Legally doing without discs

What do you mean 'legally', you bought the product didn't you? Isn't there something like fair use?

 

There are no-cd patches, I ended up using one when my discs went awol before moving house. The game will have to be fully patched and modded before applying it. (I've also used a similar patch for Fable because the bloody thing didn't recognise it's own CD )

From the site I used before:

 

Hugely misleading because it doesn't say in which country are the rules supposed to apply.
In mine it isn't true.

 

dmc,

Is a no-cd patch illegal if used with a legally purchased product? IMO the answer is no. Using a no-cd patch simply saves your disk. Of course, when you use a no-cd patch so your son can play the game then you may be going into a gray area.

If I needed to purchase the game again I would probably use gog.com.

 

Isn't one of the specific points of copyright laws to prevent someone from doing precisely this?

 

It seems that you're trying to use common sense to figure out the letter of law. Sadly, with copyright it doesn't work like that.

Do you mean generalities or some specific law?
If generalities, then no, copyright is supposed to increase public access to knowledge and culture by motivating creation by giving creators limited monopoly on the use of their work. There are many different views on what is such limited monopoly and most countries regulate it somehow, but AFAIK what you highlighted is not a common part of these interpretations.
The "AFAIK" is important, IANAL, but I know that:
-this is not a part of any major copyright treaty
-this is not a part of EU law
-this is not a part of my country's law

 

AFAIK it is, because part of what's illegal is "circumventing DRM copy protection" (or something like that), which is what no-cds do by eliminating the need to access a CD for validation. (We had a quasi-legal professional look into this for ToEE - a game that often wouldn't work without a no-CD - and that was their conclusion.)

That said, GoG somehow gets around the DRM thing because they obviously don't distribute software by CD, but I'm guessing this is due to their licensing agreement. (They even included a no-CD in their edition of ToEE.) Plus, I kind of doubt that anyone's really on the ball trying to hunt down BG pirates anymore.

 

OK, technically two different people would be using the game, but dmc legally purchased the game, and the two computers the game would be played on would both be owned by dmc, and they both would be playing in the same house. I'm with T2B, in that I do not think that is the purpose of the copyright law.

That said, the easiest solution would be to spend $10 on another ToB CD. Technically, you wouldn't even NEED the additional SoA CDs. The most sensible thing to do if you both want to start right away, would be to setup SoA on your son's computer and let him play through that portion of the game. By the time he gets through it, to ToB CD will arrive, and you might even be done with it by then, even if you don't buy an additional copy.

 

I don't understand why people here are recommending using a no-cd patch. Why not just make an image of your CD and mount that in some program. Not that it's more legal or anything, but at least it doesn't require you to install third party programs and face possible problems with mods.

I'm not entirely sure if it's legal here to make a backup copy (it is for music, but I'm pretty sure it's not for software), but since it's the only way I can play it, or even install it on my laptop (which doesn't have a CD drive), I'm not too concerned about it.

Anyway, for dmc I would recommend just to get a secondary copy. It doesn't cost much anyway and if you get it from GoG.com you don't have to deal with CDs either. And hey, you can support SP indirectly too!

 

Guys, I can't really look at how you discuss legality of stuff w/out talking about where is it supposed to apply. The OP made his location clear, but neither of you did. Maybe you're both from the US and you know each other's location, but a casual reader coming here will be mislead.
And location is something that really matters.
For example in my country I can photocopy a book and give it to my father. And he can photocopy his copy and give it to his friend. Here the law considers it to be normal and it's doubly useful in the digital age. In fact, I can even break DRM if it prevents me from making a copy and giving it to a friend or a relative.
Though OTOH this doesn't apply to computer software at all, so I can do what the license says and nothing more, not even make backups. You can guess which part of the law gets more respect.

 

I don't know if this is allowed - and if not, Tal, please trash this post - but I guess it should be because creating an image file and mounting it isn't illegal in and of itself.

First thing to do is to create an image file from you disc. To do this, insert the relevant disc into your disc drive. If you have any program to burn data to CDs, it will probably also allow you to create an image of this disc. If not, you can download this program to create it.

Once done, you need to mount this image with a program like for instance this one. Programs like this basically create a virtual disc drive in which you can load any image files you have and read from them as if you had put the real disc in the drive.

I always do this for any discs I have, if only so that I don't have to look for the disc and put it into the drive, but can just do it from the hard drive. There's of course also the fact that the disc is less likely to break if you leave it in the case all of the time. And that you can then use this disc on a computer that doesn't have an actual physical drive.

 

Not sure if I'm one of the "neither," but if I am, I live in the US.

 

You could grab the game cheap off GOG