SEIV Gold Rebate

[Mr. ?]

I have ordered SEIV Gold and in order to get the rebate, you have to mail in a piece of the original SEIV CD. I was advised to make a copy before I broke it and sent in the piece with the Shrapnel logo on it. I have heard of people copying PlayStation games and that they had to use a special CD burning program. Is this true for the SEIV game? If so, what program should I use?

[Wizarc]

You do not need any special CD Burning program. You can use any CD Burning program. Some of the more known ones are Nero Burning Rom and Easy CD Creator.

You can also just copy the CD to your hard drive for later copying.

Hell, copy it to four different hard drives and burn it to 10 cds so you are sure to have backups just in case...you know. Oh, keep some at work and some at home, in case one or the other burns down. Well these are extreme circumstances though.

[rdouglass]

Ahem...you may want to double check any license agreements. Most LA's only allow you one 'backup' copy. I do not have my SE disk with me (I'm at work) so I can't be sure, but you should probably double check (at least for official reasons....)

[BeeDee10]

Unless there was a licence agreement you signed when you purchased the game that said something about restricting your ability to back up the thing, don't worry about any "click through" licences that might have come with the game itself. They are in all probability not legally enforceable, the only reason most people think they are is because nobody has actually taken a case to court. The only relevant laws in this case are copyright laws, and they explicitly allow you to make as many backup copies as you want in whatever form you want (see: "fair use"). The only limitations are on _distributing_ those copies.

In fact, it might be that it would be illegal to make a copy of the game and then send the _whole_ CD in to Shrapnel, but that it's legal to make a copy and then send in a fragment of the CD. Seems to me that sending in the whole thing would count as distributing illegal copies (since you're keeping one for use), but by rendering the original unreadable before sending it out you aren't actually distributing the game. IANAL, of course, this is just my own interpretation of what I think the laws say.