> There's also the fact that said tech (assuming it's true) might have damaged the > game, perhaps even in a way that's irreparable since they're so rare like > inadvertently killing a custom chip or undumped PAL. Now granted in the hands of an > expert those chances are very very small, but still that's a risk he had absolutely > no right to take unauthorized with someone else's property. Personally I'd feel like > the world's biggest asshole taking that kind of gamble with someone else's property > behind their backs and wouldn't be able to live with myself if I screwed it up.
It's a whole chain of shitty things to do.
There collectors themselves are taking risks with things they didn't originally create too.
Some have better solutions to mitigate the risk than others, but there have been a few cases where for example, the collectors *think* they have things backed up, only to not actually have a good dump, or to have not read out a critical component because they didn't realise it could be read, or for their backup, which hadn't been checked in years, to have failed in the meantime (CDRs go bad, HDDs go bad, email accounts purge emails etc.)
If it wasn't for the shitty behaviour in the first place, this subsequent shitty behaviour wouldn't have occurred; I dare say the person doing it might have felt they were doing the only thing possible to liberate a collector from a non-beneficial agreement if these stories about the collectors promising other people they won't distribute things (and therefore having their hands tied) are to be believed. The data being 'stolen' absolves them of any responsibility after all.
I'm assuming these weren't sold on ebay for profit, but instead handed over anonymously for free, meaning profit wasn't the motive, so IMHO the guy who did it had probably heard those stories about tied hands and thought he was actually doing the collector a favor.
But yeah, it's just all one long chain of shitty behaviour and unnecessary risks, people giving value to things which really have no value and as a direct result of that, people trying to help in the only way they see possible. All of this, every single risk, could have been easily avoided.
Worse used to happen back in the day at trade shows etc. where ROMs were dumped from the prototypes back then, and ended up on the market before the official game even hit; you can read stories all about how that happened with Defender and the like. That was actually a legitimate problem, with potentially huge losses, this is a storm in one person's teacup.
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