But I think it's highly dubious to accept let alone solicit donations for copyrighted content.
[–] jimmyjazz14 13 hours ago
[–] flykespice 9 hours ago
[–] rvz 15 hours ago
Just because this game is old, does not mean they (nfsu2 [dot] xyz) own the rights to redistributing it which is what they are doing. Both the copyright for this game and the company is still live.
Even asking for donations is going to get them into trouble as well as inviting the rights holders to contact them directly.
So I don't think this site will survive for long. EA's lawyers have access to insurmountable funds which make this cat-and-mouse game disadvantageous to projects like this who are even showing the intention of asking for some form of financial contribution of support (money through donations).
[–] Forgeties79 14 hours ago
[–] blensor 15 hours ago
> Help, bugs and questions: our Discord. > Rights holders: legal (at) nfsu2.xyz.
I wonder if the email just goes to /dev/null
[–] m00dy 17 hours ago
[–] PorciiVorbesc 17 hours ago
No honor amongst thieves.
I miss the days when pirates did it for the love of the game.
[–] hobofan 17 hours ago
With movies more so than with games, the piracy scene and the organized/commercalized bootleg scene were never far apart. Few people sit in a cinema with a camcorder "for the love of the game" and risk criminal charges, while many people will do the same thing for a few hundred bucks.
[–] sigmoid10 16 hours ago
[–] EmX_3000 10 hours ago
[–] ssl-3 10 hours ago
Cam: Some regular person at audience-level aims a camera at the screen, usually with poor results. Easy to detect when the person in the next row gets up to go to the bathroom, if nothing else.
TS: "Telesync". Usually an inside job by a projectionist or similar, often with excellent audio (but sometimes not). Camera is usually very stable with an unoccluded view; these can be hard to detect if a viewer isn't paying particularly close attention.
Screener: Once upon a time, people with influence in things like the Academy Awards were sent physical copies of films to watch and judge at home. These copies were called screeners. Not as often a thing these days (with limited-access online streaming being a largely-solved problem), but they could be both very high-quality and very early. Sometimes, they included things like a periodic scroller or crawler that informed unaffiliated viewers that they were not allowed to be watching the thing they were watching. Sometimes, they also had one-off watermarks that were intended to show the source of a leak[1].
In the realm of leaky films, screeners were/are usually the superior format by a wide margin.
[1]: https://waxy.org/2014/01/ellen_degeneres_walter_mitty_screen...
[–] Grombobulous 16 hours ago
Will EA sell me Need for Speed Underground 2? Nope! They won't even acknowledge it exists on their website:
https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed
Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu. It's not even there in the sense of "we're proud of our heritage, look at a history of our old games."
I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. I bought the 4K remaster of Lawrence of Arabia for $5 on the Apple TV Store recently, and that's a very fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.
I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:
If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work, or is no longer for sale in a manner reasonably consistent with its original form of sale (e.g., they used to sell Need for Speed Underground 2 as a one-time purchase but now it's only available as a subscription, or the price has been changed from $50 to $3,000), people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work. The redistributor would also not be allowed to represent themselves as the rights-holder or do anything that would confuse people into thinking they were the original source of the work.
[–] frmersdog 10 hours ago
[–] vel0city 13 hours ago
So I can go to the store and buy any of these? No? Huh. Sounds like this is largely untrue for most films ever produced commercially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...
[–] boston_clone 3 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_St...
[–] vel0city 1 hour ago
But sure, let's go to more modern examples. Are all of these easily acquired "new" these days?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...
[–] brink 16 hours ago
They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.
[–] frmersdog 10 hours ago
[–] NooneAtAll5 15 hours ago
donations are a form of "thank you", completely voluntary
[–] Forgeties79 15 hours ago
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.
[–] NooneAtAll5 15 hours ago
[–] Forgeties79 14 hours ago
[–] davkan 13 hours ago
[–] Forgeties79 12 hours ago
In case it wasn’t clear before I very much support piracy. What I don’t like is people making up high-minded reasons as window dressing. The percentage of people doing it for “legitimate” or otherwise “good” reasons is very, very small. On the other hand, I also don’t think online piracy inflicts enough harm for it to be necessary to make an excuse.
As for people who make it possible, that’s another thing entirely and I agree!
[–] davkan 10 hours ago
Obviously not to the degree of long term professional archiving but I do think it is a form of preservation to a greater degree than an average home user doing 3-2-1. The greatest risk of loss comes from people not resharing all their content when the private trackers disappear.
[–] mag7269 16 hours ago
Us, Pirates: “We each do it for what we lack most.”
[–] pixelstack 13 hours ago
[–] origini 17 hours ago
A company like EA, being known for protecting their critical assets, should not accept that someone is stealing their content from 22 years ago and then even asking for donations.
we should write to EA legal team asap.
/s
"I think it might be quite risky for them to ask for donations, might get them into more trouble"
[–] alexjplant 10 hours ago