Posted by
Hemos
on from the what-else-should-the-code-do dept.
Bravo writes: "C|net has recently published an interesting
article
on abandonware and its legality. " They do a good job of covering both ends of the spectrum - the publishers who want to hold on to their old code, and folks who see it as being wasted.
The whole point of copyright is to encourage people to create. If they've abandoned their work, there's no need for copyright -- they've already gotten all the benefit they're going to get from it. --
An excellent point - and one that's often glossed over by the would-be robber barons of the information age, who hope that by treating intellectual property as an absolute right, rather than a socially convenient legal fiction.
Sadly, the growing profile of Abandonware will probably be its downfall - one need only see Microsoft's attitude displayed in the article.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
Re:Purpose of Copyright
by
mrfiddlehead
·
· Score: 3
Perhaps, but it's their code, and if they don't want to share it that's their perogative, no?
Open source is a great concept - that still remains to be proven - but those who do not subscribe to its tenets should not be castigated because of their decision. Besides, one thing OSS has proven is that nothing is impossible.
Intellectual property is intellectual property, no matter if it's not being sold. Just because a certain issue of a magazine is no longer on the shelves, does that give you the right to go out and copy it? This is the same issue - while it would be nice for some of the old code were made avialable, it is still the intellectual property of the copyright holder.
For instance, what if you want Microsoft to open up Win 3.1? It's old code, right? Well, Win 3.1 is still capable of being a competitor to Win 9x if it evolves in the right direction.
How many out of print movies and books are there? Hard to find - but they always have a legitimate reason for not "opening it up" - the copyright owner still wants to get something from any distribution of this, and would prefer to keep that right for themselves.
> Perhaps, but it's their code, and if they don't
> want to share it that's their perogative, no?
Authorship is not equal to Ownership.
They Own Copyright on the code. They own hard drives and other storage media that conain the code. However, the code is intangible and cannot be owned.
The question is NOT whether they should be allowed to "Not Share". Of course they should be allowed to not share. The question is whether they shoul dbe allowed to stop others from shareing it.
Copyright says that they can. However, I would submit that this is a mistake. Copyright was invented to encourage publication by ensuring that authors have a way to make sure that they get paid for their work by publishers.
The reason that copyright holders are given this "right" is to give them temporary monopoly. However, if they are no longer using it, and they use copyright to stop further distribution, they are perverting and in fact working against the entire reason that copyright exists.
They are taking something that was given to them for one reason (making it safe for them to publish) and they are using it to stop the distribution of things that they have no intention of publishing again.
This is clear and simple abuse of the copyright system, and a shining example of why it needs heavy updating.
> Open source is a great concept - that still
> remains to be proven
I dunno.... I can go, find a free software program, I can download it. I can read the source, I can modify and redistribute it. I can compile and use it. Have done each at least once and some many times. Whats left to be proven?
That is of course unless you plan to judge Free Software by the standard marketspeak of "its more effcient" "it makes more stable code" and "bugs get fixed faster". Those may be yet to be proven absolutely...but they are all side effects of the system anyway.... more bonuses than central points.
-- "I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Re:Purpose of Copyright
by
Floyd+Tante
·
· Score: 4
Intellectual property is
...a myth.
Just because a certain issue of a magazine is no longer on the shelves, does that give you the right to go out and copy it?
My actions are not bounded by artificial "rights" granted by others. I am, as a human, fully capable of exercising Reason in such issues. If you need something, why should anyone put up artificial barriers against it? It does nothing but hold back the progress of humanity, thus furthering the claims of those who benefit from the status quo.
For instance, what if you want Microsoft to open up Win 3.1?
Strawman. The Abandonware Movement is about free "beer" not free "speech".
How many out of print movies and books are there?
Too many. Movie companies usually destroy films when the copyright expires rather than allow them to enter the public domain. Is this "right"? Not even the most morally corrupt person could claim so much. -- Floyd
I don't understand your sig. Money doesn't have a speed value associated with it. Usually I can say "My car is slow" or "My pet turtle is slow", but "My money is slow" doesn't have any meaning without some context. For instance, when talking about distribution of money, and it's discovered that it takes a year for a dollar bill to move from one side of the country to the other, you could say "Money is slow". However, in absence of context, money has no speed value.
That said, I think it's time you got yourself a new sig.
Most books and movies are out of print. If you look at the combined total of all books and movies ever made, most of them are not being sold anymore. So how do you read them or watch them? You go to used book stores, or the library. How do you get old software that isn't being published? They don't have software in the library, and it's hard to find good sources of used software. This sort of abandonment library is tremendously useful for society. It really is a public service. I think it's more than fair that they remove any software that the publisher complains about.
The more I think about it, the more I like this idea: have software for checkout in the library. The purpose of libraries is to provide free temporary access to copyrighted works. Why shouldn't they have software? Software publishers could produce special versions that require the CD to run (so people can't keep using the program when they return the CD). This would be really cool. Imagine going down to the library to check out the latest Redhat CD. Or checking out Diablo for the weekend. There's the danger of people abusing the system and copying the programs, but there is that danger with audio CD's as well and libraries still carry those.
Re:Purpose of Copyright
by
um...+Lucas
·
· Score: 2
Well, look at MAME ROMS as an example... For years, no one was doing anything with them. Then companies realized that there was still indeed demand for their games, so they're releasing all of these "classic arcade" game CD-ROM's.
It's their right. They made them. They can decided what to do with them, just as I can write a book and then throw it into a burning trashcan if I so desire.
I wrote a book, thought it was horrible, and shelved it, that I wouldn't have any rights because I wasn't selling it?
What difference would it make to you, financially or otherwise (HINT: none). These spurious strawman arguments only prove the weakness of the corpratist point of view.
Well, this is not exactly true. What if the contents of the book, or the quality of the book compromises my future earnings or ability to get a job. Lets say, the book was so bad, and so offensive that if anybody saw it, I wouldn't be able every publish another book again my reputation would be destroyed. By releasing that book, you could do financial harm to me. Don't I have the right to privacy? Don't I have the right for you NOT to expose me?
Of course, this argument isn't exactly relavant to abandonware, because the IP we're talking about IS published.
Are you proposing doing away with copyright entirely, or just returning it to a "founding-fathers" level?
Money doesn't have a speed value associated with it.
Actually it does. In economics, there's a concept called the "velocity of money". It's a measure of how much money changes hand in a given time period. The more money that "moves around" (i.e. the more buying and selling that occurs), the stronger the economy, or so I've been told. The more people save money, the less it moves around, and the velocity of money goes down. --
-- And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Maybe because it would cost them more to actually sell the work (and support it!) that they would get in return. Abandonware, with its lack of warentees or guarentees, is by far the most cost effective way of distributing these old titles to the small minority of people who actually benefit from them (like people who havn't upgraded their computer since 1994, or people who really like some classic game by a company that went out of business 5 years ago).
Ah, yes, the "I didn't steal it--you put it down; I thought that you didn't want it any more" defense.
Actually, in some instances that is a valid defense. The law is quite clear about how one can attest rights to abandoned physical property (IE maritime salvage, squatter's rights, etc). [Just what the law is, I don't know, because IANAL]
Since corporations persist in making the argument that intellectual property rights are equivilent to physical property rights, they have to take the good with the bad: the same standards should be applied to abandoned intellectual property as apply to abandoned physical property.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
-- Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Don't I have the right to privacy? Don't I have the right for you NOT to expose me?
Generally speaking, and this is already taken care of by other areas of civil and criminal law. You don't need copyright for this.
Are you proposing doing away with copyright entirely, or just returning it to a "founding-fathers" level?
Actually, some of the Founding Fathers were in fact completely opposed to the notion of copyrights and IP in general (the most notable of these being Thomas Jefferson, a prolific writer and inventor).
I'd personally just be happy to see it go back to the original ~14 year term, with limitations only on publication, rather than use.
Wrong. The creator only controls the distribution rights as long as he has copyright.
If he wants to seal it in a safe and not EVER allow anybody to distribute it, then he cannot have ever had it published, or be willing to buy up every copy that was published.
It is true that copyright has been extended for a LONG time, but it is not indefinite.
Look at the purpose of copyright law. It was to allow someone to profit from their works for a LIMITED time, by preventing someone from copying a book he/she had just printed and selling the copy. There was NO intention of granting property rights to ideas, or expressions of ideas, in perpetuity. It was intended that works pass into the public domain after a short time in order to increase the common store of knowledge.
P.S. That is very sad about the negatives...I always consider it a collective loss whenever knowledge(in the general sense, eg. art, records, even bad movies) is lost.
The current length of copyright is not fulfilling the intention of the law, in that it is not only encouraging people to live off the rewards of PAST work, it is preventing the spread of knowledge.
Wrong. The creator of a work controls the rights to how it is distributed. If that creator decides, for whatever reason, that s/he does not want it distributed at all, it is the perogative of that person to just seal it in a steel safe and not allow anybody to distribute it.
Why? It's easy to sit back and say this. Now, tell me why I should respect it. If I have a piece of your work, and I give a copy to a friend, you've lost nothing unless that gift prevents a potential sell. But in the case of abandonware, there is no potential of a sell. Therefore, you have been harmed in no way at all. So what justifies your use of force against me to prevent my giving that copy in the first place?
--
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
if I wrote a book, thought it was horrible, and shelved it, that I wouldn't have any rights because I wasn't selling it? That you could come in and make a xerox copy of it (after all, it's not actually theft since you're leaving the original copy) and distribute it?
No, that wouldn't be Ok, because it violates your privacy. It's just like copying your unreleased-to-the-public love letters.
Is copyright an inalienable right, or is it more of a quid-pro-pro contract with the state, where both sides have consideration?
The popular view around here is that normally society gives you a monopoly on the expression in your book, in order to encourage you to release that expression. But if you're not going to release that expression, what reason does society have to give you the monopoly? What's in it for us? Why should we give you an extra unnatural right?
---
-- As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If they've abandoned their work, there's no need for copyright -- they've already gotten all the benefit they're going to get from it.
I'm with you on your argument, but this doesn't make any sense. If they've gotten all that they're going to get from it, why are they being such bastards about it? Companies don't do things to spite you, they do things for profit. Whether or not they spite you is just a side effect.
So obviously since they're protecting it, they must think that they can still squeeze something out of it. (Either get a positive benefit, or avoid a negative consequence)
The trick is convincing them that this is not the case.
-- --
Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Copyright was a balance, between restricting the rights of the people and helping them via encouraging more works to be created.
Not being allowed to copy something during a reasonable ammount of time lets a publisher make money by doing that copying and selling. Like a patent, it was a temporary monopoly to encourage further development. But copyrights have changed a lot since the early days, growing longer and longer, and being seen as an absolute right instead of a trade-off.
Disney and other large companies have pushed to have insanely long copyrights and would undoubtedly go for ones that wouldn't ever expire if they thought they could get away with it. But what would be the other side in this tradeoff? The public pays the FBI who enforce copyright, the public are the ones against whom this copyright is being enforced. Where's the balance?
Then, as you say, when copyright is used to stifle publication, it's serving exactly opposite of what it was intended to do.
Copyright laws need to be completely revamped, to where they help content creators only as much as they help content consumers. Unless both sides get something out of it, it's not fair to expect one side to give up a lot of rights to give the other side a government enforced monopoly.
I know what property rights are, and I know what property is. I also know what theft is. Theft is when I take something from you. It involves the illicit transfer of value from you to me.
Intellectual property is a different thing. You insist that you have these rights. I'm asking you to justify that claim. Why do you have those rights? Where do they come from? Tell me WHY I should respect them. And all you keep doing is yelling about their existence.
As for your lithographs, certainly nobody has the right to reprint them and sell or distribute them as one of the original. That's forgery; it's fraudulent. But that scenario is totally different from a clearly abandonded piece of software.
--
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
With Microsoft, it's not that they think they are going to make any money off the old software... they just want to force people to buy the new software.
Microsoft depends on people always, always having to upgrade.
Imagine if Windows 95 and Office 95 were good enough that companies could still use then today. They would just buy nice new computers from Dell with no operating system, and install their old, perfectly legal copies of Windows 95 on them.
This would be fatal for Microsoft. This is why they have always forced old software to become unusable. They refuse to sell it, refuse to support it, and make their new software incompatible with it.
Microsoft is getting caught in a tight spot. If they don't make their software better, Free Software will take over. But if they make it good enough, people will buy it once and never upgrade. Either way, Microsoft is screwed.
This is why Microsoft is making moves to a subscription model of software, where you cannot buy the software. You will only be able to lease it on a yearly basis.
If Microsoft succeeds in doing this, they have it made. They won't even need to put out new software anymore - just minimal support, and let the money roll in.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
-- Torrey Hoffman (Azog) "HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
God you're fucking dumb, no wonder you're hiding as an AC.
To reprint a 'signed and numbered lithograph' would be fraud, for reasons completely seperate from the copyright issue. If you're too stupid to come up with an analogy that works, don't use them.
If you research any of the history behind copyright law, you'll see it's a two-sided law. You get protection for your work, but ONLY if it's released later into the public domain.
There is no stated provision for allowing someone to copy an abandoned but still copyrighted work, but why do you really think it's bad?
What reason, that anyone could care about, could the author have to let something sit unreleased and probably go completely missing? And if they just want to keep people from playing older games so they'll be more likely to buy new ones, why should we care what they want?
Their 'property rights' are being enforced by our tax money... Every FBI agent tracking down some warez dealer is being payed for by the taxes of the citizens, doesn't this mean we own a little bit of that copyrighted work, that we should stand to collect when the copyright expires? But the movie studios would rather destroy old works, and software companies would rather nobody could play old games, instead of allowing the people that which they payed for.
Too many. Movie companies usually destroy films when the copyright expires rather than allow them to enter the public domain.
Do you have any evidence of this? Considering that all films made since 1927 (I believe) are still under copyright, it seems hard to believe.
There's one thing that I don't understand about all these anti-IP fanatics. You guys like to throw around words like "evil" a lot, and compare Bill Gates to Satan, but of course everyone knows that big corporations aren't really evil -- they just want to make as much money as possible.
That's why the whole abandonware argument doesn't make much sense. The fact that companies still protect old software is proof that it still has some value. Are we really supposed to believe that executives hold on to copyrights just because they enjoy making people suffer?
How nice....you make a straw man then don't even have the common curtesy to knock him down. Very nice. Not terribly effective though.
You see the whole point of mis-representing what I say, is so that you can attack what I said based on flaws in reasoning that were introduced in your representation of what I said, rather than in what I actually said. All you did was mis-represent what I said, you never attacked the flaws.
As I said in my post, Authorship is not Ownership. Your analogy shows a complete lack of understanding of this concept and of the foundations of copyright.
As I said, an author has every right to share or not share his own physical copies of his work. Which is the only thing that is anaolgous to your car. So in short, no. I would not feel that anyone should be able to take your car because you stop using it. That was very strongly stated in my original post.
Now copyright is another matter entirely. Ownership does not end. If you own something, you do not cease to own it (unless you discard or sell it) until you die. When you die, it becomes property of your heirs (assuming that you have any). However copyright lasts only a limited time (a long period of time when compared to our daily lives, but limited none the less).
After copyright ends can NEVER be claimed again on the work. Again, not so with property. Property can be owned again by someone else after you die with no heirs.
In short, copyright was designed NOT to "protect authors rights to property" but to encourage them to produce and publish works. When copyright is used solely to stop the distribution of old works, it is an abuse of the system. It is an abuse against the very people who gave up their rights to the authors, so that the authors could profit initially.
It is right use of the system for an author to publish his work and stop unauthorized publishers from profiting off his work without paying him. It is a gross abuse of the system to use copyright to stop the continued distribution of the work, after the author is no longer using his copyright to profit.
--Steve
-- "I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The reason why they hold on to the copyright is because they don't have any proof that they do not have any more value. (Follow that?)
Yup. But the act of releasing old software also has value, maybe considerable value. (Just picture the chaos on Slashdot the day that MS frees Win 3.1...)
There's just one catch... Execs choose to hold onto their copyrights because they think that they are more valuable closed than open. They can be wrong... in fact, in the case of software, they are almost always wrong. (IMHO) But that's incompetence, not malice. That's why the original poster's claim about movie copyrights set me off... destroying movies with expired copyrights would not benefit the owners in any way that I can see, and I just can't believe that they would do it out of sheer malice.
A 'strawman' is a type of argument where you elaborate on what another person said and then criticize your interpretation. (Say, for example, that arguing gun control, someone for absolute gun control says someone against any further gun control, 'So, you think people should be able to use deadly force with impunity all the time? That would cause the health costs to skyrocket not to mention the moral questions... ' Putting up the strawman is the first sentance, and knocking it down is the arguing against it.)
In common usage, a 'straw man' is a man made by taking clothing stuffing it with dried grass, or taking bundles of dried grass and tying them off in a man-shape, sometimes used as a scarecrow but in this day and age usually only as an autumn decoration.
Parity, who does not have any critical thinking or debate books in possession at the moment, so there may be some errors here.
So if I have a car I no longer use, and probably never will, you feel you should be allowed to take it without my permission?
More along the lines of if you stop producing a car and don't plan to produce that model again, I can start producing exact replicas. (actually, I can do exactly that under existing law since you can't copyright a car's design)
>The reason that copyright holders are given this "right" is to give them temporary monopoly. However, if they are no longer
>using it, and they use copyright to stop further distribution, they are perverting and in fact working against the entire reason
>that copyright exists.
Good point.
One of the most hated things about copyright goes back to when it applied only to books. And that item was the fact that if a publisher bought the rights to your book, botched the selling of it, & let the work fall out of print, there was nothing that you, the author, could do to bring the book back into publication unless you could get the suits at the publishing house to return the rights to you.
Yeah, right. And Random House got to be the biggest publisher in the game by being such a nice guy.
There are a lot of books out there that remain out of print because the publisher can't figure out how to make a profit from it, but they don't want someone else doing it.
Well, at least if you can find the book in the library, you can read it. If a software manufacturer wants to sit on a product, there's no way for someone to use the program -- other than to download it from an abandonware site.
Geoff
-- I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would
be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce
p
Look at the purpose of copyright law. It was to allow someone to profit from their works for a LIMITED time, by preventing someone from copying a book he/she had
just printed and selling the copy.
Another aspect which appears to have been co-opted into the US version of copyright is the idea that the copyright holder has "ownership" not only of their work, but also on anything which may be derived from it.
> I'm sorry, I have no idea what you mean by
> having the common curtesy to know down strawmen
I would highly recomend the jargon dictionary:
http://www.netmeg.net/jargon
and everything2:
http://www.everything2.com
Very good for jargon. Strawman isn't in common usage (ie most people on the street don't know what one is)
> However, I actually find it quite provocative
> that you don't think people should have the
> rights to their own work, and calling it abuse
> if they won't give away what they won't sell.
Again, not what I said.
People DO have rights to their work. They certainly are allowed to not give it away or not sell it. The question is this: What gives them the right to stop someone else from selling it or giving it away?
The answer is "Copyright". Which means, they are given FOR A LIMITED TIME exclusive rights to copy. Once that lapses, its gone. Anyone can copy and redistribute.
Copyright was NOT intended to allow authors to stop the distribution of their own works (nor was it ever intended to protect publishers, it was intended to protect authors FROM publishers who would distribute and sell copies of the authors work and not pay the author)
If an author's work is being sold and distributed activly, then he certainly has the right, via copyright, to stop its redistribution. The ENTIRE REASON for this is to encourage publication. That is key to my argument.
When an author/publisher uses copyright to stop redistribution of something that they have stopped publishing and "Abandoned", then that goes against the fundamental purpose of copyright. It is an abuse of the system.
> If I take something without permission,
> I am stealing.
Stealing is wrong not because you get something,
but because the rightful owner loses it. In the
case of a copy, the rightful owner loses nothing, he still has his copy.
This is not stealing, it is unauthorized copying. Its a different action. Again copyright is not ownership like physical property ownership. It is very different and can't be expected to follow the same rules.
> because I play them instead of buying new games,
> the games manufacturers loose money.
Its not their money, how can they lose it?
They can not lose money until that money is in their bank acounts or hands. Then the money is theirs, and they can lose it. You can't lose something that you don't have.
-Steve
-- "I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I don't know about deliberate actions, but there are certainly films which have been lost, because the copyright owner did not take good care of the media. If you do a trivia search on 'check your attic' on IMDB you'll find a list of some of them, eg thi s one filmed in 1948. Some of these losses are through deliberate action of the copyright owner, for example the BBC destroyed several hundred episodes of Dr Who, and many of these episodes only exist because of various people recording off of the air.
Regardless of incentive, it's obvious that current copyright laws are not resulting in good maintence of media.
Abandonware == Good thing
by
MaxVlast
·
· Score: 2
The NeXT community survives on abandonware. A fantastic set of productivity apps (the Lighthouse Suite) was bought by Sun and basically given away. There are a whole bunch of other such apps. It's quite refreshing in that it keeps the old platform alive. I suspect people will always use the old platforms while there is software available, and abandonware (mostly legal) is the way to do it.
The question of illegal abandonware is a little more sticky. I suspect that most people are less queasy about trading abandoned apps than they are about currently available programs.
-- Max V.
