As many of you have noticed, several files on the site have disappeared or won’t download any more, while others are seemingly unaffected. The truth of the matter is that, on the 11th of October 2017, we were given 10 DMCA takedown notices from MEGA, our file hosting company.
Obviously we were pretty shocked at the time, who could have a problem with patches and installers for old games? While it is possible that some of our replacement installers occasionally contain a fragment of the old game in question, this is rare. Even so, this fragment on its own is not enough to play the game, so it seems pretty unlikely any copyright holder would have an issue with them.
The files that are affected include:-
- Lego Racers 2 replacement installer – Written entirely by us, with no third party files included (now restored)
- Midtown Madness patches – Entirely in the public domain (counterclaim filed)
- Heroes of Might and Magic patches – Entirely public domain (now at least partially restored)
- Silver replacement installer – Potentially contains infringing files (again, we’re not legal experts so we would have said that there was nothing here that couldn’t be considered fair use).
So, who filed the claim? All that we were given is a e-mail which points to an entity called legal-copyright.com, whose website claims to be a part of “Skywalker Digital Limited”. It would seem this is a Hong Kong based company that specialises in DMCA takedowns. It also seems highly likely, from reading their website, that this was simply an automated “bot” takedown notice that mistook our patches and replacement installers for actual copies of the game.
We filed counter claims for the files we knew were definitely not infringing. After doing this we heard nothing back from Mega themselves, or from Skywalker Digital Limited, but we have noticed that several of the files were silently restored at some point.
Thanks to everyone who wrote in letting us know which files were affected, I’ll aim to get the problem resolved as soon as possible and the files re-enabled.
People spend a lot of hard earned money to have the internet connected, plus pay the extra electricity and equipment costs. People then don’t want to have unwanted ads forced on them by mercenary web site owners, which they have no intention of clicking through ever. Neither do they want their personal details stolen and sold to advertisers. Many say oh, we would never do that. But there are many scammers and spammers, and that is spamming at least. You might block users, but then why bother to have a web site? Users will just close the page and go to another, accessible one. How dare you go to such lengths to force that poison down their throats? We loathe and detest it, along with the businesses involved in it.
Thanks for your feedback. As you’ve seen it costs money to connect to the internet, and it costs even more if you have a computer permanently connected serving a website. Without advertising content will simply disappear from the web, as it has been doing already, until there’s nothing left but Facebook, Twitter and suchlike.