28 Mar
2017
28 Mar
'17
2:36 p.m.
On Tue, 28 Mar 2017, Michael-John Turner via cctalk wrote:
Own a piece of gaming history! This Indy workstation
was once owned
by Acclaim Entertainment, the legendary game publisher, and was
liquidated at Acclaim's bankruptcy sale in 2004. It sat untouched in a
Brooklyn warehouse for more than a decade before being recovered last
year.
<snip>
Andy Skalka: More than a hundred e-mail messages
about Acclaim IT
operations (see photos)
Danielle Papsidero: More than five hundred e-mail messages (see
photos)
Rob Zimmelman: Image sequence for Dragonheart game combat
EVa motion capture editing software (unlicensed)
BioMotion motion capture editing software (unlicensed)
Motion captured animation data (Dreamworks, baseball, Batman, etc.)
Licenses: various expired and/or inactive licenses for Nichimen
This guy is on Reddit and has been posting lots of stuff from these
machines and I can't help but feel a bit suspect about all of this. While
they're old machines, the information is presumably no longer of any
commercial value and the company no longer exists... I can't help but feel
that this is an invasion of someone's privacy. The commercial content is
one thing - although whether it's truly "abandoned" runs down into all of
those arguments we see flare up in cctalk about once every two years, so
let's not go there again...
But... eMails? I dunno. I've been pulling a lot of data off a Cray J90 and
I've had a lot of people ask me to release it to the public and I just
can't bring myself to do so. I'm _pretty sure_ that it belonged to NASA,
which might mean some/all of the information may even be Public Domain -
but this has people's usernames, and lord knows what kind of effort they
put into the work. (And that's ignoring how not-qualified I am to make the
PD assertion)
It just feels _wrong_ to me, personally.
While I'm not specifically crapping on the guy selling this Indy - I'm
kind of curious how others feel about this sort of thing as it's something
I've been confronted with personally lately.
Cheers;
- JP