-- There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Re:Abandonware == Good thing
by
daviddennis
·
· Score: 2
I wonder what the status of the Lighthouse Suite might be once MacOX X makes NeXT software viable again. It might suddenly turn from worthless to a viable product.
What does the NeXT community think of MacOS X? Is it going to make NeXT programming once again a valuable skill?
D
----
Re:Abandonware == Good thing
by
MaxVlast
·
· Score: 2
NeXT programming will be a valuable skill--I suspect that once the platform is shown to be viable, people will begin coding for Cocoa (the OpenStep libs) in earnest.
Some of the old NEXTSTEP programmers (the Omni Group, Stone design) are preparing large-scale ports of their OpenStep apps to MacOS X.
Alas, it looks like Sun has killed further development of the Lighthouse apps, so they won't show up on X. It's too bad--I'd rather use OpenWrite than MS Word on my Mac any day.
The community is somewhat divided over MacOS X. Some people are just glad to have the wonder OpenStep development environment back in any form. Others are upset about the lack of elegant integration that NEXTSTEP provided (Services, universal color managment, copy-paste of fonts, etc.)
-- Max V.
-- There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Re:Abandonware == Good thing
by
Frater+219
·
· Score: 2
Others are upset about the lack of elegant integration that NEXTSTEP
provided (Services, universal color managment, copy-paste of fonts, etc.)
It's my experience that the current MacOS provides support for copy and paste of 'styled text', which includes font information. Is that what you're talking about?
(If you copy something from an application that uses styled text (such as SimpleText or AppleWorks) and paste it into another such application, styles are preserved. If you paste it into an application that only supports plain text (such as Alpha or NiftyTelnet SSH) it is converted into plain text; similarly, if you copy text from a plain-text program and paste into a styled-text program, it is pasted with the current style.)
I don't see as Apple would abandon this feature in MacOS X.
Re:Abandonware == Good thing
by
dillon_rinker
·
· Score: 2
Right - in the sense that 8-bit emulators make 8-bit software viable again. I would gladly pay $20 for a CD that contained a significant proportion of ALL C-64 software ever published. That's hardly viable...
By now, it should be pretty well-known that any attempt to control digital media in the Internet age will be a complete failure (cf Napster, Gnutella, etc). Who worries about the legal status anyway? If you want to download a copy of Ultima 7, then you're going to do so no matter what the law says.
The only real difference between abandonware and mp3 audio is that abandonware is generally distributed on centralized web sites rather than de-centralized systems like Napster, which means that they can be shut down much more easily. I personally look forward to the day when all of it is available on FreeNet of Gnutella.
I've run a Commodore 64 website for five years with a large collection of C64 software available. It has been my experience that most authors are pleased that their work has been preserved for posterity... I've even had a couple of original authors contact me and ask if there's anything they can do to help crack their old code to work on emulators. For this I am grateful. But, there are the occasional emails from authors/publishers that want me to remove a game or two, because they are still commercially available (Infocom adventures come to mind). I have no problem with this - they are still legally the owners of the work, and as I have no rights to their software (other than the license I purchased when buying the actual software), I respect their right to administer the copyright as they see fit. Personally, I think that's the way abandonware should be handled.
--
Re:Respect the authors
by
Wind_Walker
·
· Score: 2
most authors are pleased that their work has been preserved for posterity
That's an excellent point. I know that if I were to write a program for any platform, I would want to milk the most money out of it as I could (this is the USA, after all, build upon principles of greed and hoarding)
My problem is with your definition of how abandonware should be handled. You say that you put programs up on your website until the authors ask you to take them down. What if they don't know about it, and hundreds of people nab it before the e-mail hits you and you take it down? Then you've become nothing more than a w4r3z site.
A better method would be to contact each author/corporation before posting it. While being inconvenient, it's really the best way to ensure you aren't violating anybody's rights. ------
A better method would be to contact each author/corporation before posting it. While being inconvenient, it's really the best way to ensure you aren't violating anybody's rights.
Well, at least that would make it legal. But how effective would it be? Individual authors who want to see their works preserved for posterity would probably be happy to cooperate, but corporations wouldn't consider granting such permission without the approval of their lawyers and executives. Lawyers are usually loathe to forfeit any rights, on general principle. Executives are similarly loathe to forfeit any possible source of revenue, however small or theoretical. (Even if they don't choose to exploit it, they will rarely relinquish the right to do so.) Executives could potentially even be held liable by stockholders if someone concludes that they passed up a moneymaking opportunity. These things make it difficult and risky for corporations to be good citizens; the path of least resistance is to refuse permission, even if they don't actually care about the code anymore. The corporation might be willing to turn a blind eye (probably protesting ignorance of the flagrant copyright violation, and doing some symbolic sabre rattling when pressed), but asking them to grant express permission is asking a lot more of some (usually) conservative people.
Another possible problem is identifying the proper legal owner of the code; many old software companies have gone out of business, and finding out who inherited the intellectual "property" may be quite difficult. (Unfortunately, even if the actual author is sympathetic, some company or another usually owns the copyright and won't be as sympathetic, unless they still value that author.)
"It's easier to get forgiveness than permission." This seems to be the operating principle of these abandonware sites. Is it legal? Obviously not. Is it right? That's a moral question, and laws alone cannot answer moral questions. If they're not in it for a profit, and they're not harming the business of the copyright owners, and they're willing to remove anything by request of the proper owner, then at least it can be argued that their motives are pure. Legally, they're still at risk, and could take a fall. Or they could get away with it indefinitely. (Minors who run such sites may have some legal protection, unless tried as adults!)
--
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible."- Alan Kay
You'd be amazed. I'm part of an effort to find copyright holders of Apple II software and to persuade them to reclassify their programs as freeware. In the last couple of months I've managed to free The Ancient Art of War, Ancient Art of War at Sea, Balance of Power, a set of statistical programs, and I've sent copies of ThinkTank and Advanced VisiCalc to their respective authors to post on their sites. Just about all Beagle Bros and Penguin/Polarware programs are now freeware. Yes, the big corporations are a problem... especially Apple, I'm sorry to say. But what can be done is pretty amazing.
Well, it's good to hear that at least some companies will act rationally. Were you able to convince them to make the next step and release the source code as well? (i.e. free beer or free speech?)
--
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible."- Alan Kay
Editors remember only copyright
by
Vincent+Bernat
·
· Score: 2
I find the article has one particular interesting point. An "excuse" to mount an abandonware site is that many people bought the game but don't have the original disks any more (because they are corrupted).
It is not an unfair excuse. When I got my CDR burner, I have archived my old games on a CD. I haven't been unable to put them all since some disks became unreadable.
I am not a lawyer but I remember if a game (or just a piece of software) has copy protection, the editor must provide a piece of backup if the customer ask it. I don't think this is limited in the time. I don't think if I ask some game editor for 15 years old game's disks, it will send them to me. But finally, some of them won't forget they own copyright on these titles...
However, I don't know any game editor for computer (not for console) that have fought this kind of "piracy". Do someone knows one ?
Re:Editors remember only copyright
by
NetFu
·
· Score: 3
I agree on the issue of not having to pay for software you already paid for because you lost it over the years or because you spilled coffee on the install media or something like that.
How would I prove to the publisher that I bought their computer game "Nuclear War" 12 years ago and I want another copy because I lost the original one during one of my many moves back then? Sure, if the only way to get a replacement copy is to buy it, then that's the price of stupidity and I'd buy it, but if I can download it off the internet then what's wrong with that? Oh they don't like that because then people who didn't pay for it could download it and they'd be losing money... even though they don't even sell it, let alone support it any more, so how much money could they really lose?
Why don't you software companies stop letting the bean-counters run your companies and do what some software companies *have* done and post the old software on your site as an unsupported free download? Then, if you find it is popular, you can re-release it and make money off of it... oh, I guess you won't do that because then you'd find out that next-to-nobody wants those old games anyway, only a few of us who really loved them.
Anybody know where I can download (or even buy) copies of those ancient InfoCom games we used to have so much fun with?
Re:Editors remember only copyright
by
Ketzer
·
· Score: 2
It happened to me.
I recently got an itch to play Star Control 2 again (that was such an awesome game) and couldn't find my original floppies. So I bought it for $10 online at some vintage game store. They offered it for download, along with the manual in pdf and a pic of the map, both for reference and copy protection.
There definitely needs to be some sort of archive. The Library of Congress for games. If the manufacturers want to, they can license their stuff to the archive and have it sold for a reasonable price. If a copyright expires, set it to free download. I would love this.
how can these guys can do this and think of it as a good service?
this is illegal.
to use the oft cited collolary - books - if a books is out-of-print, do you as a public citizen have the right to make copies for people? even if you take no income from it? aren't you violating the publisher's rights? the author's rights?
i fail to see where this 17 yr old is any different than any other pirate copying games and throwing them up on an FTP site.
-- /* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
What about the publisher who went out of business? If someone owns the rights to the program, call them up and asked to be removed.
There will be a argument for every piece of softare he's got posted.
Publisher out of business = no copyright
Publisher sold rights = copyright
publisher won't support = ?
-- ....... Thus ends my attempt at wit or whatever
The purpose of Copyright is stated in the Constitution -- "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". Out of print titles do little to further this aim.
If a book is out of print, it increases the liklihood that your use can be found a "fair use" since the infringing act does not have an effect on the market for the book -- there is none. If it's done non-commercially instead of for-profit; if it's done for educational purposes; these things just come down on the side of "fair use".
-- I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Most of the other comments on this thread have mentioned how I feel about this stance, as for books, there is some interesting stuff going on with copyrights and books. If a book goes out of print for a certain amount of time, then even if the publishing company still owns the copyright at that time, the writer is given a legal ability to publish the book without the consent of the publishing company. Or something like that.
If the company is not producing or supporting a product and does not pursue illegal reproduction of said product then it might as well be legal. He is different than a regular pirate because his act of piracy does not cost the company that he is pirating the software from any money. He is providing a service that people want and the legitimate companies don't wish to do.
The difference is that nobody is being deprived of an income they wold otherwise have had.
The traditional argument against piracy is that the owner is being denied the payment for their property. In this situation, where the owner is refusing offers of payment, this is clearly not happening.
I can't say I'm really against abandonware, but there are some thing from the corporate side people seem to be forgetting. With all the different media out there right now (DVD, video, computers, video consoles, etc) most companies are competing for overall entertainment time, as well as directly against competitors. If you are spending time playing an old abandonware game, that is less time for you to be playing that new PS game, or Diablo2 or whatever game they just came out with. That is one of the biggest reason game companies are against abandonware.
Also, don't forget that some game companies release collection of old games every so often. Abandonware hurts these collections more than anything else. I could go and buy a collection of all the old King's Quest games, or I could get them for free...which is more likely to happen? Yes, this is a minority of the games, but it is still something that needs to be considered. While abandonware can be good, I can completely understand why many companies are against it, usually with at least some good reasons.
--
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
"to use the oft cited collolary - books - if a books is out-of-print, do you as a public citizen have the right to make copies for people?"
Yup. It's called public domain. After a certain (currently inordinately long) time, the public does have the right to do these things, whether or not other people are making profit from it. It becomes even more suspicious if *nobody* is currently making profit or attempting to make profit, or even supporting in any manner the items. Even *more* so with software because the lifetime of a piece of software is *years* not decades or centuries, like books, etc.
In any case pirates don't copy games. They roam the seas steal loot, bury it, and kill people. Pirate is a loaded word that doesn't make sense in digital copying. Digital copying does not "deprive" the originator of the work, and is not stealing per se. That is not to say it is good or legal, but that it means something different with respect to digital, conceptual, and other non-tangible things. See the FSF and Jefferson's opinion on this.
If you are spending time playing an old abandonware game, that is less time for you to be playing that new PS game, or Diablo2 or whatever game they just came out with. That is one of the biggest reason game companies are against abandonware.
As others have posted in this story, this seems a really silly argument. At any given moment, the endeavors which I am currently undertaking prevent me from doung countless other things. Nintendo should sue Sega for having a product that takes away possible Nintendo revenue by keeping people from playing Nintendo games. The recording industry should sue the publishing industry (or vice versa--the publishers were here first) for offering products that occupy people who might otherwise be purchasing CDs.
This is a great arguement except they don't have anything to do with these other projects. They do hold the copyright on games they created, so if they don't want to have the games they control out there for these reasons, they can. Think, you it be preferred (from the company's standpoint) that you keep playing the original SimCity, or buy the new version and play that? If you can't get the original, then if you want to play a version of SimCity, you need to go buy the new one. If you could get the old one for free, you might be settled with that, and not buy the new one. This way they don't have to keep competing against themselves. They will always have to compete against the "real" competition, but the don't have to compete against their own older products.
--
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
You guys really don't have a clue about property rights, do you?
Actually, most people here (yourself perhaps excepted) have a perfectly good understanding of property rights.
However, Intellectual Property is a misleading term. It is not property per se, but a privelege granted by the government for a limited time[1] that allows one exclusive control over the first sale of their product.
That is all. Calling such Intellectual Privelege "Intellectual Property" doesn't make it an actual piece of property, any more than calling a Pig a Duck would suddenly cause the pig to grow feathers.
As an aside, concerning property rights, there are such things as easements, abandonment, and squatters rights which allow people who have been tresspassing for a certain period of time to retain defacto rights to do so in the future even if you, the property owner, don't like it. In the case of squatting, ownership of the property can actually change hands as a result. In the case of abandoned property, typically anyone can come along, pay back taxes, and take possession (again, after a period of time).
Such periods of time are typically measured in years (I believe Illinois allows 10 years for easement, 20 years for squatters, and 7 years for taking possession of abandoned property, but I haven't checked the law recently and could be off by several years either way. Regardless, this is a far cry fron 120 years [corporate copyright] or life plus 95 years [individual copyright]).
So even your misplaced and misguided example doesn't apply, as the property rights you hold so dear, and are so eager to misapply to the intellectual realm, have clear limitations and provisions which kick in after a remarkably short time, when compared with period of time for which copyright grants authors and corporations such near absolute priveleges of monopoly over the works they market.
Publishers doing the Right Thing
by
Phil+Wherry
·
· Score: 3
While I'm certainly a big open-source advocate, I think it's at best questionable to make abandonware available in an uncoordinated fashion.
This doesn't stop the publisher from doing the Right Thing, however. It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while, a former publisher of software will do the right thing and make copyrighted works available at no charge after their commercial value is gone.
There are some examples of this actually happening. I started off my small-computer career using the venerable TRS-80 line of computers, which were actually decent machines for the day when outfitted with a third-party operating system. A number of applications (including source and binaries for my OS of choice in those days) have been made available by their copyright holders -- see http://www.research.di gital.com/SRC/personal/mann/trs80.html if you're interested in these specific examples.
I'd love to see terms written into a license agreement that allow unrestricted free distribution of the software either immediately or X years after the software is no longer sold and/or supported. I'm not, however, holding my breath, since the point of most license agreements is to disavow everything said elsewhere on the product's packaging.:)
Phil
If they won't replace disks...
by
evanbd
·
· Score: 3
So these older titles shipped on diskettes, and then the diskettes failed, and in a moment of nostalgia someone wants to play an old game or something. The publishers had a card in the box saying they would replace the diskettes if they failed. So is there any recourse when they don't? I guess one could try something in small claims court, but would that work? Is there really any other way to get these old titles back? I still have several old shareware titles (registered! imagine that!) that I *occasionaly* dig out and play. I now have them moved to CDROM, which makes things easier, but if I hadn't I'd be grateful for such a site.
If only it could be taken a step further. Like some way to have firms actually take seriously a license that GPL's (or BSD's) a piece of software x years after it's no longer supported. (Preferably where x=0.)
It increases the value of the software, by making consumers know that if it is good, someone will always be there to take up development on it.
Maybe they could put the code with some sort of escrow company, who reviews all the software and GPL's it as appropriate.
Anyone working on this?
Steve
Legally very interesting indeed.
by
AndrewD
·
· Score: 5
Let's leave the criminal penalties out of it for a moment.
The civil measure of recovery for breach of copyright is one of:
Damages, so as to place the wronged party in the position he or she would have been in had the harmful act not occurred;or
Account of profits, whereby the wrongdoer has to pay over the entire profit made by the infringement.
So how, in a civil action, does the copyright owner establish an entitlement to other than nominal damages? He's not making any money at all off the abandoned software, so there's no possibility of damages. He can't say he's lost any fraction of zero sales that would sound in damages.
As to an account of profits, only those sites that actually make some form of money gain from offering abandonware are vulnerable, and at that there's a good argument that the profit is only that fraction of profit represented by the illegally distributed title. If there are thousands on the site and it's making peanuts, damages could well be very small indeed.
I would certainly be advising a copyright holder not to waste his money, were any of them to come to me over this sort of thing.
On the other hand, I imagine the criminal penalties for breach of copyright in the US are rather more fierce and fiercely enforced than they are here in the UK. It would be doubtful whether offering abandonware on the web, free at the point of sale would actually be a crime here, absent advertising to make it "in the course of a business". And even then you'd have trouble getting the weights and measures people interested - they're more interested in the pirate recordings and dodgy-chanel-perfume-made-with-air-freshener-and-c at-pee markets.
--
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
Re:Legally very interesting indeed.
by
freebe
·
· Score: 2
Sure, sure, sure, just like Mitnick's stolen copy of the Solaris source "cost" Sun the entire cost of engineering the source code.
I'm certain the copyright holder could use such an argument to the court - and claim about $10 million in damages. And they would get away with it, because they have expensive lawyers.
Disclaimer: Do not construe my comment as defending or attacking Mitnick.
Re:Legally very interesting indeed.
by
PhilHibbs
·
· Score: 4
So how, in a civil action, does the copyright owner establish an entitlement to other than nominal damages? He's not making any money at all off the abandoned software, so there's no possibility of damages.
If in getting a free copy of Word 2.0 I decide that I do not need to buy Word 2000, then they have lost a sale, and could claim the lost revenue from that sale. It's tenuous, but that's what expensive lawyers are for.
Re:Legally very interesting indeed.
by
jandrese
·
· Score: 2
What if your computer simply cannot run Word 2000. Say it is a 386 with only the base 640k of memory. You simply cannot buy a Word processor today that will run on your system, so you have to go find an old version that will. Microsoft lost no sale, and perhaps only Intel could sue you for lost sales.
There are times when the laws, especially the laws that affect corperate earnings, aren't in touch with reality. I think a lot of Slashdot posters are forgetting this, and merely posting a lot of "stealing is wrong, if you steal you are worse than hitler, abandonware is stealing" posts.
--
I read the internet for the articles.
Re:Legally very interesting indeed.
by
Frater+219
·
· Score: 4
The softco's argument could be: 'The user used an old copy of Microsoft Word 2.0. This stopped them needing to buy
a copy of Word 2000. This denied us a sale.'
It is unreasonable to count old versions as competitors but not to count competitors as competitors. That is to say, a bootleg Word 2.0 denies WordPerfect a sale just as much as it denies Word2k a sale.
Re:Legally very interesting indeed.
by
AndrewD
·
· Score: 2
This is why I limited the initial post to the UK.
In the UK a claim like that is susceptible to being thrown out at an early stage as having no reasonable prospect of success at trial under Part 24 of the Civil Procedure Rules, or as an abuse of process under Part 3. The winning party gets to claim the loser's costs from the winner as well.
--
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
Re:Legally very interesting indeed.
by
AndrewD
·
· Score: 2
I think you overestimate the ability of expensive lawyers. I am one, and know whereof I speak: the difficulty with running specious arguments like that in court is that the judge, who used to be an expensive lawyer himself, tends to ask inconvenient questions about how breach of copyright puts the Claimant out of pocket by the whole development cost in any way that hadn't happened by reason of the software's obsolescence.
Remember always that the aim of damages is to place the claimant in the position he would have been in, so far as money can do it, had the harmful act not occurred. Punitive damages can sometimes be levied over and above that measure for an assortment of reasons, but none of those reasons that I know of in various jurisdictions cover not-for-profit actions that cause zero or nominal loss to the aggrieved party.
--
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
Re:Legally very interesting indeed.
by
jandrese
·
· Score: 2
Perhaps I cannot afford a new computer, or I don't belive in the forced upgrade cycle that the computer manufacturers seem to like. If my comptuer does what it needs to, then why should I upgrade? Just so I can run the newest version of a piece of software with features I can't use/don't want? That is perhaps the dumbest reason to upgrade I've ever heard. If MS still sold Word 2.0, I'd buy it to run on my computer, but since they don't I have to get it some other way. IIRC MS has publicly stated that they do not support the 386 platform anymore, therefore I see no reason to support MS.
It must be tough to ski when you can't see the moguls because your world is all black and white.
--
I read the internet for the articles.
Enforcing Copyrights on Abandonware
by
meckardt
·
· Score: 4
Enforcing Copyrights on Abandonware is done for one reason only: control. Why would a company want to keep users from having access to old versions of software? So the users have to buy the new versions!
As a rule, new versions of software are more feature rich (read: fatter) and may or may not be more useful. But it is certain that the company that produces the new software can get a lot more money from it that they would if they kept selling the sold software.. Rather than sell and support both, they would just as well force you to upgrade.
Of course, that makes it hard to keep using those old Win3.x machines with currently available programs.
