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tcaud

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  1. The closest precedent we have to this is the case of the ROM managers, which mainstreamed emulation and began drawing the attention of game companies to piracy. History shows that when something becomes "mainstream" it begins disrupting existing macro behavioral patterns (particularly economic ones). This is definitely disruptive technology. One additional thing I don't understand: why not just add tags to the images already in the Retromags gallery? I mean it's kind of arrogant to just appropriate other people's work by starting your own independent thing when there's already something going and the leadership isn't being particularly abrasive. You can't play the preservation card because the preservation community is already established and the courts will expect you to obey its norms. That means not turning a profit with these scans. Make sure you ask Marktrade, KitsunieB, and Kiwi before using any of their scans. Kiwi in particular has his own competing effort which he takes very seriously. Those Videogame Preservation Project scans probably also have their own terms attached. The safest thing you can do is simply go to Patreon and ask for money... few will trust you if you use ads because your income won't be verifiable (among other reasons). You will have to work to earn my trust... I expect you to use Retromags' scans and IA folkscanomy to get things going, then when your Alexa ranking is up and people start to pay attention you make a deal with the publishers to get a license and buy out or replace the scans by people who object to your deal making ...this is exactly what I assess your intentions to be. I don't believe for a second your motives are altruistic. Not for a moment.
  2. If you're running on one of the big 10 hosts then you might want to check the TOS. They don't like image galleries on their servers. I think there's a lot of risk in making the data in these mags more accessible. It becomes more valuable which invites copyright claims where before it is aggregated it's seen as more benign and personal, "preservation". (lol like you don't know that, obviously you do). I'm not faulting you for your app, tho I wonder why you didn't just make a Github page for it to demo it. Requests aren't the issue, bandwidth is. I'm not surprised that Retromags has remained mostly obscure, because looking for specific game ads/reviews is something akin to looking thru a needle in a haystack (and most of the ads and reviews for the big games have already been extracted by fans and posted to the relevant CDNs) but yeah I'm not so naive as to think this particular service wouldn't just explode in popularity because the games in question are still being sold or at least available. Whatever, I didn't make the scans so not my problem. It's just my 2 cents. I was planning to introduce an app to ease translation of the Japanese mags, which will probably get less crowd attention on account of this one.
  3. So someone figured out how to monetize this stuff. I guess it was inevitable as the pool of data grew and the sense of it being copy-left-for-dead gained traction. On the internet someone will always find a way to make a fortune from the tidbits and tatters of other people's individual, seemingly worthless efforts. It would take a while to inventory the popular games, but eventually the site would have astronomical bandwidth costs. Hundreds of thousands of dollars at least, image galleries aren't cheap to run and a reviews site as such would be going head-to-head with Metacritic etc. A non-profit like this could never make it in the cloud... would need a privately hosted server with several dedicated lines, else the site would die as soon as Kotaku wrote about it. Better leave NP out of it. Nintendo is very serious about their IP (unless you intend to bribe them). Official Playstation also. There is also the issue that the very copyrighted content of the mags themselves is now newly viable and presumably valuable. Contributors of scans should also be consulted individually, because they offered their work under the expectation that the scans would be packaged as whole mags, and even the belief it wouldn't be heavily monetized. I always expected that GOG would end up owning these scans before the end. This is probably how that outcome develops, because there's no way in hell a Patreon of casual users could keep this online.
  4. I have an idea to increase participation by using a scan quality ratings system. Basically, users would be encouraged to scan mags after which the pages would go in an editorial queue. An editor would rate each page for scan quality using an agreed-upon set of criterion. Users could browse pages that needed work, download them, edit and upload for additional review.
  5. As a child I remember having Consumer Guide's Hot Tips for Nintendo strategy guide, which I got at the Scholastic Book Fair. Also I remember umpteen Final Fantasy VII guides by various authors, and in the 80s I remember reading a strategy guide for Zelda 2 and Kid Icarus (among other games) which had hand drawn maps instead of screenshots. Anyone remember it / what it was called?
  6. In the copyright thread I discussed holding companies. I've had both psychology and business classes in college... I know what I'm talking about. Archive.org's status is untested... they recently uploaded a ton of old games for PC and console, including some that are on Nintendo VC. It was a really risky move that will probably get them attention from rights holders at some point. History suggests copyright reclaimation comes as a wave: some guy writes an article about how copyright is sacroscant, and points the finger against the easiest target, and all of a sudden the beuracracy of said target grows and becomes rigid, and things start disappearing. This was how Wikipedia lost its freedom: someone wrote an article about how long the Sonic and Pokemon articles were and about how this was supposedly a bad thing, and then came the Wikia drama and massive content deletions/removals. Attitudes are fickle, and usually reflect the will of the most shrill voice and the deepest pocket. The demise of megaupload and now rapidshare has resulted in lost access to many, many book scans, most of which are now lost to the internet. Is anyone going to collect/scan those books again? Probably not. Things really do disappear from the net, particularly when interest wanes and generations pass. Archive.org is growing now but it'll reach its limits and when it does it'll be looking to prune and the more conservative voices will determine what disappears and what doesn't. Anything of prospective commercial value (like magazine ebooks) will either be deleted or be restricted to historians. Ziff Davis has put up all the issues for PC Mag from like 86 to 2000, but if you think Google will still be hosting them ten or even five years from now you're probably mistaken. If you put your faith in Archive.org, consider it faith misplaced.
