What's the legality of distributing a Doom executable without an iwad?

[129thVisplane]

I'm only asking because someone on youtube wanted a download link to the midi data of a corrupted Doom song, but I did it by corrupting the executable, not the midi, so I thought i'd offer the executable itself. However im not sure how legal that would be, since it'd just be the exe without the iwad, but it's a shitty pirated commercial v1.2 exe I found on an ancient cd, and it's tampered with on top of that.

 

Am I allowed to go for it and slap the executable online anyway, or is it a strict no-no warez zone even without the iwad data? I don't want to piss anyone off and get a storage account deleted by distributing forbidden stuff, yknow.

[kb1]

The IWAD is the big deal. But a pirated v1.2? How do you know it's pirated? Cause there are lots of Doom EXE hacking tools, like DeHacked. But I don't know if DeHacked has ever worked with v1.2.

 

The other thing is that Doom shareware can be distributed anywhere, including the IWAD, if it is not modified.

 

How do you have a corrupted Doom MIDI file, and a corrupted v1.2 EXE? And how will a modified EXE fix a broken MIDI file? Are you saying that you hacked a shovelware v1.2 to make it play its songs differently?

 

I guess what I'm asking is: What in the world are you two trying to accomplish? And who cannot afford a real paid-for copy of Doom?

 

You can always distribute a BDIFF file that can turn one file into another file if the recipient has a valid copy..

[129thVisplane]

-I put up a video on youtube that's literally just a fucked up playback of D_E1M1 in a manually corrupted version of a Doom executable.

-A guy in the comments asked to use it in a project and asked me for the corrupted midi. However I do not have a corrupted midi because the corrupted playback in the video was achieved through fucking with the executable and not the midi. So I thought i could send him the corrupted copy of the executable so he could record the e1m1 playback (and the rest of the songs if he wanted) himself, instead of ripping it from my low quality video.

-I know it's a pirated copy because it was on a cd from early 2000s full of other pirated shit and I know my dad's piracy antics.

 

Does that explain anything at all?

[SiFi270]

I'm pretty sure that's what's being done here and I haven't seen anyone make a fuss about it.

[SaladBadger]

In theory if you wanted to be safe you could create a patch that fucks up a shareware release in the right way (was there ever a 1.2 shareware version? Hmm...). Executable distribution is a bit of a weird subject, in that it isn't strictly allowed by EULA, hence the use of DeHackEd patches instead of distributing modified executables, but at the same time id did freely distribute perfectly working Doom executables with the shareware releases.

[Pegleg]

9 hours ago, InsanityBringer said:

(was there ever a 1.2 shareware version? Hmm...)

 

There was a shareware version 1.2. It was released in early 1994 and contained the swastika in E1M4 and introduced the Nightmare difficulty setting. I still have the disks for it at my parents' house. (They were still sitting in the dust-covered box the last time I visited 5 months ago.)

 

As for the OP's question, I'm no legal expert, but I imagine that releasing the executable, even without the iwad and its accompanying content, is probably not legal. It's highly unlikely that anyone would pursue a judgement against you for doing it, but that's a different story.

[Empyre]

Aren't all the Doom ports basically modified Doom executables?

[Nevander]

I see it like this: can you run the full game with only an EXE? No. Is the source code released? If yes, then I see no issue.

[Dark Pulse]

The legality may be dubious, but the chances of anyone coming after you for a 25 year-old game are virtually zero.

 

Not to mention the fact that, as others have said, the source code is released (meaning you can build your own EXE anyway), and that that EXE can't do anything without valid IWAD data in the first place.

[kb1]

You cannot modify the shareware version at all - that's part of the concept of shareware, and it's explicitly forbidden by Id Software. That includes modifying the IWAD, using PWADs, *and* the executable, or any other files in the shareware release.

 

Of course, you can pretty much do what you want with your local copy of anything. And, you can always release a patch file, and a patch program that hacks someone else's files.

 

I'm curious: You got your executable to play the songs differently. Can you be more specific? I'm really interested to know what you did, and how it sounds! It seems like a cool, interesting hack.