Gonzo
Re:Enforcing Copyrights on Abandonware
by
freebe
·
· Score: 2
You're right. That's why the makers of the new Asteriods wouldn't let the old version be distributed for free - because the new version includes the old version! As long as there are opportunities like that, I fail to see how opening abandonware can be good for the companies in question.
Copyobligation or Copyright?
by
BaronM
·
· Score: 4
As far as I know, copyright is an exclusive right conferring the specific power to prevent others from copying a piece of work. The fact the a copyright holder no longer wishes to provide copies is not an abuse of their right, it is straightforward exercise.
Maybe that shoudl change. Books go out of print, music stops being published, and software that is still useful dies because authors and publishers no longer have an economic interest in providing copies. In all cases, cociety is poorer for the loss.
Maybe copyright should be modified to impose an obligation to provide copies to all who are willing to pay for them. If an author wants to be released from their obligation to provide copies, they must release their copyright.
This is too simplistic, but cay you all see the basic idea?
Re:Copyobligation or Copyright?
by
radja
·
· Score: 2
>The fact the a copyright holder no longer wishes to provide copies is not an abuse of their right, it is straightforward exercise
In many cases the copyright holder has stated in the license that I am entitled to replacement copies if the media breaks, becomes corrupt or something. Thus, by not providing replacements, they are infringing on rights they explicitly gave me.
//rdj
--
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Re:Copyobligation or Copyright?
by
Kickasso
·
· Score: 2
So I'm obliged to provide a copy to everyone who's willing to pay. Fine. That'll be 1,000,000,000, sir. Sorry, we can only accept cash. --
Re:Copyobligation or Copyright?
by
dillon_rinker
·
· Score: 2
I've thought about that, too, but it would clearly be an abuse of such a law. You would not be permitted to charge more for a copy than the lowest cost you had previously charged for a copy, plus the actual cost of copying. And if you charge excessively, and this is proved in court, you lose the copyright and the work goes into the public domain.
In short, if you are given rights, you are also given obligations, and if you violate the obligation, you lose the right. Sort of like the right to own a gun. Commit a felony with a gun, lose the right to own a gun.
What about abandoned music?
by
Remus+Shepherd
·
· Score: 5
There's a band I really like -- Big Daddy. (Not the current rapper known as Big Daddy, but a 50's style band of the same name who did parody songs in the '80s.) Big Daddy put out 4 albums, only two of which were released as CDs. The other two were vinyl-only...and are totally unavailable. The record company doesn't sell them, used record stores can't find them. Those songs are in serious danger of being lost forever.
And yet, if I were to rip my Big Daddy albums into MP3s, burn them to a CD, and give the CDs to friends so they can experience Big Daddy's music, I'm breaking the law. Yet if I don't break the law, this music will eventually disappear completely.
I have a hard time understanding how preservation of music or software became illegal. If the publisher doesn't supply or support it, and it's unavailable through normal means, why not let the public do with it what they will? There's no more money to be made on these works -- the creators aren't even trying to make money on them anymore. They should be in the public domain, and if the public wants to preserve them they should be allowed to do so.
Note that if copyright only lasted 15 years (as I believe it was originally written), Big Daddy's works would be in the public domain by now, and the public could rescue them freely. It seems as though copyright is interfering with the process of restoring and recording history.
-- Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Re:What about abandoned music?
by
Kaa
·
· Score: 2
I have a hard time understanding how preservation of music or software became illegal.
One of the rights of ownership is the right to destroy.
If you want to preserve something that is not yours -- tough luck. The owner gets to decide what happens to it.
I am not saying that letting old software die is a good thing, or even a reasonable thing to do. However, the copyright holders are perfectly within their rights.
Kaa
--
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Re:What about abandoned music?
by
Rude+Turnip
·
· Score: 2
It is my understanding that copyright does not mean that you "own" something. For instance, MSFT can't walk into my office and break my MS-Office CD because they hold the copyright. The doctrine of first sale states that I own the physical disc and the little bumps burned into it. I can microwave it, use it as a coaster, or do my job with it. Copyright law states that although I own it, MSFT has the right to say that I cannot share it with others. So, no, copyright does not give you the right to destroy.
Copyright was created to promote the creation of works. You are simply given distribution/copying rights (hence - copy*right*). The copyright laws were designed to promote the arts for the betterment of *society* by giving artists an incentive to create.
If you no longer distribute or support your art (such as games) and you use the copyright laws to prevent others from preserving the art, then you are harming society as a whole. I must emphasize that copyright is ultimately for the benefit of society, which will last much longer than any shortsighted individual or corporation.
I agree with one of the above posters that if copyright holders do not want their old progs. being distributed by others, then they should at least provide the progs. themselves.
In the end, I do not believe we should voluntarily burn another library of Alexandria for the temporary monetary gain of just a few individuals.
Re:What about abandoned music?
by
dillon_rinker
·
· Score: 2
One of the rights of ownership is the right to destroy.
This is SO wrong. You don't OWN intellectual property (what a ridiculous concept!)- you hold in trust for the public good. Copyright and patent holders are granted a monopoly in exchange for their willingness to eventually place their work in the public domain.
Re:What about abandoned music?
by
dillon_rinker
·
· Score: 2
I agree - one of the obligations that should go along with copyright is the obligation to ensure that the work is eventually placed in the public domain. Is your performance copyrighted? Did you distribute copies? Very well, then; you have now created an obligation for yourself to see to it that the work is ultimately placed, undamaged, in the public domain. Want to keep the copyright for the whole 120 years? Fine; just be sure it's recorded on non-degradable media, and that the devices that play back the media are still intact 120 years from now.
This is what libraries should be used for. You create a work, you sell a work, you donate one copy to a library. That library then assumes the responsibility of seeing to it that the work remains intact.
Re:What about abandoned music?
by
dillon_rinker
·
· Score: 2
Two choices:
1. You don't live in the US
2. You live in the US and are severly confused about copyright laws. If you look hard enough, you can find (as I once did) an intellectual property FAQ (for US law, of course) on the net somewhere. It's a good source of basic info.
One could compare this to a situation with out of print books. There is a definite owner of the IP, (s)he is still alive and owns the copyright, but the work is no longer commercially available. If there was a surge of interest in such a book, and I had a copy, I would never consider it acceptable to just scan it in and let people read it without asking the writer.
Thats the problem. Calling it "abandonware" makes it sound like a little lost puppy that you can't find its owner. They know who the owners are. Why not (scarey thought coming) ask them? The guy profiled in the article has ad revenue coming into his site. He is likely making money off of other people's IP. Why not send a form letter stating the purpose of the site, what titles they would like to feature and offering a profit share based on downloads?
In most services, requiring an "opt out" rather than "opt in" is considered predatory marketing. In a situation where the legal lines are so well drawn, simply offering to remove is not enough. There are ways to do this right, and making money off of doing it wrong is not aulteristic, no matter how you try to spin it.
Kahuna Burger
-- ...will work for Chick tracts...
Re:Out of print books?
by
KahunaBurger
·
· Score: 2
It's also far easier to get forgiveness than permission from any company. Companies don't want to get involved in lawsuits. Well, some do. But most see it as a huge expense they'd rather avoid.
On the other hand, getting permission requires legal effort and decisions on the company's part. And companies are populated by folks who don't want to make decisions...
Not to be simplisticly moralistic, but doing the right thing is often harder. And don't underestimate the difficulties one could have hunting down permission for a book. Small presses go out of business, authors use pseudonymes, move to different cities, etc.
An honest site trying to "provide a service" would check to see if a piece of software was truely abandoned (is it avalible in a compilation or re-release, if so post a link to the provider) and ask permission of those that were. When the owners were not providing the software and said no to the abandonware site, the site could keep track of requests and periodicly report the consumer demand and ask again. It would be more work. But providing a service is usually work.
Allthough I do wonder if that time span of 5 years isn't a bit short. In some cases vendors tend to bundle their software together in order to sell it, once again, in some form of "the best off". IIRC its adventure games (they need some time to solve anyway) which tend to be bundled over the years.
The most recent examples of this coming to my mind are the Dragonlance series from SSI (Champions of Krynn, Death Knight of Krynn and the Dark Queen of Krynn (see the Dragonlance site) which were bundled in the so called "Forgotten realms collection". And there is offcourse the Ultima series which also got bundled (episode 1 - 8 iirc).
If you compare that with an action game like Half Life you'll notice a difference. It was quite recently when I picked up a bundle offering Half life & opposing force. So basicly I think its kinda hard to take a period of 5 years and consider everything older then 5 years obsolete.
Kenyon's site, like other abandonware sites, offers hundreds of classic games and applications free for download, including Dune 2 and Syndicate... Kenyon and his peers define abandonware as software that is at least five years old and is no longer sold or supported by its publisher or developer.
I know Syndicate is still available for purchase from Electronic Arts under its 'Classic' label.. and I'm sure quite a bit of the software on abandonware sites is still sold in stores. Most of my software purchases are classic games, because you can get excellent games for a great price, and you can know the game won't suck. If abandonware sites claim they are doing a service for people who need replacements for bad disks, why don't they have sanction/permission from the publisher? Oh, wait, it's just like how Napster, et al is really used for freely distributable music.
If you want classic games, pick them up for $5 at the store, on CD-ROM no less. You'll be doing everyone a favour - you will have a great game, and publishers will be encouraged to re-release more classics for cheap prices.
Re:A legal mechanism to abandon?
by
AndrewD
·
· Score: 2
Easy enough. A public announcement that they intend never to pursue remedies in respect of the copyright, and that people are free to use the thing so released (maybe adding that henceforth it's on the GPL, if they're feeling that way out) amounts to a license granted to the world at large and off we go. While it isn't supported by consideration to make it completely enforceable, it's still thereafter impossible for anyone to sue on the copyright.
Abandonware is a tricky subject. A couple of points the article failed to bring up:
1. In some cases, people _need_ older copies of programs. There are some document formats that, for one reason or another, are no longer supported--even through modern conversion software. If that old document happens to contain password-protected tax data, and no modern software will read it, where does the user turn to but to abandonware?
2. On the other hand, compilations of old games are a relatively popular low-budget option for game publishers. They're almost guaranteed to make money for the company (since they're dirt-cheap to make). I for one jumped at the chance to purchase Interplay's compilation of the SSI Gold Box games. However, if these games are freely available on popular abandonware sites, then it makes it difficult for a publisher to convince anyone to buy it.
3. Here's the real sticking point (which I'm also the most out-of-my-league about): if it can be proved that a copyright holder knowingly allowed someone to infringe on that copyright and did not take action to prevent it, then the rights to that material can be permanently lost. This prevents selective enforcement, but at the same time obligates the companies to go after abandonware sites if they want rights to a future version of the game.
It seems that this whole area is in a kind of legal void, with the two sides of the argument brought up in the article both having valid points. It will be interesting to see if this ever gets brought to court--doubtable, though, since people running abandonware sites will probably never be able to afford a lawyer for a case like that.
Actually, I made the unstated assumption that the article mentioned--your old program disks go bad, etc. Sure, this would require you to be rather foolish (running an old program off of your one copy of the disk) but it isn't entirely impossible.
Also, I'm not sure that it's a valid excuse to break the law--I just think that it's not immediately obvious that retrieving data through abandonware should be illegal.
3. Here's the real sticking point (which I'm also the most out-of-my-league about): if it can be proved that a copyright holder knowingly allowed someone to infringe on that copyright and did not take action to prevent it, then the rights to that material can be permanently lost. IANAL, but I consulted one over this very issue (in my case, it was an abandoned role-playing game - the old fashioned pencil and paper kind). This is wrong. Copyright is absolute, period. I can let you violate my copyright for 100 years without losing a single one of my rights under copyright law. You can make billions of dollars over the course of decades by violating my copyrights, and I can sue your for every last time the day before my copyright expires.
Trademarks, however, work exactly as you describe.
Has a court said so? The purpose of copyright protection is to increase the material available to society. If a program is unavailable by any means other than copying without the consent of the author or their agents, then a court might well decide the copying is fair use, as that is the only way to achieve the purpose of the law.
"aren't you violating the publisher's rights? the
author's rights?"
I have a right to, say, park my car in a public parking space. But if I choose not to use that right, other people are entitled to use it instead. If an author or publisher chooses not to publish, they have little claim to loss when other people choose to publish instead.
Discovery in such a case might reveal that a publisher, by their own evaluation, would have to expend $100,000 in costs to create and distribute copies of a program that would reap $80,000 in revenue. Thus they would lose money. The defendant who provided copies of this abandonware would have cost the company to lose the opportunity to lose $20,000. Thus there are no damages, and hence should be no court award.
Things may be different in the cases of books, which are sometimes reprinted years or decades after the original printing. We have not seen such a market for software yet, and we are not likely to, except for nostalgia. So software should be ruled and judged by a standard appropriate for it, not for books.
Sec. 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or
phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including
multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in
any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether
such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit
educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in
relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or
value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon
consideration of all the above factors.
Copying abandonware is not commercial, and has no effect upon the potential market for or
value of the copyrighted work. So that's 2 of 4 points. I think it's not unreasonable to treat such copying as fair use. (Not all 4 points must be satisfied; courts will consider all of them and their relative importance in each particular case.) Granted, this is not scholarship or research or news reporting, but it need not be. For instance, backup and timeshifting are not mentioned here, but they were found to fall under fair use. --
Again, the "we want things for free" mentality.
by
AugstWest
·
· Score: 2
Assuming that because a product is not currently being marketed and sold, it has no commercial value is ludicrous.
Especially in a country so obsessed with nostalgia, things come in and out of vogue, reunions happen, Williams releases emulators for their arcade software for various platforms....
There's a case in point. I know people who didn't buy any of the arcade reissue discs for the PSX, even though they were avid fans of the included games. And why not? Because anyone can get their hands on MAME... because there is a mentality that "they're not making money on it right now, it's languishing, so it's free for us to release it."
Copyrights are copyrights. Fight them all you want, go ahead and change the laws, but until you do, they're still law.
Re:Again, the "we want things for free" mentality.
by
PigleT
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· Score: 2
"Assuming that because a product is not currently being marketed and sold, it has no commercial value is ludicrous."
How about backing up that assertion? No-longer being actively sold means exactly no commercial value to me.
Yes, folks will want stuff for free - the alternative, always having your wallet dripping out of your pocket for every little thing is downright offensive - and if a company could give it away for no loss to themselves, they should be encouraged to do so.
Of course that means the copyright laws and IP laws are a crock of crap - holding on to something beyond usefulness. If you want to support that corrupt legalistic system, feel free, of course. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
-- ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Re:Again, the "we want things for free" mentality.
by
AugstWest
·
· Score: 2
Ah, a young anarchist who doesn't want his/her money to leave his/her wallet... because it's "offensive."
I did back up my assertion. Did you read the post? Williams was the example I used. They lost revenue due to piracy in the name of abandonware. A number of other companies do as well. See? That's not your "no loss" situation.
If you visit some of the abandonware sites, you'll see lists of games that have been deemed no longer abandonware, due to their being put back on the market again. There are at least 30 games in some of these lists, and they don't always overlap.
I think it'd be a good thing to create a climate in which companies can, if they choose, release their software or source when *they* choose to, as is happening more often lately.
most of these pieces of software should have had their copyright run out. However, the (Sonny) Bono/Disney amendment to copyright law made copyrights expire 100 years after the author's death. THis practically made coporate-owned copyrights immortal.
Since this is a bad law, we as moral people, have an obligation to not only disagree with it, but also to not follow it. Civil Disobedience, if you will.
The video games from 20 years ago should be in the public domain by now. The only theft, is by the corporations who are robbing the public out of public-domained knowledge/works of art.
The immortal copyrights need to be amended to something reasonable, like 17-20 years. If not less, considerring the speed of internet development.
3. Here's the real sticking point (which I'm also the most out-of-my-league about): if it can be proved that a copyright holder knowingly allowed someone to infringe on that copyright and did not take action to prevent it, then the rights to that material can be permanently lost.
IANAL, but... ...the kind folks from the SPA had a nice talk with me, which prompted me to do some research into the subject. Under the Berne convention, copyright does not need to be policed by the copyright owner. Trademark and patents, yes, copyright, no.
And there's the rub. Duke or Doom are copyrighted titles... but they're also trademarks. Not defending the copyright is the same as not defending the trademark. That's why publishers are so quick to take action when copyright infringement is brought to their attention.
The article links (through a redirect script) to http://www.abandonwarering.com/ as the main web page for the abandonware thing. It's got links to many warez sites, use at your own risk. Doesn't seem too legal to me, seems like they're making money off other people's work - it's got banner adverts.
-- You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Yeah, but I bet the banner ads don't even cover the cost of keeping the site up and running. They aren't making money, they're just losing money at a slower rate.
Disclaimer: I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I seriously doubt that the 0.01 cent/visit you get from the banner ad will get you any profit after you pay your ISP.
It would be nice if software companies were required legally to place all obsolete, discontinued, or simply old software into the public domain (at least at the binary level -- source code would be super-cool, but that's not likely at all) 2-3 years after they stopped selling it. This would benefit scores of end users, at pretty much no cost to the company. The software publisher is no longer selling the product, so it's not like they are losing revenue from that particular version of the product.
At my school, for example, there are many students whose home computers consist of 486 and slower Pentium based systems, as well as a small cadre of users who are still using older PowerMacs (and a few clones). The vast majority of these users are simply interested in a machine that they can do simple word processing on. A 486-66 running Win95 rev. A ain't gonna be able to hack running Office 2000. These guys don't have the bucks to shell out for a newer machine (or an upgrade) so that they can run MS' latest bloated version of Word. Word 6.0 or WordPerfect 6/7 will suit them nicely, but guess what? They can't buy it anywhere, and if they copy someone else's, then they're suddenly a pirate in Microsoft's eyes . . .
I've tried to set a few guys around campus with Linux and AbiWord, but in most cases they've either gone back to Windows (Linux is too much for them to bother with, AbiWord doesn't do page numbers yet, etc.) or I end up doing 24/7 tech support for 'em. So that option, while it's inexpensive in terms of money, isn't really an option for folks who aren't as technically inclined as most of us.
The problem with AbandonWare (in the case of products like Word and WordPerfect) is that the 486 user that doesn't have the horsepower to run Office 2000, and copies her friend's old Word 6.0 to do simple word processing represents a potential sale to MS. And when there are thousands of potential sales that end up copying old software instead of shelling out whatever the latest version of Office costs ($300? I have no idea really . ..) then suddenly the suits start to worry. Sure, 50,000 users *not* buying a $300 software package that otherwise would buy it only represents a total of $4,500,000 to Microsoft, whose assets are far past that amount, but each chunk of revenue lost equals a hit to the bottom line.
And, in the end, it's the bottom line that counts to pretty much any company (at least the ones that want to stay in business). Microsoft doesn't really give a rip about whether Bob and Sue can afford to upgrade their computers to run Office 2000, or if they can't stretch their budget to buy Office 2000 itself. They care about money. Period. And, even though I use MS as an example throughout, I'm not just picking on them -- most large software companies are going to feel the same way.
On an entirely different note, it sure is fun to run across a copy of a game you played 10 years ago, and play it again though . ..
-------
--
/* "A fool does not delight in understanding, but only in revealing his own mind." */
Zero information decay and its impact ...
by
LL
·
· Score: 2
The whole fundamental basis of the current capital framework is the concept of depreciation of durable goods. You purchase an item, then you write off its cost over n years. Now if you are a manufacturing entity, you'd like to shift the equation towards more frequent purchases of lower-cost goods (amortise R&D base across wider spectrum) leading towards a consumer/throw-away mentality.
Now apply the same thinking to software, if your profit margin is in the first sale, then any activity which results in suppression of repeat sales of the next upgrade is to be severely discouraged. Entities like Microsoft have tacitly acknowledged this by noting that their biggest competitor is actually their old products.
Thus if your business model relies on forcing customers to go through an endless upgrade cycle (cough*Wintel*cough) the Internet is a threat because so long as there is one person with the passion and resources to keep a copy, others will be able to find it and offer some exchange/trade/resale. Think of web-rings, freshmeat and mirrors, all which collectively serve to persist information and minimise bit rot. This may not suit companies accustomised to high information decay rates as it forces them into a service model which is human intensive and because they've bid up the price of programming labor to insane levels in hiring software engineers to churn out the next killer-app, can't compete as service model requires a somewhat different skillset (more diagnostic and less development). Lower margins = less profits = collapsing share prices = pissed off investors.
As AbiWord CEO points out, "Users are tired of the crazy upgrade cycle which has become the norm for so many desktop applications", primarily because it puts the real cost of software in wasted time learning applications which may be deprecated in the next release cycle. From the software developers and distributors point of view, old software is also a disincentive for upgrading and thus their desire to shorten the half life of information or put time-limited licensing terms into their EULA.
OpenSource sorta gets around the problem as their real business is stability and interoperability, despite all too frequent plaintive cries that Unix is not "innovative" or "bleeding-edge". Until the marketing/advocacy people realise this and emphasise low "cost of repair/replacement", they will be perceived as at a disadvantage to "mainstream" software. However, despite similar functionality, it is a distinct business from licensing IP blocks (drag,drop,script) where all the value is retained by the manufacturer. Just like abandonware is not really a software distribution, it is in the nostalgia business. As such, it can probably carve out a small niche for its proponent provided he's smart to avoid copyright lawsuits, given that the majority of software purchasers have short-term memory (when did you ever come across a piece of non-gaming software that you really *enjoyed* using?).
