> Or if you go onto a retro gaming site like GOG you'll see that many of the "extras" are from pirated sources.

Can you give one or two examples of this?

I'd be interested as well. Certainly being DRM-free GOG.com's content typically ends up on torrent sites, but I haven't heard of it the other way around—though there are of course various examples of pirated content appearing in officially published downloads elsewhere I've read about and even experienced first-hand. One that comes to mind was 90s hip-hop act De La Soul generously releasing their discography for free during Valentines Day a few years back to promote a new record, which from some ID3 tags mentioned the source were pirated copies.

You have to wonder when an artist finds it easier to copy the albums from such sources than from the collection of their own.

> but I haven't heard of it the other way around

I can't find the article I read this from, but a few years ago (back when GoG was 'Good Old Games'), there was an article about how license holders often didn't have any of the actual game material, they just happened to own the license to them through mergers / aquisitions / bankruptcies / whatever. So GoG would have to track down old published copies of games for them (either through second hand shops, or eBay, or the internet) and then restore them (using a combination of internet / open source tools, or their own work), in order to sell them on their store.

Presumably, if the internet 'pirates' had not done the work of backing this software up and preserving it, a number of GoG's titles simply would not exist today in any form, and could no longer be sold (even if the license holders wanted to)

I would imagine downloading a 'pirated' copy of the work is not piracy when you already hold a valid legal license to that work, by definition.

>I would imagine downloading a 'pirated' copy of the work is not piracy when you already hold a valid legal license to that work, by definition.

You are not necessarily in the clear; it depends on type of license you have, and whatever personal copy/fair use protections your country has.

I didn't devote much time, but about half of the 10 manuals I looked at quickly are of horrible, almost unreadable, photocopies. One thing I did find is that some games, like Arcanum, use "warez" copy protection cracks.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general_archive/gog_arcanum_releas...

That's not really relevant to his point, though. I'm sure it's quicker to get a ROM dump of Super Mario by downloading it than by digging it out of Nintendo's archives or setting up their own cartridge ripper. That doesn't mean they couldn't or wouldn't have done one of those things otherwise.

So what if they did? They own the rights to the Mario ROM.

If Nintendo lost or threw away their own copies, the software would no longer exist for Nintendo to use, apart from pirated ROMs. The implication is that software piracy is sometimes the only viable means of preserving software in the long term.

The conclusion that they downloaded the rom from the internet because it has an iNes header is kind of ridiculous to start with; if you build an NES emulator, you're going to need to have some sort of header to indicate what mapper (if any) was used on the cartridge and what stuff was present. Given that the community has already built a standard for that, why not use it?

If you go ahead and use the community header format; of course your rom image will be indistinguishable from a pirated rom -- the header and data should be the same. It's not clear if they downloaded the rom from the internet, read it off a cartridge in their archive (or obtained from employee's collections or the used market), or from a possible archive of all roms they've ever had made.

Given the long life and mass distribution of almost all their titles, there's not a danger of loss of the published material. Certainly, unpublished roms and the occasional title that was not widely produced are in danger of loss if they aren't archived. The source materials are also subject to loss if Nintendo doesn't archive them.

There's some indication that Nintendo may have an archival program after all; Star Fox 2 was recently released on the SNES Classic from a ready for release, but never released or leaked rom; different than the leaked prototype roms. They also add in-memory patches to some roms that run in virtual console and nes/snes classics; I haven't seen anything indicating if they do that based on disassembly of the roms or based on the original sources.

So, that's standard practice in the industry. Download your own stuff from a pirate site, then sue the shit out of the pirate site owner.