Adventure Gamers - Forums

Hello I see that you have started a playthrough thread of the game Touche: The adventures of the fifth musketeer. Also you can download a copy of the game only for this thread not for the public. I was wondering if there is any other legal way to get this game. I have tried gog.com and the game was not listed. I tried ebay only spanish and german versions are available and the copy that is available from amazon does not ship to New Zealand. Please can anyone help?

I think the reason that they got special copies direct from the developer was because the game is completely abandoned. It is on abandionware sites which is presumably far more legal than getting a copy from Graham Lilley, who almost certainly does not own nor have distribution rights to the game.

wisnoskij - 27 March 2016 12:16 AM

I think the reason that they got special copies direct from the developer was because the game is completely abandoned. It is on abandionware sites which is presumably far more legal than getting a copy from Graham Lilley, who almost certainly does not own nor have distribution rights to the game.

very much wrong
abandonware is never legal, its just not enforced or especially cared about.
And (as mentioned above) reportedly he is working on a mobile port.

I openly admit, I have no idea who owns the Touché game or who owns the rights to distribute copies of it. He might be part of the .001% of developers who retain rights to their own work from way back then, I cannot say. But if we make the small logical jump to, U.S. Gold, Inc. and Clipper Software own the game. I have looked, and could not find any mention of Graham Lilley owning either of these entities.

In that case, which might not be applicable here, but will be applicable to 99.9% of all similar situations, you have the same laws in the way of both Abandionware sites and Graham Lilley. Except, Archive.org has its own abandionware archive and has a legal exception from the government to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act given to it by the government. And Graham Lilley is also loaded down with with contract and employment laws that could add on some serious break of contract, corporate espionage laws on top of any copyright violations.

So, absolutely, unless you have absolute proof that Graham Lilley has the legal right to distribute Touché, it is far far more illegal to get it from him than from some random online source. There is nothing wrong with the man, I don’t dislike him in any way, it is just from a legal standpoint him being a past employee of the likely copyright holder add-ons on layers of legal issues, and makes it a far more serious offence.

So in summery, just get it through Archive.org (link), which like I mentioned earlier was given a legal exemption from the copyright act by the government. They have endorsed thw efforts of Archive.org, they were given a legal exemptions allowing them to make their abandionware archive; Making it implicitly legal to download/play anything they host.

wisnoskij - 27 March 2016 03:50 PM

I openly admit, I have no idea who owns the Touché game or who owns the rights to distribute copies of it. He might be part of the .001% of developers who retain rights to their own work from way back then, I cannot say. But if we make the small logical jump to, U.S. Gold, Inc. and Clipper Software own the game. I have looked, and could not find any mention of Graham Lilley owning either of these entities.

why talk about something you clearly dont know about?
The download was graciously hosted on the clipper software website.