LL
Cross Platform Compatibility?
by
hymie3
·
· Score: 2
What's the legality in purchasing a version of software for one platform and then getting a warez version of it for another version? For example, I legally own copies of the Zork series for the C-64. Can I legally run these games on my BSD box?
I can legally copy a tape of music onto a CD (or visa versa). Is there any relation between the music and software worlds as far as copyright is concerned?
Hmm...Microsoft seemed rather against the whole abandonware concept...yet...when I go to the Abandonware Ring page...what do I see? An MSN ad banner.
I love it when stuff like that happens.
-- "That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
DOS creator not that badly off?
by
daviddennis
·
· Score: 2
The conventional wisdom is a juicy story: Microsoft founder Gates buys DOS from Seattle Computer founder Tim Patterson (those names might be off a little, feel free to make a correction) for $ 55,000, MS goes on to make billions, and Patterson's company goes bust.
But if my memory serves, Patterson was hired afterwards by Microsoft. If he got the stock options normally offered at that time, he'd be pretty rich right now, thus giving his story a happy ending.
BSA - aka Bidouilleurs Sans Argent (Means something like Moneyless Hackers) - is a non-profit organization aimed at giving people free software : not only GPL'ed but also FreeWare and even "Official Abandonware".
We created it in France something like 2 years ago after long discussions that even involved Richard Stallman himself (co-author of the BPL - BSA Public License).
We gather all the related software on our Web Site (in French) and we actively harass Abandonware editors to let us publish their "old", though often useful programs.
Of course, this might look we have not gathered that much software but whatever we get we publish it and if you help us convincing editors there'll soon be loads to pick.
FYI, the BSA name comes from the fact that we remarked that the Business Software Alliance didn't have a legal existence in France : So, we just picked the acronym before them...
--
Copyright actually lasts some number of years (I think 75) past the life of its creator. I'm not sure how long it is for corporations - I think it's a fixed span then.
I think car companies are required to sell spare parts for a specific amount of time after they stop production, and I think that period is quite long. However, a car is very different from hardware or software. Would you still drive a 10 year old car if the new ones cost 1/10th what old ones did, and the new ones were 20 times as fast and efficient? There wouldn't be many old cars actively used if this was the case.
One of the reasons abandonment is not a problem with books is that there is a well-established library system. Almost all books of any significant interest or value are available for free loan. It might be interesting to establish a software library -- a web site where you could "check out" and download software the library had acquired. Then the library would not let anybody else download the software until you returned it, by visiting the web site and going through the return process, which marks the program returned and deletes the downloaded copy. If a patron did not return a program on time, the library would charge a late fee.
Libraries could easily acquire material through donations of old software. In fact, once the library had acquired its first copy of a program, additional contributors do not need to upload new copies; they merely need to tell the library they are donating their rights to the copy they have. "Click here to donate your copy of Zork to the library."
Nothing in this model prevents a person from copying the software while it is in their possession, but nothing in the book library model prevents that either. Lending libraries would not be useful for people looking for software to run regularly on their computers, but it would be useful for playing games and for working with old documents in obscure or no-longer-supported formats.
Theft is illegal because it harms society as a whole. If I steal something physical from you I can't get as much for it with a fence as you could have gotten by selling it on the open market; thus the total wealth in society has decreased. A society based on theft would fail in a constantly spiraling decline of wealth as everyone stole from everyone.
Please note that there are people who do benefit from the theft of physical objects; the thief has and increase in wealth, and the manufacturer of the object benefits, since they get to sell another copy to replace the one which was stolen. This does not compensate for the direct loss of the victim, and the loss to society as a whole from the decrease in value of the original stolen object.
In the case of intellectual property just the opposite occurs. If I copy an existing disk the wealth of society INCREASES; there are now two copies of the original which can do more work than the previous existing copy could. Who loses? The owner of the disk does not lose, he still has his original copy. I benefit, I can now do something I couldn't do before. The only possible loser is the manufacturer of the software - who was deprived of an additional sale by my act of copying. Notice that I said the MANUFACTURER, not the CREATOR; there is a difference. Under the free market system the person who creates software is very rarely the person who benefits from the sale of that software.
Please note that in the case of physical theft the manufacturer benefits. I HAVE NEVER HEARD A MANUFACTURER COMPLAIN ABOUT BENEFITING FROM PHYSICAL THEFT. Have you? By failing to do so they lose the moral right to complain about the loss in sales caused by duplication of disks.
There is a critical difference between material goods and IP; in the digital world the digital equivalent of the 'Star Trek Replicator' exists, it is a CDROM burner or a floppy disk drive. Given a pattern to work from these can replicate the original. Think how much the economy would change if physical replicators existed. Manufacturing would become obsolete - each person with a replicator would in effect become a manufacturer.
What the software MANUFACTURERS want to do is to benefit from the fact that replication exists in the digital world while preventing everyone else from using their own replicators. Of course they do, if physical replicators existed physical manufacturers would try to keep people from using them while they got to use them to make outrageous profits.
Last year Microsoft had NET profits of 40% of sales. That is NET, not GROSS profits. The net figure comes after their accountants have pulled every trick in the book trying to reduce the number to minimize taxes. Microsoft's huge profit occur because they are using replication technology to build their product, it costs them less than a dollar to create a copy of a program which sells for hundreds of dollars.
Please note that the actual creators of the software are paid chicken feed to create the digital patterns which Microsoft turns into billions of dollars worth of profits by using their replicators, and forbidding us to use ours.
The free market system has worked well for us in the past when it comes to the manufacturing of physical goods. However it breaks down in the face of replication technology. We need to come up with a system which rewards the actual CREATORS of software instead of rewarding people who are using digital replicators to gouge the public for billions of dollars, while trying to deny to individuals the use of that technology.
That is why I distinguished between creators and manufacturers, the creators do deserve to be rewarded. It is also why I said we as a society need to come up with a system to reward them for their creations.
Creators and manufacturers are not in equal bargaining positions: in business the golden rule applies: "He who has the gold, Rules".
If creators and manufacturers were in equal bargaining positions the creators would write about half of the contracts of which you speak, They don't write any. Their choice is turn over their work for what ever wages they can pry out of their employer, or starve. That is not much of a choice.
I can write on the subject of IP for hundreds of pages, I chose to shorten what I had to say about theft.
All arguments are circular if you take them far enough. As long as we are on the subject of logic, here is a little puzzle for you.
X/X = 1
0/X = 0
if X = 0 these two equations become identical and contradict each other.
Aristotle said "No thing can be both A and non A at the same time and in the same way". That is the postulate of identity which keeps contradictions from happening. I have presented an example of a contradiction. The ONLY conclusion you can reach is that Aristotle was WRONG.
Postulates are not logically defensible, they either stand or fall on their own. All that is necessary to invalidate a postulate is to show a counter example. I have done so.
By the way, don't try arguing that division by zero is not an allowed operation: that doesn't make the contradiction go away, it just sweeps it underneath the intellectual rug.
The correct postulate of identity is: "Accept in so far as something refers to itself, no thing can be both A and non A at the same time and in the same way."
If Aristotle had been correct Rand would have been correct. If Rand had been correct, you would be correct. He wasn't, neither was she, and neither are you.
The revised postulate of identity is compatible with the Yin and Yang nature of reality, Aristotle's original one is not. It is just as wrong as his belief that heavy object fall faster than light ones.
respecting copyright IS cooperation
by
adamooo
·
· Score: 2
> Movie companies usually destroy films when the copyright expires rather than allow them to enter the public domain.
> How spiteful! It's a wonder how society limps along at all when nobody is willing to cooperate even minimally with others...
Looked at the right way, Copyrights (and all other laws) ARE an agreement to cooperate with each other. When you abide by the law because it's what you'd do anyway, it's worthless. When you abide by the law because it's the law, you are making a decision that the public good (being able to rely on certain rules of behavior) is worth sacrificing personal liberties (e.g. by not yelling "fire!" in a crowded room, or by not stealing music just because someone else CAN rip a CD and CAN post it on the web and you CAN download it for "free" (like beer)). Society CAN be tightly restricted by laws, but a basic level of law CAN insure that the majority of people have the elbow-room to live decent lives without someone sticking a gun in their face to get their wallet or selling bootleg copies of the CD their band works on.
Violating copyright is tresspassing on someone's Homestead (see ESR's page) on the Noosphere - people who care about software development should consider whether they think this is akin to tresspassing in their physical home. The answer will vary for each of us - but in some sense Copyright law does (or can) give each of us the right to make that choice (let people in - OSS; keep people out - traditional) just as physical property laws allow me to protect my home (or open it up, whether for a weekend party, or every day).
Re:respecting copyright IS cooperation
by
B'Trey
·
· Score: 2
When you abide by the law because it's what you'd do anyway, it's worthless. When you abide by the law because it's the law, you are making a decision that the public good (being able to rely on certain rules of behavior) is worth sacrificing personal liberties (e.g. by not yelling "fire!" in a crowded room, or by not stealing music just because someone else CAN rip a CD and CAN post it on the web and you CAN download it for "free" (like beer)).
Laws should be written to protect the individual, not to support the common good. It isn't wrong to yell "fire!" in a public theater because it protects the common good. It's wrong because my individual right to attend a theater in relative safely over-rides your right to free speech in that particular instance. If you obey the law solely because it's the law, you're making a decision to allow someone else to think for you. I refuse to do that.
--
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
I disagree that the article did a good job covering both viewpoints. Although it did mention both sides, it hardly did so in an unbiased way. At times, it said something like, "providing abandonware is illegal and infringes on the intellectual property rights of publishers and authors." Then it said, "The pirates claim that they are providing a service to the community." I hardly call that an unbiased report when one side is presented as fact, the other as a mere allegation.
Re:"Both ends" of the spectrum
by
Foogle
·
· Score: 2
I won't speak for the rest of the article, but the sentence you gave as an example was fairly unbiased, regardless of whether you agree with who it makes look better.
Providing abandonware, without permission, is illegal. You may not think it should be, but right now it is; that statement was as factual as possible.
The pirates do *claim* they are providing a service. That's not something you can really substatiate on -- Maybe it's a service, and maybe it's a morally reprehensible crime against intellectual property. You may think it's a service, but I guarantee you that the original game publishers don't think so. If you can dispute it, it's not a hard-line.
Didn't you ever cover opinion versus fact in fifth grade?
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Pirated "Abandonware" for sale in British Shops
by
Contact
·
· Score: 2
I work in central London, here in the UK. Just yesterday I was in one of our larger record shops (HMV on Oxford Street) and was rather shocked to see a compilation CD for sale offering "over 3,000 ZX Spectrum games, plus emulators!" (I believe the Spectrum was marketed by Timex in the US?).
I seriously doubt that the manufacturer of this compilation had authorisation of the publishers for this collection. There were pretty much all the old classics on there, from numerous different software houses (some now long gone, some still here).
Overall it was a well done article, providing insight into both views. However, my only gripe is the bit of propoganda in the form of the bar graph depicting the billions of dollars lost due to software piracy.
First of all, that bit of information has no bearing whatsoever on the topic at hand, and second, those numbers are greatly exaggerated.
For example, I would bet that the majority of people who posess a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop would be unwilling to fork out the money to actually purchase the program. They would find a much cheaper software solution that would meet their needs.
The numbers presented by the graph are grossly bloated. (Like many of programs and prices that the manufacturers offer consumers.)
A long while ago (but not that long ago) I acquired a customer who had a requirement that their C programs be compiled with Microsoft C 6.0. They had a DB library that wouldn't support any other compiler. At the time, MS had just started selling Visual C++ 2.0, which had a 16-bit compiler, but it wasn't compatible with 6.0.
I called Microsoft. They told me that I couldn't have 6.0, as they didn't sell it any more. However, if I copied 6.0 from my customer and bought VC++ 2.0 at full retail, they would turn a blind eye. Not that I could get that in writing, of course, but I had the personal assurance of the guy who answers the phones.
This actually sounds quite reasonable, until you realise how much more VC++ 2 cost than C6. IIRC it was about 4 times the price.
I can only say that abandonware (although it's the first time I've heard the term) is the only reason I have ever seen that justified pirating to me.
I still consider it pirating, but it's the only reason I've ever accepted as legitimate.
To sum up some of the other posts that think this is still morally wrong, we have to look at exactly what this is: published material that is relatively old and NOT SUPPORTED by the company that published it, and not sold by, or in anyway available from, the company that published it or anyone else.
Personally, I have a copy of Falcon 3.0 that I tried to install recently and one of the 3.5" disks (possibly more, since I didn't get past it) was corrupted. By RIAA standards, it's illegal for me to download somebody elses copy, even though for all intents and purposes, they are identical.
So there's a difference between intent of the laws and actual wording (and morality is a completely different issue).
Someone gave the counter argument that you don't legally have a right to not stop at a stop sign, even though you know no cross traffic is coming. That's true, that's the letter of the law, but the intent is to protect lives and allow traffic to proceed in a fair manner - and by not stopping (or coming to a complete stop), you are not violating the intent of the law. You are also saving gasoline and causing less pollution. Of course, a cop'll still give you ticket, because they are typically instructed to follow the letter of the law - it's not their place to determine what's right or wrong.
But who are we to judge when it's ok to violate the letter of the law? When it's so blatently obvious no one is coming (you can see for a good distance in all directions before getting to the intersection), and when the original copyright holders have no purpose in protecting something they no longer sell/support, I just don't see the problem. No counter examples really capture what's going on, here.
I agree with these "abandonware" people, and I WILL download Falcon 3.0 if I see it.
----------
-- Stupid sexy Flanders.
Don't Require the CD to run...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2
I've returned Diablo II 3 times already, because they decided to copy-lock their CD with a system that's incompatible with many of the newer CDROM drives, including my own.
I can copy the cd to get Diablo II installed, but unless I break the cd-lock system, I can't actually play the game.
Copy-locking has never been a good idea. It just insures that people who want to buy your product can't, and that when your product is pirated (because you know somebody is going to see it as a challenge) EVERYONE will want a pirated copy. Even the legal folks, just in case they ever purchase the product and actually want to use it...
Re:Don't Require the CD to run...
by
WNight
·
· Score: 2
Starcraft and Broodwars are the worst I've seen. They install fine, but then they'll never recognize the CD in my system. I have two cd readers, and I installed from both, and it didn't work either time. When I downloaded their CD tester it declared my CD drivers were invalid, that I'd have to buy a new one to play their game...
So I went off to astalavista.box.sk and downloaded a crack.
I'll *never* buy a Blizzard game again, the email I sent them complaining about how their copy protection system kept me from playing their game went completely unanswered. I guess once they sell it, they don't care if it works or not... that doesn't get them anymore sales.
And it's not like I have an old PC, all the components are new. The oldest is my 2x DVD drive, the 48x CD drive I just got months ago. (And I tried to use my old SC/BW CDs in the new system.)
So, seeing as how much fun it was to be able to play without throwing the CD in, I went and cracked all of my games. Nothing currently requires the CD in the drive. It's wonderful.
(And in doing so, I researched a bit of the law... It's not illegal in any way to crack software. The exception being if you live in the USA, in a state that has ratified the UCITA, where the 'no reverse engineering or modification' clause is binding.)
So, take a lesson from this and simply crack all your games. Not only do they work better but you don't have to mess with keeping the CDs handy.
(Even Q3A cracked, and allows me to play online (with my legit CD Key)... I was impressed.)
Re:Don't Require the CD to run...
by
WNight
·
· Score: 2
I live in Canada.
For you, as a US resident, using a crack is completely legal, unless you fall afoul of the DMCA or the UCITA.
The DMCA will get you anywhere in the USA, but shouldn't get because the crack has a usefull purpose beyond breaking copy protection, it allows function on computer where the copy protection doesn't work. Considering the companies rarely do anything about this, they've lost the right to complain (I think, though a judge could be bribed to say otherwise.) Reverse engineering to facilitate compatibility is specifically allowed under the DMCA.
But, if you're in one of the states that ratified the UCITA, using a.CAB viewer on the install files is probably a violation of the 'No Reverse Engineering' clause...
So, it depends on where you live and if you have legitimates copies of the games... If you own legit copies and just crack them to play them better or get around a broken CD check, the DMCA can't touch you. If you sell the cracks as such, or are pirating, they can likely get you for another charge under the DMCA as well as regular copyright law.
The UCITA though, makes nearly everything illegal and provides that the software doesn't need to work, so by living in those states, you basically agree that buying an empty box that claims to contain software is just fine...
Re:Don't Require the CD to run...
by
WNight
·
· Score: 2
Exactly, backups, where needed, aren't against the law.
What remains to be seen, is if it's against the law for companies to provide media you can't backup... In some cases, obviously not, they can provide a DVD game and it's not their fault it costs a lot to back up a DVD, but if they provide a CD with special laser marks burned into it and the game refuses to play off of any other disk, does that unfairly circumvent your right to make a backup copy.
I think it does, and that software companies shot themselves in the foot when they started ignoring requests to replace damaged media... That leaves no choice but to be stuck with a useless product or to make a backup as soon as it's received (or to make a copy of another identical program, as a backup for your broken one.)
So keep on to it untill the copyright has gone (thats after 30 years btw) and make sure you are the first one to claim the rights.
If the works were published in 1964, say, the earliest they would go out of copyright would be 2059. That's more than 30 years.
For works published more recently, it's generally is the lifetime of the author + 70 years. Works of corporate authorship are under copyright for the shorter of 120 years from creation, or 96 years from publication[1].
A work published today will most likely not enter the public domain until sometime in the mid-22nd century...
...that is, assuming copyright terms are not retroactively extended again as they have been consistently over the past few decades (c.f. The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act).
Audio CDs have a lifetime of about 50 years. If people don't start making their own copies of things after they go out of distribution, very large chunks of our culture will begin dissapearing.
Excessively long copyright terms are producing the cultural equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture[2].
[2] I am seriously considering voluntarily releasing my own works into the public domain after 14 years (the original term for copyrights) to combat this.
--
DNA just wants to be free...
Appealing to logic would be better
by
Morgaine
·
· Score: 2
You write: this is illegal.
So, you never exceed the speed limit because that would be illegal, right? Yeah, right. In reality, questionable laws don't get respected and don't get obeyed by anyone except sheep who are unable to distinguish right from wrong.
Any argument based on a statement of "this is illegal" is basically not a logical argument at all, but an appeal to authority. And "violating the publisher's/author's rights" is no better -- it presuposes that the case for rights is a priori granted or obvious, which may not be the case.
Here in particular such reasoning makes no sense whatsoever, because the very concept of intellectual prioperty is being re-examined in the light of the new realities of unlimited distribution and sharing on the net. What the law established in pre-Internet days is not necessarily right in today's world, any more than Victorian laws regarding horse-powered transport are right on today's highways. The law either adapts rapidly or it gets ignored.
-- "The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
So keep on to it untill the copyright has gone (thats after 30 years btw) and make sure you are the first one to claim the rights. After that you can do with the music whatever you want. Even sue others for violating the copyright on which you spended your hard earned money.
(emphasis mine)
This is just wrong on so many levels. Once a work is in the public domain, it's public domain. You shouldn't normally be able to copyright anything but your own derivatives of said public domain work.
If, on the other hand, you're suggesting holding onto the sole copy, and then leveraging copyright to extract licensing on copies of that, I think that's just morally reprehensible...
The fact that you reconize some is not allways because of the way the music is composed. In most cases its due to the fact that the company is using music which is more then 30 years old.
Usually that means that the music has been licensed from the original publisher, not that the copyright has expired.
... you know, I just realized you're in Norway. [Sorry, American arrogance strikes again:/] I may be completely off base, then, but I sincerely hope Norwegian copyright law isn't as twisted as you make it sound to me (although I daresay 30 year terms aren't bad)...
In any case, as regards copyright terms, international law is slowly serving to synchronize copyright terms in various countries (which was one of the contributing factors to the US extension). I'm not sure you will be able to rely on 30-year terms for long.
--
DNA just wants to be free...
Re:Resurrecting Abandonware [and Demos!]
by
Knos
·
· Score: 2
If only they still had the source code or the developement environment to run/compile the software!
Actually we have the same problem in the demo scene, old demos are very hard to watch as most emulators fail to cope with the kind of tricks a demo needs. And we still don't have any decent 8086 emulator which would emulate the Gravis Ultrasound, a necessary step to be able to watch the old pc demos!
Of course if we had the sources for those demos we may be able to port them, but this demos are the kind of productions where the binary is really the end product..
It would be really sad if this part of the modern culture disappeared in such way..
-- . . . . . . ... . . . . . ..
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
Copyright on "Abadonware" still useful
by
skoda
·
· Score: 2
This is an interesting issue. Like every other high school student with a computer, I pirated games (for my Atari 800XL:) I gave that up in college, suspiciously close to the time that I began working summers as a paid developer. So now I am reflective as I consider the non-legal distribution of software from my childhood.
If a company made a non-expirable contract with a buyer to replace software media, they ought to live with it (especially if us consumers gotta live with their EULA's). If this is not fulfilled, the "legal" recourse would be to sue. Since suing over $1 in media is not tenable (it's downright stupid), the more reasonable recourse is to just download the software. Not legal, really, but I think it is ethical.
