Kiwi, the guy scanning GameFan wants to remain anonymous.  That's cool, that's his choice.  But if I was going to upload his scans to archive.org or anywhere else, how hard would it be to include a note like "the scanner of these mags wishes to remain anonymous, but big thanks go out for making these available!"?

The actual truth is that there are two communities.  A large community of leechers who get a personal satisfaction every time something new is made available that they can download, and a much much smaller community of people actually involved in keeping this hobby alive who get satisfaction from seeing any kind of contribution, whether it benefits them personally or not, including not just new scans, but also database contributions, forum posts, or just clicking the "thanks" button when downloading an issue.  Sketch's uploads benefit the larger community, but it's for the benefit of the smaller community that credit should be given, because it's only that smaller community that is going to go to the trouble of being thankful to the ones contributing.  I like to know who is providing content so that I know who to thank.  It's as simple as that.

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10 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

A bunch of those Gamefans have been available at archive.org for over two years now.  Surely Dave can't be the last to know if he's as tenacious in defending his rights as you claim?

Some rogue issues on something like Archive.org isn't going to get a whole lot of views, or notice(just look at the total views on any given issues I have up). Now, on the other hand, the entire run of the magazine(minus a few issues from volume 6) will, especially when it's already on Archive and will soon be everywhere else(just wait for some jerkoff site like "Kotaku" to post about it). It's a good thing it's on Archive.org, because he'll have a harder time getting them pulled. I don't know what to make of this mocking of his "tenaciousness" as this site has run in to it, Kiwi is smart enough to know to avoid it and the guy making the scans refuses to give any name at all as to totally duck it. Watch, when it gets out that the whole run of GF is now online, he will come knocking. It's a moot point, though, as now that it's out he can only cry so much before he runs out of tears and gives up his "no one deserves to bask in my greatness" crusade.

As for the mooching and whatnot, I can agree with you. I've had entire sections of my website stolen and used for others' monetary gain. It my younger years it upset me, but as I've gone on you just sort of have to accept the fact that once you release something to the net, it belongs to the net. You can't really expect everyone out there to go digging to find the source of whatever they're watching/reading/downloading/etc. If the person who took the work and distributed it without crediting the source..dems da breaks.

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3 minutes ago, Trinity said:

Some rogue issues on something like Archive.org isn't going to get a whole lot of views, or notice(just look at the total views on any given issues I have up). Now, on the other hand, the entire run of the magazine(minus a few issues from volume 6) will, especially when it's already on Archive and will soon be everywhere else(just wait for some jerkoff site like "Kotaku" to post about it). It's a good thing it's on Archive.org, because he'll have a harder time getting them pulled. I don't know what to make of this mocking of his "tenaciousness" as this site has run in to it, Kiwi is smart enough to know to avoid it and the guy making the scans refuses to give any name at all as to totally duck it. Watch, when it gets out that the whole run of GF is now online, he will come knocking. It's a moot point, though, as now that it's out he can only cry so much before he runs out of tears and gives up his "no one deserves to bask in my greatness" crusade.

Yes, but again, you're overselling Dave's "dangerousness."  We didn't take down GameFan because we were served a court order by Dave and his crack prosecution team, we did it because it's our policy to do so if asked by the rights-holders, and Dave asked for them to be removed.  Did he ask politely?  Doesn't matter.  Our policy doesn't specify that we only respect the rights and wishes of people who are polite, it applies to anyone.

If he had pursued legal action, I imagine they would be down already.  Our good friend Sketch took Retromags' entire collection of Nintendo Power a while back and uploaded it at archive.  Nintendo lodged a complaint, and they were removed.  I really don't think archive or anyone else was or is in danger of being sued by anyone, so long as they comply with removing content at the owner's request (a la our policy.)  Archive.org or whoever uploads to it isn't the one taking a chance - it's the guy who scanned the mags in the first place.  Not because he's in legal danger, but because the mags he spent so much time scanning might not be able to have a permanent home anywhere.  Which is again, why THAT'S the guy who deserves our thanks and appreciation.

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