A crime is a crime even before a judge rules over it. Sure, innocent until proven guilty, but most people know when they're doing something wrong and then don't do it.
Of course, this is a lot more grey area for copyright violations etc because it's a civil matter.
Pithy but untrue. The verbose-but-correct statement is about procedural prerequisites: Government officials are forbidden to imprison or fine you until your guilt is proved, to an impartial and properly-instructed jury in a fair trial, beyond a reasonable doubt. (The Scots have the better formulation for criminal cases: Guilty, or not proved.)
Illustration: OJ Simpson was found not guilty [sic] in his criminal trial. So he couldn't be imprisoned. But then a different jury found — under the lower, preponderance of the evidence standard — that Simpson did indeed murder his ex-wife and the other guy. The latter case was the civil action for wrongful death, brought by the survivors of his victims. The survivors won a $33.5M verdict. Simpson's assets were seized, and sold at a court-ordered auction, to pay the judgment — including his Heisman Trophy.
Neither of the jury verdicts altered the reality of whether Simpson did or didn’t kill the two victims.
(In Simpson’s second trial, the jury found him liable, not “guilty.” Guilt is the term used in criminal prosecutions. Liability is the term used in civil cases.)
There are legal forms of killing. It is only via the application of our legal institutions that criminality is decided. No specific act on its own is criminal, there is no Platonic Crime.
It's quite dangerous to make unsubstantiated comments and assumptions on US copyright law without the proper research.
Valve still owns the copyright to the game and just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent, especially when we know that the game is still being sold. [0]
They (Valve) reserve the right to enforce that and this site clearly does not have such a "license" and haven't disclosed as such. Why would you expect Valve to be in discussions with a 15 year old to redistribute the game for free?
> just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent
I don't think the parent comment is claiming it's legal, other than the (unlikely) chance that this is licensed, just that it's up to Valve to enforce and not really our concern. A lot of cool things (like the similar https://noclip.website/) are prima facie copyright infringement.
Until they decide, we can't know if it's illegal or not - who knows, this site might have a license.