But that only applies to previous purchasers. What about those who download it, never having paid for it, claiming that it's abandoned, making no money, and thus should be freely dessiminated?
The financial argument doesn't hold, since "abandonware" can become "commercialware" quite easily. Since someone had the copyrights to PacMan, Centipede, Frogger, etc, Microsoft (I think) was able to acquire them and release their "retro" gaming packs a couple of years ago, selling "abandonware" games for profit. Likewise, Hasbro was able to purchase them, make new versions, and sell them. Further, copyrights can be used (or sold) so that a sequel can be made, e.g. Syndicate. If the copyrights were thrown out after some short period of non-use, then everyone and their brother could resell, remake, or sequel-ize the games, which I don't think is a good thing.
Whether it is a good, bad, or ugly thing that copyrights can be held, sold, utilized, and employed to sequels, is perhaps the real issue, since this is relevant to movies, books, and other things, as others have pointed out.
Re:Copyright on "Abadonware" still useful
by
TrentC
·
· Score: 2
Further, copyrights can be used (or sold) so that a sequel can be made, e.g. Syndicate. If the copyrights were thrown out after some short period of non-use, then everyone and their brother could resell, remake, or sequel-ize the games, which I don't think is a good thing.
Why not? People wouldn't have to wait for a commercial developer to decide it's financially viable to re-release a game, or to make a sequel.
I bought a copy of Tomb Raider (yes, the original Tomb Raider) for my fianceé when I got my PC a little less than a year ago. Guess what? It looks horrible on my Diamond Viper 770! No 3D! I can't find any kind of patch for Direct3D or for my particular card. (If anyone knows of such a patch -- or even an *gasp* unofficial hack -- I'd love more information.)
Eidos seems unwilling to support the product which I have already purchased -- but I bet they'll be willing to sell me "Classic Tomb Raider" in another five years, all updated for whatever version of Windows...
Virgin Interactive was working on a Playstation 4-player fighting game called "Thrill Kill." Like the name suggests, it's gorier than Mortal Kombat even (yep, it gets pretty silly...)
Electronic Arts (I think,) bought Virgin Interactive, decided they didn't want a game like that being released under their name, and canned it... a week before launch.
I have downloaded this game (don't ask how, you can find anything on the net,) and I found that it only has a couple of minor bugs, and obviously a lot of work was put into it.
Now, do you think it was wrong to download, because the original programmers aren't getting royalties for every copy sold, and the company doesn't want the game out?
...or do you think it was acceptable because the game was never released anyway, so there's no loss to the company? Also that the programmers are probably proud of their work, and wouldn't want it wasted?
I'm not looking for justification to download it, I've already made my choice... but what does the/. community at large think of this?
Intellectual Property Conservancy
by
EricEldred
·
· Score: 3
Many posters comment that Abandonware sites are technically illegal. So here's a plan. Provide an incentive for copyright and patent owners to donate their works to the public, in return for a tax deduction. Don't steal the works, pay for them.
Set up an Intellectual Property Conservancy that is a non-profit, educational, publishing corporation. Donations of intellectual property could be tax-deductible (Congress could even make the tax deduction higher than normal for a superincentive, or provide a monetary incentive in lieu of tax deduction). Accept donations of copyright, online publication rights, source code, patents, trademarks, books, software, development environments, the whole lot.
When a company finds the income from an old work no longer makes maintenance worthwhile, then they can donate it to the public domain and the rest of us will distribute it and support it for free (or even for money). They will have an incentive to consider this, and if the company goes under the creditors will probably force it, since otherwise they would not get money back.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution wisely set up a balance between the rights of authors and inventors, and the public domain, by limiting copyright term and recognizing fair use rights. However, copyright term in recent years has been extended far too long. While it started at 14 years, now it is 95 years for a work made for hire (in other Berne Convention nations, it is 70 or 50 years after the author's death).
The copyright holders (mostly big publishers) howled that they needed protection for more years, because works had value that long. This is doubtful, but if it is true, then surely the copyright holders will get behind this plan, and find a way to realize more profits.
Since the public is the one to benefit, the public should pay. A difficulty with previous ideas is that the government does a bad job of setting prices for public goods. Okay, I say let the normal process of the market or fair appraisals, as is done today with tax deductions, be used instead.
Richard Stallman has pointed out that it might be immoral to reward those who take out software patents, for example. It might be considered like paying money to redeem a child from slavery. So there is room for a lot of debate and discussion on the issue. What do you think? Can you help get the services of a tax lawyer to vet this plan?
Re:Intellectual Property Conservancy
by
TrentC
·
· Score: 2
So here's a plan. Provide an incentive for copyright and patent owners to donate their works to the public, in return for a tax deduction.
It's kind of sad when we have to have this conversation, given that the whole point of copyright and patent was to provide incentive for people to create in return for their eventual release into the public domain.
In other words, imagine having the following conversation:
So here's a plan. Provide an incentive for the house painter you paid to paint your house this week, in return for a tax deduction.
Silly, ain't it?
Copyright holders have gotten their due from the system; they have control over the works they have "created". (The term is used in quotations since it's often a record label or publisher, not the actual creator, that enforces the copyright.)
But when it comes to living up to their end of the agreement, we instead get Sonny Bono copyright extensions, films being destroyed as they near the end of their copyright term, and everyone cries "oh, think of the author's heirs" and "shouldn't authors be compensated for their hard work?"
Jay (=
Re:Intellectual Property Conservancy
by
EricEldred
·
· Score: 2
we instead get Sonny Bono copyright extensions
Well, I am fighting that battle too, with a lawsuit against the Copyright Term Extension Act. See the OpenLaw site and add your comments.
It is sad, but maybe we can use some judo on the system to turn it to good ends.
Some old software has been published for free. For example, Visicalc, Borland C, even Microsoft Word 5. But what we need is to have the source code go back into the public domain so the public can benefit from it. Then the ideas can be reworked by the next generation and better products developed from it.
So we need an incentive to accomplish this. Simply publishing or stealing the object code is not enough. Of course, it would have been better if the Copyright Office had required registration and deposit of the entire source code, but it hasn't. So we need to develop some private institutions that can perform the way the Framers intended, and reinstitute the idea of copyright as a way to produce more for the public good.
While the right to make archival recordings is well-established, this is largely a digital phenomenon: No one would say that I have the right to make duplicates of out-of-print vinyl albums simply because they're not available any more.
Now that copying is trivial, we all of a sudden see it as our right and duty? Please.
Personally, I think anything that has been out of print for an extended period of time should be fair game, but that's not likely to happen.
See the spirited discussion that's taken place on thejudys.com (a great 80's band that barely had a presence in the record stores to start with, and so very hard to find) for more on the issue of whether it's OK to copy even things that are flat impossible to get hold of.
-- "The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last./ post
1. Not being able to get an old piece of software is like not being allowed to fab a part for a classic car. My prefered model for software has always been "software as product" where we simply treat it as a physical, destructable product, even though it isn't. Now, since the company that oroginally made the product is no longer manufacturing it, and refuses to do so, I believe it's fair game to allow others to "fab parts" as best they can.
This, by the way, is the same reason I hate Microsoft's EULA. Not being allowed to move Windows to another box is like not being allowed to pull a Chevy V8 and put it in another car.
2. If the authors aren't selling, they aren't losing money. In this case, the only argument they can make that they are losing money is that it interferes with their planned obsolecence plans. That's a poor excuse.
Another reason I side with abandonware is that I'm sure there have been many companies that have been bought for some reason, and then the purchaser decided they didn't want to develop the product.
If we want to extend the whole "piracy on the high seas" analogy, there is a precedent in maritime law. IANAL, but aren't people allowed to "salvage" ships abandoned at sea? I think this is very similar.
Now, how could we legislate to make abandonware legit?
Well, the five year rule is one good guideline. I would also say that the distributors of abandonware should not be allowed to sell it for any more than the cost of distribution. If the original manufacturer decides to start selling it again, they should be allowed to re-start sales at no more than the original retail price of the package, and the abandonware distributor should cease and desist.
-- For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I was not talking about *copying* Windows. I was talking about *moving* windows. The EULA does not even allow you to even *move* Windows, even if you agree to forfeit tech support.
As for the rest of what you are saying, I am not saying that the authors forfeit rights to their work. Notice that I said the abandonware distributor can make *no* profit, and must cease and desist on order of the author.
I fully agree with the "don't buy, don't get" concept, but what we have is a situation where certain distributors are taking the ability to buy out of that equation. That is no better than price-fixing
The larger issue here is planned obsolescence, which has never been dealt with as a legal issue as far as I know. REPEAT: I DO NOT EXPECT PEOPLE TO JUST GIVE AWAY THEIR WORK.
There are very good reasons "abandonware" should not be expected to be free.
1. We are not talking about source code here. Abandonware is binary only. If source were available, people would be maintaining it via patches, and there would be no issues.
2. Waiting until a package no longer makes money to take it would *not* damage the profit motive, because by definition, the profit motive is already gone. Notice that I asserted the right of the author to issue a cease and desist and resume sales whenever they want. Alternatively, destributors could be allowed to sell the product simply by sending a standard royalty to the author/publisher without a contract. DO YOU REALLY STAND IN DEFENSE OF PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE???
-- For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Most Windows users have OEM versions, not full retail.
Here is a direct quote from the OEM license to Windows95: "You may permanently transfer all of your rights under this EULA only as part of a sale or transfer of the COMPUTER..."
-- For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm not advocating turning abandonware into "free as in speach" software.
Exactly how could you interpret my statements as saying they should give up rights in other markets? I said nothing of the sort.
Where did I say anything about support? Support is not the issue. Sales is the issue.
I'm not saying that this piracy shouldn't be stopped either. Under the current legal framework, it's illegal. I *am* saying that we should look into revising the law so that the phrase "you can't get that anymore" becomes less common.
-- For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Do you see how silly that is? Imagine walking into a car dealer, and you have to agree to a contract saying you will never remove the engine and put it in another car. If you want an engine that you are allowed to remove, you can buy another engine and put it in the car, but you cannot buy a car without an engine. Instead, you must throw the OEM engine away.
-- For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The whole point of copyright is to encourage people to create. If they've abandoned their work, there's no need for copyright -- they've already gotten all the benefit they're going to get from it.
Let's say that's true, and it's violating the spirit of the law to enforce copyright in these cases. Unfortunately, the law needs to be enforced according to how it's written, not on a case by case basis where every instance is sent to a judge to decide where the benefit to society lies. It's simply not possible to run a legal system that way.
Laws also need an easier review process where if a case comes up that is against the spirit of the law but follows the letter of the law, that law could be rewritten.
This isn't to say that we should all follow the spirit of laws and never the letter, but today it's seeming that the spirit of the law is lost...
The RIAA mde one little wording change to a barely-related bill and classified recordings as works-for-hire.
Disney/MPAA/etc are extending copyrights until they're past the lifetime of the average citizen. (Currently 75 years, male life expectancy is 73 in the USA, last I heard...) If something was written when you were born, it'd still be copyrighted the day you died, in an average case.
The DMCA was supposed to stop piracy, but was written in such a way that it makes any attempt to circumvent the illegal sale restrictions (region coding, forced commercials, etc) illegal.
It's hard to have any respect for the laws when they're obviously written for the sole benefit of the people who pay to have them written.
A work goes in the public domain 50 years after the death of the author. Or 50 years after it was created if the author is a corporation (in Canada, other countries have similar thing, the period may change - I know that Disney want the period to be extended to 100 years, don't know it they managed to do it).
It was life + 50 years for individual authors and 75 years for corporate authors. Then the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended that by 20 years in both cases, to life + 70 years for individual authors and 95 years for corporate authors. Beyond the basic damage caused to the public domain, it was done retroactively (to Disney's delight), which is almost certainly unconstitutional. (Good luck getting a fair ruling on that one!) Ironically, Mickey Mouse may already be public domain, technically. (Good luck defending it against Disney's army of lawyers!)
--
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible."- Alan Kay
Original Length of Copyright
by
Deven
·
· Score: 4
Note that if copyright only lasted 15 years (as I believe it was originally written), Big Daddy's works would be in the public domain by now, and the public could rescue them freely. It seems as though copyright is interfering with the process of restoring and recording history.
The U.S. Copyright Act of 1790 allowed for a 14-year duration (a quite reasonable timeframe and a good balance of author incentive vs. public good), with another 14-year optional extension (in the 14th year), for a maximum of 28 years, which is plenty of time to capitalize on a creative work. (Especially when you consider that businesses usually make their plans based on expected returns within 5 years or so!) Works had to be registered with the Copyright office to receive protection; many works entered the public domain directly because the author didn't bother to register the copyright.
Copyright has been extended many times since then for the further enrichment of the rich, with no consideration given to the balance inherent in the "bargain" between the author and the public that copyright is supposed to represent. It's been twisted into an entitlement in many people's minds, a tool to enrich a few at great cost to the public. Copyright extensions (especially the last one) are enacted to preserve corporate profits (and the GNP), public be damned. It's a gross perversion of a system that was originally designed to benefit the public, not to enrich authors and "IP" owners.
--
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible."- Alan Kay
The best kind of abandonware is *source*
by
DG
·
· Score: 2
Far better than just posting the binaries, it would be _fantastic_ if some of these abandonware sites could contact original authors and get _source code_ released.
Why emulate, when you can port?
Is there any example of such a thing ever happening, outside of ID's sourcing of Quake/Quake2/Doom?
Copyright is a two way street
by
FreeUser
·
· Score: 2
Movie companies usually destroy films when
the copyright expires rather than allow them
to enter the public domain.
How spiteful! It's a wonder how society limps
along at all when nobody is willing to
cooperate even minimally with others...
Looked at the right way, Copyrights (and all other laws) ARE an agreement to cooperate with each other.
It is the movie studios that are not abiding by the copyright law, by destroying movies as they enter the public domain rather than adhere to the other side of copyright law (the other side of the "contract" if you prefer), namely that eventually such material over which they enjoyed such exclusive priveleges would enter the public domain and enrich us all. Instead, they are deliberately destroying stuff which has entered the public domain. In a sane society, this kind of behavior would be punishable as an act of vandalism against all of us.
Compared to the movie industries systematic misuse and abuse of the copyright system, even the damage done by those consumers who do violate copyright is minimal. Destroying old, valuable footage rather than giving it over to the public domain as is there obligation is merely the most flagrant and appalling example of an ethical and moral bankrupcy which infects that industry at virtually every level.
The diminishment of our culture by such greed is an outrage of dimensions seldom achieved, comparable in both scope and breadth to the nazi sponsored destruction of so much art and culture prior to the second World War.
Re:Copyright is a two way street
by
WNight
·
· Score: 2
If they're not living up to their end of the copyright laws, don't bother living up to your end... It's a pretty simple thing.
They demand protection, payed for by our tax money to keep piracy down, in compliance with copyright law, but they refuse to repay that tax money with their creative works later, that's a direct violation of that social contract, imho.
But it's only one of the more blatant. Usually they just write one-sided laws that they don't want to break and then pay some corrupt politicians to pass them. Not hard to be cynical.
If a book goes out of print for a certain amount of time, then even if the publishing company still owns the copyright at that time, the writer is given a legal ability to publish the book without the consent of the publishing company. Or something like that.
Actually, I think this is a feature of the CONTRACT that the author signs with the publisher - giving the publisher unique rights to publish the work, but reclaiming those rights for the author when the publisher chooses to stop executing them. This is how it worked in situations with which I am familiar - a textbook author I know has been notified by his publisher that they will not reprint the book, ergo he is free to re-contract with another publisher (or self-publish)....
Yes, it seems that book authors really have it better than musicians when it comes to contracts. It seems that the norm in book publishing is that the author retains the copyright and grants a temporary exclusive (renewable) license to the publisher to make copies, and that the author can re-publish later if the original publisher loses interest. Musicians, on the other hand, usually assign copyright to the publisher, and no longer have rights to their own work. (I believe recent copyright law changes have even codified this as the default for music!) Gee, could this have anything to do with the fact that the RIAA monopolizes the recording industry? Hmm...
--
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible."- Alan Kay
Now that copying is trivial, we all of a sudden see it as our right and duty? Please.
It's more that for the first time copyright terms now vasty exceed the lifetime of the media the works are recorded on (e.g. audio CDs). Ease of third-party copying is incidental, if convenient.
This stuff will dissapear if second and third-generation copies aren't made, and if something's out of publication, the publisher is obviously not willing to do that.
Personally, I think anything that has been out of print for an extended period of time should be fair game, but that's not likely to happen.
Personally, I think copyright terms should be reduced to something more reasonable (less than the median lifetime of the media would be nice), so this would be a nonissue.
I don't actually have plans to be doing any copying of "abandoned media" myself at the moment, but I am seriously thinking about dropping my own work into the public domain after maybe 14 years (the original copyright term).
Here's an intersting (if only tangentially related) thought, actually: does the Library of Congress have copies of The Judys' albums? (they appear not to, from a cursory look at their catalog) If not, shouldn't they? Why wouldn't they?
From what I can tell from the article, the abandonware sites are possibly legal, despite what the software publishers say. The article also has some significant inaccuracies of law.
The article says: According to copyright law, the creators of intellectual property such as software, books, and music have full ownership of the property. This is wrong (at least as to U.S. law). The creators of a work have a large number of substantial rights, the most absolute of which is when or whether to publish the work. As an incentive to publish ("make public") the work, the government agrees to provide certain limited monopoly rights on the work for a limited time, and back those rights with the power of the state. However, those rights are limited in a number of ways.
Copyright expires - the U.S. Constitution explicitly mandates that copyright last for a "limited time", which Congress has chosen to currently set very, very long.
Copyright rights of the creator do not prohibit "fair use" by anyone else without permisiion of the creator.
Copyright rights of the creator do not prohibit certain types of copying by libraries and public archives. This limitation is very relevant to the discussion of abandonware. More below.
The "first sale" doctrine and section 109 of the law prevent creators from restricting re-selling of a work, or (for most works, with some important restrictions) the lending or renting of the work. (Programs and sound recordings can't be rented commercially.)
There are some incredibly arcane rules that I don't begin to understand allow some re-transmissions of (lawfully) transmitted works.
Composers MUST license their published songs and other music (excluding operas and other "dramatic" musical works) under terms of a compulsory license for making "phonorecords" (sound recordings - tapes, records, CDs, etc.). The rate of payment is fixed by an arbitrator.
Publishers of "phonorecords" must license them for use in commercial jukeboxes, but have the option of trying to negotiate a deal that suits them better than the deal set by the arbitrator.
Owners of a copy of a computer program may make whatever copies of a program are essential to its use, or may make (an unspecified number of) backup copies. Section 117
The copyright on a building or other architectural work doesn't prohibit pictures or other images of the work (as long as it's constructed and in public view).
If the rights or a right to a work have been transfered (sold, licensed, or otherwise) an author or his statutory heirs may terminate (undo) the transfer unilaterally without compensation, within a window of 35 to 40 years after after the transfer. An author may waive this right by contract but cannot do so on behalf of his statutory heirs.
In other words, copyright ain't property like personal property...
But back to "abandonware". Section 108 of the copyright law says that, among other things, libraries and other publicaly available archives may (under section e of the law) make a complete copy of a work that they have determined is otherwise unavailable at a fair price and give it to a library user, provided a) they do not do so for commercial advantage and b) they display a particular notice as specified by the Copyright Office in 37 CFR 201.14 (PDF, scroll down to about page 20). The full text of the section e) reads:
(e) The rights of reproduction and distribution under this section apply to the entire work, or to a substantial part of it, made from the collection of a library or archives where the user makes his or her request or from that of another library or archives, if the library or archives has first determined, on the basis of a reasonable investigation, that a copy or phonorecord of the copyrighted work cannot be obtained at a fair price, if-
(1) the copy or phonorecord becomes the property of the user, and the library or archives has had no notice that the copy or phonorecord would be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research; and
(2) the library or archives displays prominently, at the place where orders are accepted, and includes on its order form, a warning of copyright in accordance with requirements that the Register of Copyrights shall prescribe by regulation.
Important: other parts of the section and of the law influence the legal interpretation of the above (so consult a lawyer), but the important point is, "abandonware" sites CAN be legal!
Except for some works explicitly released into the public domain, nothing since about World War I, in fact...
From a cultural perspective, what happens when the most recent body of public domain work is more than 100 years old, and anything else over 30 years old starts dissapearing as publishers lose interest in publishing it?
What is with that chart of "loss due to piracy"? Note the source: Business Software Alliance. These numbers come from multiplying an estimate of the number of pirated copies of software by the price of that software. Of course, if all those people could not pirate software, only a fraction of them would actually buy it.
Not only is this chart a lie, but it adds nothing to the article. Does the fact that someone estimates that software piracy was low in 1996 have anything to do with abandonware? No. The whole chart, with its kitschy hardware-store font, is just there to give your brain a rest from reading. The c|net reporter wants a technical-looking visual, and the BSA is right there in his rolodex, ready to provide. It is essentially free advertising for the idea that software piracy is bad for the economy.
I happen to agree that software piracy is immoral. But I hate it that the BSA gets to be the Respectable Source that, by inclusion in every story remotely regarding piracy, sets the terms of the debate. So here are a few platitudes on the other side:
- morality and economy are not the same thing (unless you decide they are, in which case I pity you).