  7. It would make sense for there to be some kind of economy around this. I think there is considerable demand for scanlation, but how to manage and finance it? There are people who are willing to sponsor ("pay for") work, and there are people who won't or can't. Both sides find reward in their respective behaviors, so why not just concentrate on meeting the demand regardless of the particulars? Retromags seems to me something of a time limited project/enterprise unless it finds a way to grow, and the path to growth is scanlation. Scanlation is the last archival frontier. It is economically realistic and opportune: even if per-nation demand is low, on a world wide per-major language scale demand is huge. Scanlation will increase competition and result in more varied and sophisticated product overall. Rights holders are likely to be receptive, and I and many others are hopeful that Retromags will evolve in this direction.
  8. You must be joking. New Years, not Xmas, unless you want to be relentlessly derided on Twitter and possibly hacked...
  9. I don't think it's really an issue. Trademark has largely usurped copyright as the primary means of protection anyhow. Even if Disney's character copyrights expire, you still won't be able to use them because trademark is forever unless renewal lapses. If you really want change, you reform trademark law, not copyright. Fiction franchises are protected by both copyright law, which protects the relationships between the characters, and trademark law, which protects the world's elements including the characters. I do think reformers were right to criticize Disney for lobbying for the extension bill, because Disney clearly saw the extension of copyright as a barrier/distraction to reform of trademark law, which is their true fear. The danger with copyright comes with copyrighted products being seen as necessary. Then the copyrighted product becomes an institution in itself, a source of power and constraint on opportunity, because requisite goods always have priority over non-requisite goods. People buy the necessary good at whatever price is offered, giving its producer all the wealth. I would cite Adobe's graphics suite as an example of such a good: it's hugely expensive and a barrier to entry for entreprenuers, but many professionals won't join an effort that doesn't have access to it. Adobe makes use of software patents to prevent cloning attempts. This brings us to patents, which are the -real- thorn in the side of innovation in our times. Patents are particularly obstructive when there are two strongly competing parties which juxtapose themselves against each other using competing, opposite technologies. Many of the problems people have with copyright are of their own making. They develop attachments to copyrighted works and grow accustomed to living in their context, and so lose their intellectual and emotional independence. They become slaves to the machine by their will, and then complain about their slavery. Independent people don't complain about copyright because they are able to find value in alternatives which offer better value. Patents are another story: the best methods are always those most easily understood by the brain, and once those methods are seized, it becomes very expensive to create practical alternatives. I do think the sale of rights somewhat a negative, because it means that people can be bullied into giving up their IP and independence. The development of holding companies, which focus on obtaining IP, is discouraging innovation from taking hold and concentrating wealth; this along with increased automation is creating growing unemployment and technological misdirection. I think much of the scholarly attention to IP reform is on that point, of it being one means to weaking the 1%.
  10. You'd have a lot more interest from people wanting to donate if you arranged a system for compensating acquirers for their expenses (might even get Archive.org on board). You could have a system in place to match acquirers with opportunities, to get the lowest price they are willing to pay. The system would arrange their automatic reimbursement via e-deposit (once the funds were available). With such a system in place you'd have an advantage over collectors at market level.
  11. I don't understand the logic of 200-400MB magazines in any case (unless they are 90s era PC mags with hundreds of pages). I do understand the need to have those highly detailed scans on hand for preservation purposes (although they might be better served in the Smithsonian), but I don't see what use casual readers have for them. At 720p they look much bigger than in real life, and are really kind of unreadable except when downscaled. They certainly don't recreate the original experience of the magazine from an aesthetic standpoint, instead looking grainy and textured where the real mag has the appearance of solid color to the naked eye. And of course, JPGs don't authentically source the image anyway... only PNG does. I don't think casual readers want to spend that much time downloading magazines, either.
  12. The big thing is that there's no distinction in this pricing between poor countries and rich countries. $20 dollars is a lot easier to come by in English speaking nations than non-English speaking nations (Africa excluded... Nigeria is a poorhouse), but English is the language apparent of the internet. Admittedly, accomodating for these persons is easier said than done, as it's virtually impossible to know for sure where a person is from on the internet. I have a theory about what happened with the downloaded magazines. A Google search reveals that character fan sites are archiving them on their servers for purposes of general access. Relevant articles are culled from the mags and put in a database. The mags themselves are apparently retained.for whatever purpose. There are of course also pirate sites which collect magazines indiscriminate of their age and lump them all together. Are they bottom feeders? Perhaps one person's bottom feeder is another's Robin Hood. Also important to remember is that the most secure pirates are in fact in the business of deliberately undermining the west... piracy endures because there's no reaching it in Russia, where Putin is said to smile every time a Western company reports a loss for the quarter. Honestly though, I think very few people are aware that this site exists. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, the site is only known by people looking to reuse the magazines; on the other, collectors do not know the site exists and that's probably a good thing. If merchants knew this site was trying to scan all the mags, the auction prices for them would soar. Computer Game Review mags are already ridiculously priced.... Old games go for very little precisely because emulators and ROMs exist. Comic readers and pdfs are the magazine equivalent. The more money this site is perceived to be making, the more it will cost to expand it.
  13. As for FileFactory... http://www.retromags.com/magazines/category/usa/gamepro/gamepro-issue-1 <- broken link
  14. Torrents have been cracked down hard. Just look at PirateBay and Kickass: nobody's seeding anymore. Not even VPNs are safe... Windows 10 is banned. The way I see it, another Underground Gamer will appear and this site will go under again regardless. *shakes head*
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