- a certain amount of software piracy is good for the economy and even good for the software industry. Whether we have more or less than that amount is debatable.
this link, sadly, is one of those tiresome trolls that appears every once in a while.
I was almost tricked... but not quite.
D
----
Re:Attitudes like this are the problem
by
dillon_rinker
·
· Score: 2
Right. I *can* shoot you; that doesn't make it right. However, in a democracy, when most people want to do something, it by definition *is* right, unless it violates some human right. Copyright is not among those; copyright is a legal fiction.
I would argue that unenforceable laws are not just stupid, they are wrong. When everyone wants to do something, and it's against the law, and it's impossible to completely enforce the law, guess what? People do it anyway. In doing so, they knowingly violate the law. They learn that they can break the law and get away with it. They learn disrespect for the law. Authority breaks down. Society collapses. We wind up cooking squirrels over burning copies of Stephen King's last novel, and all because of Lars Ulrich and his crowd. It's just not worth it.
The reason that the music, movie, and software industries are such hard-asses when it comes to old work is because they're pack-rats... they never know when their intellectual property is going to be useful/popular/profitable again.
Think of it this way... there's a classic 50's song that Warner Brothers has the rights to. This song hasn't appeared on an album in 30 years, it's not on the radio, and it's not producing a dime. In fact, it probably exists at a loss to Warner Brothers because they are paying to keep it in archival all these years.
BUT, a movie comes out that happens to use this song and it suddenly resurges in popularity. All the sudden, there's a huge demand for this song that hasn't generated a profit in 30 years. Warner Brothers re-releases the song on both the soundtrack and a "best of" album. Suddenly this song is generating real revenue. If Warner Brothers had released this song into the public domain (or was forced to), they'd lose out on this revenue stream.
They hold the rights just in case something like this happens. If you have a million songs and just 1/2% of them produce $250,000 a piece, that's a big chunk of money. Now, I'm sure the percentage is much lower than that, but the music, movie, and software companies aren't relying on that for their sole source of revenue. --
You have a point, but I'm not sure it's true that this is the first time length of copyright has exceeded the life of the media.
We are losing countless numbers of books each year simply because they were printed on acid paper, and I'd argue that loss is far more substantial in the long run than the loss of performace art, but that's simply because text has a much higher thought density. I dragged some books back from my mother-in-law's house last week, and there are a lot of things only 50-60 years old that are rapidly disintegrating.
It would be nice if the Library of Congress or someplace else would archive everything, but that isn't likely to happen. (I'm not sure how things are *supposed* to get into the LoC - are publishers supposed to submit a copy? Are congressmen responsible? (For this, not in the general case, we know they're not generally responsible!)
-- "The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last./ post
Another reason companies bury "abandonware"
by
Robert+Link
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· Score: 2
Note also that some companies will refuse permission to redistribute their abandoned software, even if they have no intention of ever selling it again because they regard it as competition for whatever they are selling today. For example, a game company might reason that time you spend playing their old "abandonware" is time that you will not be playing their latest release. Therefore, the company might refuse permission to redistribute old games in order to reduced the competition that their current titles face.
-rpl
The reason companies don't like Abandonware
by
Supercoz
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· Score: 2
Suppose I download an old copy of, say Castle of the Winds, and (its actually not a bad game, although its graphics are bad) play this for a month.
Well, since I was playing Castle of the Winds, I didn't buy Diablo II. Software companies are simply afraid people will choose older, free software over newer, better (one hopes) software that costs $50+.
Part of the problem here (at least in the gaming industry) is that graphics are not nearly as important as many people think. I know a lot of games that are a blast to play even though they don't have super-up-to-date-graphics. Many older games have better gameplay than current ones.
The bottom line is, companies are worried about you getting the old software for free, because then you won't buy the new software. -Coz
Authorship IS equal to ownership. If I create something, you damn well better believe it belongs to me. But once I sell or give away a copy to a person, things change. I now own the ORIGINAL.
The core problem with software is that it can be copied. So once it has been distributed, whether by sale or for free, it is "out there". There's not much that can stop people from copying it. Copyright is designed to classify the author differently from recipients.
As you pointed out, the only issue here, is whether or not the author should be able to prevent other people from sharing. He certainly SHOULD be able to, otherwise he couldn't sell his creation. The main problem I have with the copyright system is the length of time these things stay in effect (thanks Disney!)
But the sentiment I'm seeing here on Slashdot is more like: "you're not using it anymore, so you should just give out the binary and source code to anyone who wants it".
Well, guess what - the author wrote it, and he is under no obligation to do anything else. I get so sick of the crowd that thinks they are entitled to everything. Go create something of your own.
Software is written and sold, with some reasonable expectation of some degree of support, EULA's notwhithstanding. If the software is abandoned by the author or assigns, what is the recourse of the poor saps still using it.
For example, dBASE5/DOS has a very nasty bug which under just the right circumstances writes back to several database files the first 6 (IIRC) bytes from stale buffers. This resets the record count of affected databases, causing newly inserted records to be lost. Without source or support, all you can do is try to work around it. (Hint, avoid USE AGAIN.)
With Open Source, or Abandonware, if there is a bad problem, it is at least theoretically posible to solve it, not easy, but possible.
With source, ultimately I am responsible for what the program does, particularly if I mess with anything. Without source, ultimately the author has to be responsible, since I am not really in any position to correct the problem. For finding and taking advantage of holes in a system, source can be more of a liability than a help. It requires a lot of expertise to set up the test harness, but once established, you get a view of what is actually going on uncolored by the programmer's expectations. Once set up, you can have a better handle on the system than the guy who wrote it.
I don't know where you get these ideas but let's see if you can follow along.
Software is written and sold, with some reasonable expectation of some degree of support, EULA's notwhithstanding.
Wrong. The level of support is completely up to the author. If you don't like what he offers, then don't use the software. It's the exact same thing for the non-software sector. E.g. if I sell you a snowboard and you don't know how to ride it, I'm under no obligation to teach you.
If the software is abandoned by the author or assigns, what is the recourse of the poor saps still using it.
Don't use the software.
With source, ultimately I am responsible for what the program does, particularly if I mess with anything. Without source, ultimately the author has to be responsible, since I am not really in any position to correct the problem.
Once again, though, it is the author's CHOICE whether or not he wants to release the source or support his software. The rest of your post is simply arguing the benefits of open source. But that's beside the point. If you're feeling shafted because some program you use turned into abandonware, then find a vendor more to your liking. But there's no default degree of support offered or implied with software as a whole. Expecting that is asking to get burned.
> Authorship IS equal to ownership. If I create
> something, you damn well better believe it
> belongs to me. But once I sell or give away a
> copy to a person, things change. I now own the
> ORIGINAL.
Right. Thats actually what I said. Authorship is NOT ownership. You can own the original, the original is a physical thing. You can own a copy of the original, a copy is a physical thing.
However you can't own the words, code, sound thats encoded into it. If you sell a copy to someone, you no longer OWN the copy...they do. However, you still retain Authorship of it.
Authorship is not ownership. It remains even after ownership is transfered. (does that make more sense?)
> Well, guess what - the author wrote it, and he
> is under no obligation to do anything else. I
> get so sick of the crowd that thinks they are
> entitled to everything. Go create something of
> your own.
You rmissing the point. Noone is asking the author to DO anything. This is not about releasing source or anything like that.
The question is this: Does the author have the right to stop copying and redistribution? Yes he does. but WHY does he?
He does for the reason you say: if he didn't, he couldn't make money because publishers would just sell his work and not pay him. That is why copyright exists...to make it safe for authors to publish and thus to encourage publication.
Using copyright to stop someone else from distributing a work is fine then. However I contend that doing it, solely for the purpose of stopping distribution, in and of itself, when the copyright holder is NOT doing it themselves or liceing someone else to do it, THEN it is an abuse of the copyright system.
Copyright is a temporary monopoly, given not because it is deserved, but as a reward to encourage more works. If it is not used, it should lapse. If your not going to take advantage of you rmonopoly, it is right that you lose it.
IMNSHO the only reason that this isn't the case today is that when copyright laws were written, noone imagined the situation that we have today.
And now that we have the situation, there is too much special interest in that NOT happening.
-- "I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Re:Compulsive licensing DOES exist.
by
jms
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· Score: 2
Yes. If you write a song, you have the absolute right to release the first recording of the song. After that, any other band has the right to "cover" your song on their album if they choose, or perform your song live, and they pay a royalty to you that is defined by law. You don't have the right to say "no."
This law was created to break up the player piano roll monopoly. It's an old law.
Why is this law still important today?
Without that law, each band that wanted to perform or record someone else's song would have to obtain permission from the original songwriter.
This would seriously harm up-and-coming musicians. Most bands don't start out writing a suite of completely original material. A bunch of guys get together, and they pick a bunch of songs that they all know and like, and that they think will play well to an audience. They learn those songs, learn the craft, and play the local bar. The bar pays the compulsory licensing fees to BMI and ASCAP. Then, hopefully, the band gets good and starts writing their own songs, becomes famous, and other new bands start performing their songs, and paying BMI and ASCAP in return. It's an important part of the cycle of how musicians are developed.
The Beatles started out as a bar band playing covers -- other people's work. So did the Grateful Dead, Phish, and probably nearly every musician in the world. How many musicians can you find that have never performed a cover song?
Without compulsory licensing (not "Compulsive licensing" -- an interesting concept:), most amateur and semi-professional musical performances would be illegal. Your band could be sued for performing, for instance, "Satisfaction", without the express written consent of the Rolling Stones.
In short, Congress recognized that when the recording industry had the absolute power to pick and choose who was allowed to perform and record works, a destructive monopoly was created. This law has nothing to with Socialism and everything to do with preventing a destructive monopoly.
What about PCVR? Sorta On-Topic...
by
cr0sh
·
· Score: 2
It has been debated on this article over the legitimacy of distributing "abandonware", and out-of-print books. But what of out-of-print magazines?
When PCVR's (see my site, if you want to know more) publisher (Joeseph Gradecki) decided to stop publishing (for whatever reason), I bought a copy of each of the back issues. As far as I know, Mr. Gradecki is still alive. I want to republish some of the articles (I would love to do the magazine, but I don't have the time or money) on my web site, to make them available for others, but so far, all attempts at contacting him to ask permission have failed (I even got his mail address from his last publisher - alas, the mail came back "Return to Sender/Address unknown"). I can't contact the authors of the pieces in most cases, since many didn't have email addresses or leave snail mail addresses, either.
Short of reading the articles, and writing my own distillation of the article (or building the device, saying how I built it, and referencing the article) - I don't believe I can legally republish the article (though I tend to wonder if doing so would bring Mr. Gradecki out of the woodwork, so to speak)...
Does anyone have any ideas on what I should do?
I have a similar collection of articles from BYTE magazine (though not nearly as complete), but the PCVR issues are more at stake, since you can still look at BYTE in hardbound form in library stacks...
We are losing countless numbers of books each year simply because they were printed on acid paper, and I'd argue that loss is far more substantial in the long run than the loss of performace art, but that's simply because text has a much higher thought density. I dragged some books back from my mother-in-law's house last week, and there are a lot of things only 50-60 years old that are rapidly disintegrating.
Yeah, that's my point. 60+year copyrights are a relatively new thing. See When Works Pass Into the Public Domain-- I think it gives you rough dates of when the various legislation was enacted.
Also note that I said vastly exceed. If you're really careful with keeping books, even acidic paper will last you more than 60 years. You can't say the same for CDs -- 50 or 60 years, and you're most likely SOL no matter how careful you were. And the copyrights are now a LOT longer than 50 or 60 years. Try nearly 100, or possibly even more (see earlier link)!
I'm not talking about soley recorded performance art, either. A lot of materia go on CDs now that are more commonly associated with printed matter (encylopedias, novels, even some periodicals). Let's not forget software, either.
Some material is even more ephemeral -- for example, web pages. The reason my web site is licensed as a whole under the Open Publication license is so that if someone actually cares (well, unlikely for mysite, but...), they can (legally!) save material themselves, and preserve it, even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow and my account drops with nobody to pay the bills after I'm gone.
It would be nice if the Library of Congress or someplace else would archive everything, but that isn't likely to happen. (I'm not sure how things are *supposed* to get into the LoC - are publishers supposed to submit a copy? Are congressmen responsible? (For this, not in the general case, we know they're not generally responsible!)
It used to be, at least, the responsibility of the culture/civilization as a whole to preserve and pass on such things, not the mandate of particular organizations or individuals. The bigger the civilization, the more impossible a task it is for an individual or organization anyway.
--
DNA just wants to be free...
Abandonware accoring to Micro$oft
by
Yanna
·
· Score: 2
I am surprised that Micro$oft didn't think of this: give the masses the source for Win 3.x, let open sourcers modify and improve the code. Once there is a very decent and stable version of Win 3.x available for everyone, with loads of addons and new features not even existing in Win 2000, start selling software for the new and improved Win 3.x Open Source version.
Here, in the good old U. S. S. of A.,* in the great State of Indiana, in Allen County, there is an Allen County Public Library that lends software. Seems libraries are allowed to do this under Federal copyright law. This is also the justification for the "digital libraries" known colloquially as w4r3z sites: their "due date" is 24 hours after the download.)
So how, in a civil action, does the copyright owner establish an entitlement to other than nominal damages?
You apparently fail to realize that "nominal damages" is anywhere from $500 to $150,000 plus all equipment used in the infringement. And if certain conditions are met, the damages can be trebled. How would you like paying a $500,000 bill?
As I mentioned, I was talking about the UK position, where nominal damages is £5.00 and usually an order that the party winning them pay the other side's costs as a penalty for wasting the court's time and resources. I wasn't aware that US law (while I know a bit about US law, I'm first and foremost a UK lawyer) had such a swingeing view of what constituted "nominal" in a civil matter - the sums you're talking about sound like criminal fines. Is there some authority for that proposition that I can find on the web?
Thanks for that. One interesting point arising from it is that an alleged infringer can reduce the statutory damages to a more manageable $200 where it can prove it's a non-profit body indulging in fair use.
Whether an abandonware site with no ads restricting itself to truly obsolete unsupported software can avail itself of this is another question, of course, but it'd be worth a try if push came to shove and there was no convenient way of backing out before action.
--
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
abandonware service should not be illegal
by
Tokyo-Internet-Hell
·
· Score: 2
I think that rather then spending money going after the abandonware pirates, they should look at the situation from a marketing standpoint. Just by the sheer number of sites, and hits these sites are getting, there is obviously consumer interest in abandonware. Realizing this, rather than trying to shut these services down, maybe they should sign some sort of contract with the site operators to provide the software the companies themselves are no longer willing to provide. The way I see it, it ends up like an outsourcing project: the company receives revenue, without any of the overhead cost for it. And I think consumers truly interested in the abandonware titles would be willing to pay a certain small amount to have access to the software.
I think this is perfect example of not only how inflexible companies have become, but how copyright laws can be used for the wrong purpose.
Somehow, it doesn't surpise me that the company quoted in the cnet article is Microsoft. I think they are one of the best examples of a company that doesn't know how to serve the consumer, nor what the consumer wants.
The important element is "not for profit" on the part of the infringer, I'd guess. As to whether third-party ads count, thinking aloud:
Third-party adds interpolated in your site to pay for your free space? I suppose one could say that the adverts are there because you're attracting visitors, which makes the ads valuable, for which you get something that is worth money, free web space.
At first glance, then, I'd say that those ads do count, since you're being paid for them in server space. The defendant's argument is that all the ads do is cover the cost of the webspace, and non-profit does not mean "loss-making". The notional payment for the ad space is the server space sufficient for the defendant to provide the wares on a cost-neutral basis - he therefore makes no profit.
It wouldn't help a claimant either if several users could be brought forward with tales of breach of contract in the shape of refused replacements of disks. But that's another issue, and one which has been well-rehearsed elsewhere under this article.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of copyright is to encourage people to create. If they've abandoned their work, there's no need for copyright -- they've already gotten all the benefit they're going to get from it.
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
The NeXT community survives on abandonware. A fantastic set of productivity apps (the Lighthouse Suite) was bought by Sun and basically given away. There are a whole bunch of other such apps. It's quite refreshing in that it keeps the old platform alive. I suspect people will always use the old platforms while there is software available, and abandonware (mostly legal) is the way to do it.
The question of illegal abandonware is a little more sticky. I suspect that most people are less queasy about trading abandoned apps than they are about currently available programs.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
By now, it should be pretty well-known that any attempt to control digital media in the Internet age will be a complete failure (cf Napster, Gnutella, etc). Who worries about the legal status anyway? If you want to download a copy of Ultima 7, then you're going to do so no matter what the law says.
The only real difference between abandonware and mp3 audio is that abandonware is generally distributed on centralized web sites rather than de-centralized systems like Napster, which means that they can be shut down much more easily. I personally look forward to the day when all of it is available on FreeNet of Gnutella.
-- Floyd
-- Floyd
--
I find the article has one particular interesting point. An "excuse" to mount an abandonware site is that many people bought the game but don't have the original disks any more (because they are corrupted).
It is not an unfair excuse. When I got my CDR burner, I have archived my old games on a CD. I haven't been unable to put them all since some disks became unreadable.
I am not a lawyer but I remember if a game (or just a piece of software) has copy protection, the editor must provide a piece of backup if the customer ask it. I don't think this is limited in the time. I don't think if I ask some game editor for 15 years old game's disks, it will send them to me. But finally, some of them won't forget they own copyright on these titles...
However, I don't know any game editor for computer (not for console) that have fought this kind of "piracy". Do someone knows one ?
how can these guys can do this and think of it as a good service?
this is illegal.
to use the oft cited collolary - books - if a books is out-of-print, do you as a public citizen have the right to make copies for people? even if you take no income from it? aren't you violating the publisher's rights? the author's rights?
i fail to see where this 17 yr old is any different than any other pirate copying games and throwing them up on an FTP site.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
This doesn't stop the publisher from doing the Right Thing, however. It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while, a former publisher of software will do the right thing and make copyrighted works available at no charge after their commercial value is gone.
There are some examples of this actually happening. I started off my small-computer career using the venerable TRS-80 line of computers, which were actually decent machines for the day when outfitted with a third-party operating system. A number of applications (including source and binaries for my OS of choice in those days) have been made available by their copyright holders -- see http://www.research.di gital.com/SRC/personal/mann/trs80.html if you're interested in these specific examples.
I'd love to see terms written into a license agreement that allow unrestricted free distribution of the software either immediately or X years after the software is no longer sold and/or supported. I'm not, however, holding my breath, since the point of most license agreements is to disavow everything said elsewhere on the product's packaging. :)
Phil
So these older titles shipped on diskettes, and then the diskettes failed, and in a moment of nostalgia someone wants to play an old game or something. The publishers had a card in the box saying they would replace the diskettes if they failed. So is there any recourse when they don't? I guess one could try something in small claims court, but would that work? Is there really any other way to get these old titles back? I still have several old shareware titles (registered! imagine that!) that I *occasionaly* dig out and play. I now have them moved to CDROM, which makes things easier, but if I hadn't I'd be grateful for such a site.
---
I think this is a great idea.
If only it could be taken a step further. Like some way to have firms actually take seriously a license that GPL's (or BSD's) a piece of software x years after it's no longer supported. (Preferably where x=0.)
It increases the value of the software, by making consumers know that if it is good, someone will always be there to take up development on it.
Maybe they could put the code with some sort of escrow company, who reviews all the software and GPL's it as appropriate.
Anyone working on this?
SteveLet's leave the criminal penalties out of it for a moment.
The civil measure of recovery for breach of copyright is one of:
So how, in a civil action, does the copyright owner establish an entitlement to other than nominal damages? He's not making any money at all off the abandoned software, so there's no possibility of damages. He can't say he's lost any fraction of zero sales that would sound in damages.
As to an account of profits, only those sites that actually make some form of money gain from offering abandonware are vulnerable, and at that there's a good argument that the profit is only that fraction of profit represented by the illegally distributed title. If there are thousands on the site and it's making peanuts, damages could well be very small indeed.
I would certainly be advising a copyright holder not to waste his money, were any of them to come to me over this sort of thing.
On the other hand, I imagine the criminal penalties for breach of copyright in the US are rather more fierce and fiercely enforced than they are here in the UK. It would be doubtful whether offering abandonware on the web, free at the point of sale would actually be a crime here, absent advertising to make it "in the course of a business". And even then you'd have trouble getting the weights and measures people interested - they're more interested in the pirate recordings and dodgy-chanel-perfume-made-with-air-freshener-and-c at-pee markets.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
Enforcing Copyrights on Abandonware is done for one reason only: control. Why would a company want to keep users from having access to old versions of software? So the users have to buy the new versions!
As a rule, new versions of software are more feature rich (read: fatter) and may or may not be more useful. But it is certain that the company that produces the new software can get a lot more money from it that they would if they kept selling the sold software.. Rather than sell and support both, they would just as well force you to upgrade.
Of course, that makes it hard to keep using those old Win3.x machines with currently available programs.
Gonzo
Maybe that shoudl change. Books go out of print, music stops being published, and software that is still useful dies because authors and publishers no longer have an economic interest in providing copies. In all cases, cociety is poorer for the loss.
Maybe copyright should be modified to impose an obligation to provide copies to all who are willing to pay for them. If an author wants to be released from their obligation to provide copies, they must release their copyright.
This is too simplistic, but cay you all see the basic idea?
There's a band I really like -- Big Daddy. (Not the current rapper known as Big Daddy, but a 50's style band of the same name who did parody songs in the '80s.) Big Daddy put out 4 albums, only two of which were released as CDs. The other two were vinyl-only...and are totally unavailable. The record company doesn't sell them, used record stores can't find them. Those songs are in serious danger of being lost forever.
And yet, if I were to rip my Big Daddy albums into MP3s, burn them to a CD, and give the CDs to friends so they can experience Big Daddy's music, I'm breaking the law. Yet if I don't break the law, this music will eventually disappear completely.
I have a hard time understanding how preservation of music or software became illegal. If the publisher doesn't supply or support it, and it's unavailable through normal means, why not let the public do with it what they will? There's no more money to be made on these works -- the creators aren't even trying to make money on them anymore. They should be in the public domain, and if the public wants to preserve them they should be allowed to do so.
Note that if copyright only lasted 15 years (as I believe it was originally written), Big Daddy's works would be in the public domain by now, and the public could rescue them freely. It seems as though copyright is interfering with the process of restoring and recording history.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Thats the problem. Calling it "abandonware" makes it sound like a little lost puppy that you can't find its owner. They know who the owners are. Why not (scarey thought coming) ask them? The guy profiled in the article has ad revenue coming into his site. He is likely making money off of other people's IP. Why not send a form letter stating the purpose of the site, what titles they would like to feature and offering a profit share based on downloads?
In most services, requiring an "opt out" rather than "opt in" is considered predatory marketing. In a situation where the legal lines are so well drawn, simply offering to remove is not enough. There are ways to do this right, and making money off of doing it wrong is not aulteristic, no matter how you try to spin it.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
The most recent examples of this coming to my mind are the Dragonlance series from SSI (Champions of Krynn, Death Knight of Krynn and the Dark Queen of Krynn (see the Dragonlance site) which were bundled in the so called "Forgotten realms collection". And there is offcourse the Ultima series which also got bundled (episode 1 - 8 iirc).
If you compare that with an action game like Half Life you'll notice a difference. It was quite recently when I picked up a bundle offering Half life & opposing force. So basicly I think its kinda hard to take a period of 5 years and consider everything older then 5 years obsolete.
If you want classic games, pick them up for $5 at the store, on CD-ROM no less. You'll be doing everyone a favour - you will have a great game, and publishers will be encouraged to re-release more classics for cheap prices.
Bitchslapped. Neat.
Easy enough. A public announcement that they intend never to pursue remedies in respect of the copyright, and that people are free to use the thing so released (maybe adding that henceforth it's on the GPL, if they're feeling that way out) amounts to a license granted to the world at large and off we go. While it isn't supported by consideration to make it completely enforceable, it's still thereafter impossible for anyone to sue on the copyright.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
1. In some cases, people _need_ older copies of programs. There are some document formats that, for one reason or another, are no longer supported--even through modern conversion software. If that old document happens to contain password-protected tax data, and no modern software will read it, where does the user turn to but to abandonware?
2. On the other hand, compilations of old games are a relatively popular low-budget option for game publishers. They're almost guaranteed to make money for the company (since they're dirt-cheap to make). I for one jumped at the chance to purchase Interplay's compilation of the SSI Gold Box games. However, if these games are freely available on popular abandonware sites, then it makes it difficult for a publisher to convince anyone to buy it.
3. Here's the real sticking point (which I'm also the most out-of-my-league about): if it can be proved that a copyright holder knowingly allowed someone to infringe on that copyright and did not take action to prevent it, then the rights to that material can be permanently lost. This prevents selective enforcement, but at the same time obligates the companies to go after abandonware sites if they want rights to a future version of the game.
It seems that this whole area is in a kind of legal void, with the two sides of the argument brought up in the article both having valid points. It will be interesting to see if this ever gets brought to court--doubtable, though, since people running abandonware sites will probably never be able to afford a lawyer for a case like that.
~=Keelor
"this is illegal."
Has a court said so? The purpose of copyright protection is to increase the material available to society. If a program is unavailable by any means other than copying without the consent of the author or their agents, then a court might well decide the copying is fair use, as that is the only way to achieve the purpose of the law.
"aren't you violating the publisher's rights? the author's rights?"
I have a right to, say, park my car in a public parking space. But if I choose not to use that right, other people are entitled to use it instead. If an author or publisher chooses not to publish, they have little claim to loss when other people choose to publish instead.
Discovery in such a case might reveal that a publisher, by their own evaluation, would have to expend $100,000 in costs to create and distribute copies of a program that would reap $80,000 in revenue. Thus they would lose money. The defendant who provided copies of this abandonware would have cost the company to lose the opportunity to lose $20,000. Thus there are no damages, and hence should be no court award.
Things may be different in the cases of books, which are sometimes reprinted years or decades after the original printing. We have not seen such a market for software yet, and we are not likely to, except for nostalgia. So software should be ruled and judged by a standard appropriate for it, not for books.
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Assuming that because a product is not currently being marketed and sold, it has no commercial value is ludicrous.
Especially in a country so obsessed with nostalgia, things come in and out of vogue, reunions happen, Williams releases emulators for their arcade software for various platforms....
There's a case in point. I know people who didn't buy any of the arcade reissue discs for the PSX, even though they were avid fans of the included games. And why not? Because anyone can get their hands on MAME... because there is a mentality that "they're not making money on it right now, it's languishing, so it's free for us to release it."
Copyrights are copyrights. Fight them all you want, go ahead and change the laws, but until you do, they're still law.
most of these pieces of software should have had their copyright run out. However, the (Sonny) Bono/Disney amendment to copyright law made copyrights expire 100 years after the author's death. THis practically made coporate-owned copyrights immortal.
Since this is a bad law, we as moral people, have an obligation to not only disagree with it, but also to not follow it. Civil Disobedience, if you will.
The video games from 20 years ago should be in the public domain by now. The only theft, is by the corporations who are robbing the public out of public-domained knowledge/works of art.
The immortal copyrights need to be amended to something reasonable, like 17-20 years. If not less, considerring the speed of internet development.
Oh - and yes, I probably just fed a troll...
tagline
... hi bingo
IANAL, but...
...the kind folks from the SPA had a nice talk with me, which prompted me to do some research into the subject. Under the Berne convention, copyright does not need to be policed by the copyright owner. Trademark and patents, yes, copyright, no.
And there's the rub. Duke or Doom are copyrighted titles... but they're also trademarks. Not defending the copyright is the same as not defending the trademark. That's why publishers are so quick to take action when copyright infringement is brought to their attention.
hymie
The article links (through a redirect script) to http://www.abandonwarering.com/ as the main web page for the abandonware thing. It's got links to many warez sites, use at your own risk. Doesn't seem too legal to me, seems like they're making money off other people's work - it's got banner adverts.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
At my school, for example, there are many students whose home computers consist of 486 and slower Pentium based systems, as well as a small cadre of users who are still using older PowerMacs (and a few clones). The vast majority of these users are simply interested in a machine that they can do simple word processing on. A 486-66 running Win95 rev. A ain't gonna be able to hack running Office 2000. These guys don't have the bucks to shell out for a newer machine (or an upgrade) so that they can run MS' latest bloated version of Word. Word 6.0 or WordPerfect 6/7 will suit them nicely, but guess what? They can't buy it anywhere, and if they copy someone else's, then they're suddenly a pirate in Microsoft's eyes . . .
I've tried to set a few guys around campus with Linux and AbiWord, but in most cases they've either gone back to Windows (Linux is too much for them to bother with, AbiWord doesn't do page numbers yet, etc.) or I end up doing 24/7 tech support for 'em. So that option, while it's inexpensive in terms of money, isn't really an option for folks who aren't as technically inclined as most of us.
The problem with AbandonWare (in the case of products like Word and WordPerfect) is that the 486 user that doesn't have the horsepower to run Office 2000, and copies her friend's old Word 6.0 to do simple word processing represents a potential sale to MS. And when there are thousands of potential sales that end up copying old software instead of shelling out whatever the latest version of Office costs ($300? I have no idea really . . .) then suddenly the suits start to worry. Sure, 50,000 users *not* buying a $300 software package that otherwise would buy it only represents a total of $4,500,000 to Microsoft, whose assets are far past that amount, but each chunk of revenue lost equals a hit to the bottom line.
And, in the end, it's the bottom line that counts to pretty much any company (at least the ones that want to stay in business). Microsoft doesn't really give a rip about whether Bob and Sue can afford to upgrade their computers to run Office 2000, or if they can't stretch their budget to buy Office 2000 itself. They care about money. Period. And, even though I use MS as an example throughout, I'm not just picking on them -- most large software companies are going to feel the same way.
On an entirely different note, it sure is fun to run across a copy of a game you played 10 years ago, and play it again though . . .
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Now apply the same thinking to software, if your profit margin is in the first sale, then any activity which results in suppression of repeat sales of the next upgrade is to be severely discouraged. Entities like Microsoft have tacitly acknowledged this by noting that their biggest competitor is actually their old products.
Thus if your business model relies on forcing customers to go through an endless upgrade cycle (cough*Wintel*cough) the Internet is a threat because so long as there is one person with the passion and resources to keep a copy, others will be able to find it and offer some exchange/trade/resale. Think of web-rings, freshmeat and mirrors, all which collectively serve to persist information and minimise bit rot. This may not suit companies accustomised to high information decay rates as it forces them into a service model which is human intensive and because they've bid up the price of programming labor to insane levels in hiring software engineers to churn out the next killer-app, can't compete as service model requires a somewhat different skillset (more diagnostic and less development). Lower margins = less profits = collapsing share prices = pissed off investors.
As AbiWord CEO points out, "Users are tired of the crazy upgrade cycle which has become the norm for so many desktop applications", primarily because it puts the real cost of software in wasted time learning applications which may be deprecated in the next release cycle. From the software developers and distributors point of view, old software is also a disincentive for upgrading and thus their desire to shorten the half life of information or put time-limited licensing terms into their EULA.
OpenSource sorta gets around the problem as their real business is stability and interoperability, despite all too frequent plaintive cries that Unix is not "innovative" or "bleeding-edge". Until the marketing/advocacy people realise this and emphasise low "cost of repair/replacement", they will be perceived as at a disadvantage to "mainstream" software. However, despite similar functionality, it is a distinct business from licensing IP blocks (drag,drop,script) where all the value is retained by the manufacturer. Just like abandonware is not really a software distribution, it is in the nostalgia business. As such, it can probably carve out a small niche for its proponent provided he's smart to avoid copyright lawsuits, given that the majority of software purchasers have short-term memory (when did you ever come across a piece of non-gaming software that you really *enjoyed* using?). LL
I can legally copy a tape of music onto a CD (or visa versa). Is there any relation between the music and software worlds as far as copyright is concerned?
hymie
Hmm...Microsoft seemed rather against the whole abandonware concept...yet...when I go to the Abandonware Ring page...what do I see? An MSN ad banner.
I love it when stuff like that happens.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
The conventional wisdom is a juicy story: Microsoft founder Gates buys DOS from Seattle Computer founder Tim Patterson (those names might be off a little, feel free to make a correction) for $ 55,000, MS goes on to make billions, and Patterson's company goes bust.
But if my memory serves, Patterson was hired afterwards by Microsoft. If he got the stock options normally offered at that time, he'd be pretty rich right now, thus giving his story a happy ending.
Anyone know if that's true?
D
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BSA - aka Bidouilleurs Sans Argent (Means something like Moneyless Hackers) - is a non-profit organization aimed at giving people free software : not only GPL'ed but also FreeWare and even "Official Abandonware".
We created it in France something like 2 years ago after long discussions that even involved Richard Stallman himself (co-author of the BPL - BSA Public License).
We gather all the related software on our Web Site (in French) and we actively harass Abandonware editors to let us publish their "old", though often useful programs.
Of course, this might look we have not gathered that much software but whatever we get we publish it and if you help us convincing editors there'll soon be loads to pick.
FYI, the BSA name comes from the fact that we remarked that the Business Software Alliance didn't have a legal existence in France : So, we just picked the acronym before them...
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
Copyright actually lasts some number of years (I think 75) past the life of its creator. I'm not sure how long it is for corporations - I think it's a fixed span then.
I think car companies are required to sell spare parts for a specific amount of time after they stop production, and I think that period is quite long. However, a car is very different from hardware or software. Would you still drive a 10 year old car if the new ones cost 1/10th what old ones did, and the new ones were 20 times as fast and efficient? There wouldn't be many old cars actively used if this was the case.
D
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One of the reasons abandonment is not a problem with books is that there is a well-established library system. Almost all books of any significant interest or value are available for free loan. It might be interesting to establish a software library -- a web site where you could "check out" and download software the library had acquired. Then the library would not let anybody else download the software until you returned it, by visiting the web site and going through the return process, which marks the program returned and deletes the downloaded copy. If a patron did not return a program on time, the library would charge a late fee.
Libraries could easily acquire material through donations of old software. In fact, once the library had acquired its first copy of a program, additional contributors do not need to upload new copies; they merely need to tell the library they are donating their rights to the copy they have. "Click here to donate your copy of Zork to the library."
Nothing in this model prevents a person from copying the software while it is in their possession, but nothing in the book library model prevents that either. Lending libraries would not be useful for people looking for software to run regularly on their computers, but it would be useful for playing games and for working with old documents in obscure or no-longer-supported formats.
Please note that there are people who do benefit from the theft of physical objects; the thief has and increase in wealth, and the manufacturer of the object benefits, since they get to sell another copy to replace the one which was stolen. This does not compensate for the direct loss of the victim, and the loss to society as a whole from the decrease in value of the original stolen object.
In the case of intellectual property just the opposite occurs. If I copy an existing disk the wealth of society INCREASES; there are now two copies of the original which can do more work than the previous existing copy could. Who loses? The owner of the disk does not lose, he still has his original copy. I benefit, I can now do something I couldn't do before. The only possible loser is the manufacturer of the software - who was deprived of an additional sale by my act of copying. Notice that I said the MANUFACTURER, not the CREATOR; there is a difference. Under the free market system the person who creates software is very rarely the person who benefits from the sale of that software.
Please note that in the case of physical theft the manufacturer benefits. I HAVE NEVER HEARD A MANUFACTURER COMPLAIN ABOUT BENEFITING FROM PHYSICAL THEFT. Have you? By failing to do so they lose the moral right to complain about the loss in sales caused by duplication of disks.
There is a critical difference between material goods and IP; in the digital world the digital equivalent of the 'Star Trek Replicator' exists, it is a CDROM burner or a floppy disk drive. Given a pattern to work from these can replicate the original. Think how much the economy would change if physical replicators existed. Manufacturing would become obsolete - each person with a replicator would in effect become a manufacturer.
What the software MANUFACTURERS want to do is to benefit from the fact that replication exists in the digital world while preventing everyone else from using their own replicators. Of course they do, if physical replicators existed physical manufacturers would try to keep people from using them while they got to use them to make outrageous profits.
Last year Microsoft had NET profits of 40% of sales. That is NET, not GROSS profits. The net figure comes after their accountants have pulled every trick in the book trying to reduce the number to minimize taxes. Microsoft's huge profit occur because they are using replication technology to build their product, it costs them less than a dollar to create a copy of a program which sells for hundreds of dollars.
Please note that the actual creators of the software are paid chicken feed to create the digital patterns which Microsoft turns into billions of dollars worth of profits by using their replicators, and forbidding us to use ours.
The free market system has worked well for us in the past when it comes to the manufacturing of physical goods. However it breaks down in the face of replication technology. We need to come up with a system which rewards the actual CREATORS of software instead of rewarding people who are using digital replicators to gouge the public for billions of dollars, while trying to deny to individuals the use of that technology.
> Movie companies usually destroy films when the copyright expires rather than allow them to enter the public domain.
> How spiteful! It's a wonder how society limps along at all when nobody is willing to cooperate even minimally with others...
Looked at the right way, Copyrights (and all other laws) ARE an agreement to cooperate with each other. When you abide by the law because it's what you'd do anyway, it's worthless. When you abide by the law because it's the law, you are making a decision that the public good (being able to rely on certain rules of behavior) is worth sacrificing personal liberties (e.g. by not yelling "fire!" in a crowded room, or by not stealing music just because someone else CAN rip a CD and CAN post it on the web and you CAN download it for "free" (like beer)). Society CAN be tightly restricted by laws, but a basic level of law CAN insure that the majority of people have the elbow-room to live decent lives without someone sticking a gun in their face to get their wallet or selling bootleg copies of the CD their band works on.
Violating copyright is tresspassing on someone's Homestead (see ESR's page) on the Noosphere - people who care about software development should consider whether they think this is akin to tresspassing in their physical home. The answer will vary for each of us - but in some sense Copyright law does (or can) give each of us the right to make that choice (let people in - OSS; keep people out - traditional) just as physical property laws allow me to protect my home (or open it up, whether for a weekend party, or every day).
Now the Y2k problem adds an interesting twist. A company that does not update an older version for Y2k.
A company that went out of business, but did not list all 125 revisions of a package as it's assets. What happens?
All of this will be litigated.
Fight Spammers!
I disagree that the article did a good job covering both viewpoints. Although it did mention both sides, it hardly did so in an unbiased way. At times, it said something like, "providing abandonware is illegal and infringes on the intellectual property rights of publishers and authors." Then it said, "The pirates claim that they are providing a service to the community." I hardly call that an unbiased report when one side is presented as fact, the other as a mere allegation.
I work in central London, here in the UK. Just yesterday I was in one of our larger record shops (HMV on Oxford Street) and was rather shocked to see a compilation CD for sale offering "over 3,000 ZX Spectrum games, plus emulators!" (I believe the Spectrum was marketed by Timex in the US?).
I seriously doubt that the manufacturer of this compilation had authorisation of the publishers for this collection. There were pretty much all the old classics on there, from numerous different software houses (some now long gone, some still here).
Naughty music retailer. :)
Overall it was a well done article, providing insight into both views. However, my only gripe is the bit of propoganda in the form of the bar graph depicting the billions of dollars lost due to software piracy. First of all, that bit of information has no bearing whatsoever on the topic at hand, and second, those numbers are greatly exaggerated. For example, I would bet that the majority of people who posess a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop would be unwilling to fork out the money to actually purchase the program. They would find a much cheaper software solution that would meet their needs. The numbers presented by the graph are grossly bloated. (Like many of programs and prices that the manufacturers offer consumers.)
A long while ago (but not that long ago) I acquired a customer who had a requirement that their C programs be compiled with Microsoft C 6.0. They had a DB library that wouldn't support any other compiler. At the time, MS had just started selling Visual C++ 2.0, which had a 16-bit compiler, but it wasn't compatible with 6.0.
I called Microsoft. They told me that I couldn't have 6.0, as they didn't sell it any more. However, if I copied 6.0 from my customer and bought VC++ 2.0 at full retail, they would turn a blind eye. Not that I could get that in writing, of course, but I had the personal assurance of the guy who answers the phones.
This actually sounds quite reasonable, until you realise how much more VC++ 2 cost than C6. IIRC it was about 4 times the price.
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E_NOSIG
I still consider it pirating, but it's the only reason I've ever accepted as legitimate.
To sum up some of the other posts that think this is still morally wrong, we have to look at exactly what this is: published material that is relatively old and NOT SUPPORTED by the company that published it, and not sold by, or in anyway available from, the company that published it or anyone else.
Personally, I have a copy of Falcon 3.0 that I tried to install recently and one of the 3.5" disks (possibly more, since I didn't get past it) was corrupted. By RIAA standards, it's illegal for me to download somebody elses copy, even though for all intents and purposes, they are identical.
So there's a difference between intent of the laws and actual wording (and morality is a completely different issue).
Someone gave the counter argument that you don't legally have a right to not stop at a stop sign, even though you know no cross traffic is coming. That's true, that's the letter of the law, but the intent is to protect lives and allow traffic to proceed in a fair manner - and by not stopping (or coming to a complete stop), you are not violating the intent of the law. You are also saving gasoline and causing less pollution. Of course, a cop'll still give you ticket, because they are typically instructed to follow the letter of the law - it's not their place to determine what's right or wrong.
But who are we to judge when it's ok to violate the letter of the law? When it's so blatently obvious no one is coming (you can see for a good distance in all directions before getting to the intersection), and when the original copyright holders have no purpose in protecting something they no longer sell/support, I just don't see the problem. No counter examples really capture what's going on, here.
I agree with these "abandonware" people, and I WILL download Falcon 3.0 if I see it.
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Stupid sexy Flanders.
I've returned Diablo II 3 times already, because they decided to copy-lock their CD with a system that's incompatible with many of the newer CDROM drives, including my own.
I can copy the cd to get Diablo II installed, but unless I break the cd-lock system, I can't actually play the game.
Copy-locking has never been a good idea. It just insures that people who want to buy your product can't, and that when your product is pirated (because you know somebody is going to see it as a challenge) EVERYONE will want a pirated copy. Even the legal folks, just in case they ever purchase the product and actually want to use it...
If the works were published in 1964, say, the earliest they would go out of copyright would be 2059. That's more than 30 years.
For works published more recently, it's generally is the lifetime of the author + 70 years. Works of corporate authorship are under copyright for the shorter of 120 years from creation, or 96 years from publication[1].
A work published today will most likely not enter the public domain until sometime in the mid-22nd century...
...that is, assuming copyright terms are not retroactively extended again as they have been consistently over the past few decades (c.f. The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act).
Audio CDs have a lifetime of about 50 years. If people don't start making their own copies of things after they go out of distribution, very large chunks of our culture will begin dissapearing.
Excessively long copyright terms are producing the cultural equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture[2].
---[1] Gasaway, Lolly. When Works pass into the Public Domain. University of North Carolina. 1999.
[2] I am seriously considering voluntarily releasing my own works into the public domain after 14 years (the original term for copyrights) to combat this.
DNA just wants to be free...
You write: this is illegal.
So, you never exceed the speed limit because that would be illegal, right? Yeah, right. In reality, questionable laws don't get respected and don't get obeyed by anyone except sheep who are unable to distinguish right from wrong.
Any argument based on a statement of "this is illegal" is basically not a logical argument at all, but an appeal to authority. And "violating the publisher's/author's rights" is no better -- it presuposes that the case for rights is a priori granted or obvious, which may not be the case.
Here in particular such reasoning makes no sense whatsoever, because the very concept of intellectual prioperty is being re-examined in the light of the new realities of unlimited distribution and sharing on the net. What the law established in pre-Internet days is not necessarily right in today's world, any more than Victorian laws regarding horse-powered transport are right on today's highways. The law either adapts rapidly or it gets ignored.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
(emphasis mine)
This is just wrong on so many levels. Once a work is in the public domain, it's public domain. You shouldn't normally be able to copyright anything but your own derivatives of said public domain work.
If, on the other hand, you're suggesting holding onto the sole copy, and then leveraging copyright to extract licensing on copies of that, I think that's just morally reprehensible...
Usually that means that the music has been licensed from the original publisher, not that the copyright has expired.
... you know, I just realized you're in Norway. [Sorry, American arrogance strikes again :/] I may be completely off base, then, but I sincerely hope Norwegian copyright law isn't as twisted as you make it sound to me (although I daresay 30 year terms aren't bad)...
In any case, as regards copyright terms, international law is slowly serving to synchronize copyright terms in various countries (which was one of the contributing factors to the US extension). I'm not sure you will be able to rely on 30-year terms for long.
DNA just wants to be free...
If only they still had the source code or the developement environment to run/compile the software!
Actually we have the same problem in the demo scene, old demos are very hard to watch as most emulators fail to cope with the kind of tricks a demo needs. And we still don't have any decent 8086 emulator which would emulate the Gravis Ultrasound, a necessary step to be able to watch the old pc demos!
Of course if we had the sources for those demos we may be able to port them, but this demos are the kind of productions where the binary is really the end product..
It would be really sad if this part of the modern culture disappeared in such way..
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
This is an interesting issue. Like every other high school student with a computer, I pirated games (for my Atari 800XL :) I gave that up in college, suspiciously close to the time that I began working summers as a paid developer. So now I am reflective as I consider the non-legal distribution of software from my childhood.
If a company made a non-expirable contract with a buyer to replace software media, they ought to live with it (especially if us consumers gotta live with their EULA's). If this is not fulfilled, the "legal" recourse would be to sue. Since suing over $1 in media is not tenable (it's downright stupid), the more reasonable recourse is to just download the software. Not legal, really, but I think it is ethical.
But that only applies to previous purchasers. What about those who download it, never having paid for it, claiming that it's abandoned, making no money, and thus should be freely dessiminated?
The financial argument doesn't hold, since "abandonware" can become "commercialware" quite easily. Since someone had the copyrights to PacMan, Centipede, Frogger, etc, Microsoft (I think) was able to acquire them and release their "retro" gaming packs a couple of years ago, selling "abandonware" games for profit. Likewise, Hasbro was able to purchase them, make new versions, and sell them. Further, copyrights can be used (or sold) so that a sequel can be made, e.g. Syndicate. If the copyrights were thrown out after some short period of non-use, then everyone and their brother could resell, remake, or sequel-ize the games, which I don't think is a good thing.
Whether it is a good, bad, or ugly thing that copyrights can be held, sold, utilized, and employed to sequels, is perhaps the real issue, since this is relevant to movies, books, and other things, as others have pointed out.
ShoutingMan.com
Reduce copyrights back to the original 14 years. It'd have more or less the same effect.
DNA just wants to be free...
Here is an anecdote for you to think about:
/. community at large think of this?
Virgin Interactive was working on a Playstation 4-player fighting game called "Thrill Kill." Like the name suggests, it's gorier than Mortal Kombat even (yep, it gets pretty silly...)
Electronic Arts (I think,) bought Virgin Interactive, decided they didn't want a game like that being released under their name, and canned it... a week before launch.
I have downloaded this game (don't ask how, you can find anything on the net,) and I found that it only has a couple of minor bugs, and obviously a lot of work was put into it.
Now, do you think it was wrong to download, because the original programmers aren't getting royalties for every copy sold, and the company doesn't want the game out?
...or do you think it was acceptable because the game was never released anyway, so there's no loss to the company? Also that the programmers are probably proud of their work, and wouldn't want it wasted?
I'm not looking for justification to download it, I've already made my choice... but what does the
Many posters comment that Abandonware sites are technically illegal. So here's a plan. Provide an incentive for copyright and patent owners to donate their works to the public, in return for a tax deduction. Don't steal the works, pay for them.
Set up an Intellectual Property Conservancy that is a non-profit, educational, publishing corporation. Donations of intellectual property could be tax-deductible (Congress could even make the tax deduction higher than normal for a superincentive, or provide a monetary incentive in lieu of tax deduction). Accept donations of copyright, online publication rights, source code, patents, trademarks, books, software, development environments, the whole lot.
When a company finds the income from an old work no longer makes maintenance worthwhile, then they can donate it to the public domain and the rest of us will distribute it and support it for free (or even for money). They will have an incentive to consider this, and if the company goes under the creditors will probably force it, since otherwise they would not get money back.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution wisely set up a balance between the rights of authors and inventors, and the public domain, by limiting copyright term and recognizing fair use rights. However, copyright term in recent years has been extended far too long. While it started at 14 years, now it is 95 years for a work made for hire (in other Berne Convention nations, it is 70 or 50 years after the author's death).
The copyright holders (mostly big publishers) howled that they needed protection for more years, because works had value that long. This is doubtful, but if it is true, then surely the copyright holders will get behind this plan, and find a way to realize more profits.
Since the public is the one to benefit, the public should pay. A difficulty with previous ideas is that the government does a bad job of setting prices for public goods. Okay, I say let the normal process of the market or fair appraisals, as is done today with tax deductions, be used instead.
Richard Stallman has pointed out that it might be immoral to reward those who take out software patents, for example. It might be considered like paying money to redeem a child from slavery. So there is room for a lot of debate and discussion on the issue. What do you think? Can you help get the services of a tax lawyer to vet this plan?
While the right to make archival recordings is well-established, this is largely a digital phenomenon: No one would say that I have the right to make duplicates of out-of-print vinyl albums simply because they're not available any more.
Now that copying is trivial, we all of a sudden see it as our right and duty? Please.
Personally, I think anything that has been out of print for an extended period of time should be fair game, but that's not likely to happen.
See the spirited discussion that's taken place on thejudys.com (a great 80's band that barely had a presence in the record stores to start with, and so very hard to find) for more on the issue of whether it's OK to copy even things that are flat impossible to get hold of.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I side with the abandonware pirates. Here's why:
1. Not being able to get an old piece of software is like not being allowed to fab a part for a classic car. My prefered model for software has always been "software as product" where we simply treat it as a physical, destructable product, even though it isn't. Now, since the company that oroginally made the product is no longer manufacturing it, and refuses to do so, I believe it's fair game to allow others to "fab parts" as best they can.
This, by the way, is the same reason I hate Microsoft's EULA. Not being allowed to move Windows to another box is like not being allowed to pull a Chevy V8 and put it in another car.
2. If the authors aren't selling, they aren't losing money. In this case, the only argument they can make that they are losing money is that it interferes with their planned obsolecence plans. That's a poor excuse.
Another reason I side with abandonware is that I'm sure there have been many companies that have been bought for some reason, and then the purchaser decided they didn't want to develop the product.
If we want to extend the whole "piracy on the high seas" analogy, there is a precedent in maritime law. IANAL, but aren't people allowed to "salvage" ships abandoned at sea? I think this is very similar.
Now, how could we legislate to make abandonware legit?
Well, the five year rule is one good guideline. I would also say that the distributors of abandonware should not be allowed to sell it for any more than the cost of distribution. If the original manufacturer decides to start selling it again, they should be allowed to re-start sales at no more than the original retail price of the package, and the abandonware distributor should cease and desist.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The whole point of copyright is to encourage people to create. If they've abandoned their work, there's no need for copyright -- they've already gotten all the benefit they're going to get from it.
Let's say that's true, and it's violating the spirit of the law to enforce copyright in these cases. Unfortunately, the law needs to be enforced according to how it's written, not on a case by case basis where every instance is sent to a judge to decide where the benefit to society lies. It's simply not possible to run a legal system that way.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
A work goes in the public domain 50 years after the death of the author. Or 50 years after it was created if the author is a corporation (in Canada, other countries have similar thing, the period may change - I know that Disney want the period to be extended to 100 years, don't know it they managed to do it).
It was life + 50 years for individual authors and 75 years for corporate authors. Then the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended that by 20 years in both cases, to life + 70 years for individual authors and 95 years for corporate authors. Beyond the basic damage caused to the public domain, it was done retroactively (to Disney's delight), which is almost certainly unconstitutional. (Good luck getting a fair ruling on that one!) Ironically, Mickey Mouse may already be public domain, technically. (Good luck defending it against Disney's army of lawyers!)
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Note that if copyright only lasted 15 years (as I believe it was originally written), Big Daddy's works would be in the public domain by now, and the public could rescue them freely. It seems as though copyright is interfering with the process of restoring and recording history.
The U.S. Copyright Act of 1790 allowed for a 14-year duration (a quite reasonable timeframe and a good balance of author incentive vs. public good), with another 14-year optional extension (in the 14th year), for a maximum of 28 years, which is plenty of time to capitalize on a creative work. (Especially when you consider that businesses usually make their plans based on expected returns within 5 years or so!) Works had to be registered with the Copyright office to receive protection; many works entered the public domain directly because the author didn't bother to register the copyright.
Copyright has been extended many times since then for the further enrichment of the rich, with no consideration given to the balance inherent in the "bargain" between the author and the public that copyright is supposed to represent. It's been twisted into an entitlement in many people's minds, a tool to enrich a few at great cost to the public. Copyright extensions (especially the last one) are enacted to preserve corporate profits (and the GNP), public be damned. It's a gross perversion of a system that was originally designed to benefit the public, not to enrich authors and "IP" owners.
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Far better than just posting the binaries, it would be _fantastic_ if some of these abandonware sites could contact original authors and get _source code_ released.
Why emulate, when you can port?
Is there any example of such a thing ever happening, outside of ID's sourcing of Quake/Quake2/Doom?
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Movie companies usually destroy films when
the copyright expires rather than allow them
to enter the public domain.
How spiteful! It's a wonder how society limps
along at all when nobody is willing to
cooperate even minimally with others...
Looked at the right way, Copyrights (and all other laws) ARE an agreement to cooperate with each other.
It is the movie studios that are not abiding by the copyright law, by destroying movies as they enter the public domain rather than adhere to the other side of copyright law (the other side of the "contract" if you prefer), namely that eventually such material over which they enjoyed such exclusive priveleges would enter the public domain and enrich us all. Instead, they are deliberately destroying stuff which has entered the public domain. In a sane society, this kind of behavior would be punishable as an act of vandalism against all of us.
Compared to the movie industries systematic misuse and abuse of the copyright system, even the damage done by those consumers who do violate copyright is minimal. Destroying old, valuable footage rather than giving it over to the public domain as is there obligation is merely the most flagrant and appalling example of an ethical and moral bankrupcy which infects that industry at virtually every level.
The diminishment of our culture by such greed is an outrage of dimensions seldom achieved, comparable in both scope and breadth to the nazi sponsored destruction of so much art and culture prior to the second World War.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
It's more that for the first time copyright terms now vasty exceed the lifetime of the media the works are recorded on (e.g. audio CDs). Ease of third-party copying is incidental, if convenient.
This stuff will dissapear if second and third-generation copies aren't made, and if something's out of publication, the publisher is obviously not willing to do that.
Personally, I think copyright terms should be reduced to something more reasonable (less than the median lifetime of the media would be nice), so this would be a nonissue.
I don't actually have plans to be doing any copying of "abandoned media" myself at the moment, but I am seriously thinking about dropping my own work into the public domain after maybe 14 years (the original copyright term).
Here's an intersting (if only tangentially related) thought, actually: does the Library of Congress have copies of The Judys' albums? (they appear not to, from a cursory look at their catalog) If not, shouldn't they? Why wouldn't they?
DNA just wants to be free...
The article says: According to copyright law, the creators of intellectual property such as software, books, and music have full ownership of the property. This is wrong (at least as to U.S. law). The creators of a work have a large number of substantial rights, the most absolute of which is when or whether to publish the work. As an incentive to publish ("make public") the work, the government agrees to provide certain limited monopoly rights on the work for a limited time, and back those rights with the power of the state. However, those rights are limited in a number of ways.
- Copyright expires - the U.S. Constitution explicitly mandates that copyright last for a "limited time", which Congress has chosen to currently set very, very long.
- Copyright rights of the creator do not prohibit "fair use" by anyone else without permisiion of the creator.
- Copyright rights of the creator do not prohibit certain types of copying by libraries and public archives. This limitation is very relevant to the discussion of abandonware. More below.
- The "first sale" doctrine and section 109 of the law prevent creators from restricting re-selling of a work, or (for most works, with some important restrictions) the lending or renting of the work. (Programs and sound recordings can't be rented commercially.)
- Creators may not restrict or prohibit certain non-profit/educational performances or displays (e.g. a girlscout camp can sing copyrighted songs without paying a royalty).
- There are some incredibly arcane rules that I don't begin to understand allow some re-transmissions of (lawfully) transmitted works.
- Composers MUST license their published songs and other music (excluding operas and other "dramatic" musical works) under terms of a compulsory license for making "phonorecords" (sound recordings - tapes, records, CDs, etc.). The rate of payment is fixed by an arbitrator.
- Publishers of "phonorecords" must license them for use in commercial jukeboxes, but have the option of trying to negotiate a deal that suits them better than the deal set by the arbitrator.
- Owners of a copy of a computer program may make whatever copies of a program are essential to its use, or may make (an unspecified number of) backup copies. Section 117
- The copyright on a building or other architectural work doesn't prohibit pictures or other images of the work (as long as it's constructed and in public view).
- Copyright owners can't prohibit taping for the blind, under certain circumstances.
- If the rights or a right to a work have been transfered (sold, licensed, or otherwise) an author or his statutory heirs may terminate (undo) the transfer unilaterally without compensation, within a window of 35 to 40 years after after the transfer. An author may waive this right by contract but cannot do so on behalf of his statutory heirs.
In other words, copyright ain't property like personal property...But back to "abandonware". Section 108 of the copyright law says that, among other things, libraries and other publicaly available archives may (under section e of the law) make a complete copy of a work that they have determined is otherwise unavailable at a fair price and give it to a library user, provided a) they do not do so for commercial advantage and b) they display a particular notice as specified by the Copyright Office in 37 CFR 201.14 (PDF, scroll down to about page 20). The full text of the section e) reads:
(e) The rights of reproduction and distribution under this section apply to the entire work, or to a substantial part of it, made from the collection of a library or archives where the user makes his or her request or from that of another library or archives, if the library or archives has first determined, on the basis of a reasonable investigation, that a copy or phonorecord of the copyrighted work cannot be obtained at a fair price, if-
(1) the copy or phonorecord becomes the property of the user, and the library or archives has had no notice that the copy or phonorecord would be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research; and
(2) the library or archives displays prominently, at the place where orders are accepted, and includes on its order form, a warning of copyright in accordance with requirements that the Register of Copyrights shall prescribe by regulation.
Important: other parts of the section and of the law influence the legal interpretation of the above (so consult a lawyer), but the important point is, "abandonware" sites CAN be legal!
Except for some works explicitly released into the public domain, nothing since about World War I, in fact...
From a cultural perspective, what happens when the most recent body of public domain work is more than 100 years old, and anything else over 30 years old starts dissapearing as publishers lose interest in publishing it?
DNA just wants to be free...
What is with that chart of "loss due to piracy"? Note the source: Business Software Alliance. These numbers come from multiplying an estimate of the number of pirated copies of software by the price of that software. Of course, if all those people could not pirate software, only a fraction of them would actually buy it. Not only is this chart a lie, but it adds nothing to the article. Does the fact that someone estimates that software piracy was low in 1996 have anything to do with abandonware? No. The whole chart, with its kitschy hardware-store font, is just there to give your brain a rest from reading. The c|net reporter wants a technical-looking visual, and the BSA is right there in his rolodex, ready to provide. It is essentially free advertising for the idea that software piracy is bad for the economy. I happen to agree that software piracy is immoral. But I hate it that the BSA gets to be the Respectable Source that, by inclusion in every story remotely regarding piracy, sets the terms of the debate. So here are a few platitudes on the other side: - morality and economy are not the same thing (unless you decide they are, in which case I pity you). - a certain amount of software piracy is good for the economy and even good for the software industry. Whether we have more or less than that amount is debatable.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
this link, sadly, is one of those tiresome trolls that appears every once in a while.
... but not quite.
I was almost tricked
D
----
Right. I *can* shoot you; that doesn't make it right. However, in a democracy, when most people want to do something, it by definition *is* right, unless it violates some human right. Copyright is not among those; copyright is a legal fiction.
I would argue that unenforceable laws are not just stupid, they are wrong. When everyone wants to do something, and it's against the law, and it's impossible to completely enforce the law, guess what? People do it anyway. In doing so, they knowingly violate the law. They learn that they can break the law and get away with it. They learn disrespect for the law. Authority breaks down. Society collapses. We wind up cooking squirrels over burning copies of Stephen King's last novel, and all because of Lars Ulrich and his crowd. It's just not worth it.
The reason that the music, movie, and software industries are such hard-asses when it comes to old work is because they're pack-rats... they never know when their intellectual property is going to be useful/popular/profitable again. Think of it this way... there's a classic 50's song that Warner Brothers has the rights to. This song hasn't appeared on an album in 30 years, it's not on the radio, and it's not producing a dime. In fact, it probably exists at a loss to Warner Brothers because they are paying to keep it in archival all these years. BUT, a movie comes out that happens to use this song and it suddenly resurges in popularity. All the sudden, there's a huge demand for this song that hasn't generated a profit in 30 years. Warner Brothers re-releases the song on both the soundtrack and a "best of" album. Suddenly this song is generating real revenue. If Warner Brothers had released this song into the public domain (or was forced to), they'd lose out on this revenue stream. They hold the rights just in case something like this happens. If you have a million songs and just 1/2% of them produce $250,000 a piece, that's a big chunk of money. Now, I'm sure the percentage is much lower than that, but the music, movie, and software companies aren't relying on that for their sole source of revenue.
--
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
You have a point, but I'm not sure it's true that this is the first time length of copyright has exceeded the life of the media.
We are losing countless numbers of books each year simply because they were printed on acid paper, and I'd argue that loss is far more substantial in the long run than the loss of performace art, but that's simply because text has a much higher thought density. I dragged some books back from my mother-in-law's house last week, and there are a lot of things only 50-60 years old that are rapidly disintegrating.
It would be nice if the Library of Congress or someplace else would archive everything, but that isn't likely to happen. (I'm not sure how things are *supposed* to get into the LoC - are publishers supposed to submit a copy? Are congressmen responsible? (For this, not in the general case, we know they're not generally responsible!)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
-rpl
Suppose I download an old copy of, say Castle of the Winds, and (its actually not a bad game, although its graphics are bad) play this for a month.
Well, since I was playing Castle of the Winds, I didn't buy Diablo II. Software companies are simply afraid people will choose older, free software over newer, better (one hopes) software that costs $50+.
Part of the problem here (at least in the gaming industry) is that graphics are not nearly as important as many people think. I know a lot of games that are a blast to play even though they don't have super-up-to-date-graphics. Many older games have better gameplay than current ones.
The bottom line is, companies are worried about you getting the old software for free, because then you won't buy the new software.
-Coz
Authorship IS equal to ownership. If I create something, you damn well better believe it belongs to me. But once I sell or give away a copy to a person, things change. I now own the ORIGINAL.
The core problem with software is that it can be copied. So once it has been distributed, whether by sale or for free, it is "out there". There's not much that can stop people from copying it. Copyright is designed to classify the author differently from recipients.
As you pointed out, the only issue here, is whether or not the author should be able to prevent other people from sharing. He certainly SHOULD be able to, otherwise he couldn't sell his creation. The main problem I have with the copyright system is the length of time these things stay in effect (thanks Disney!)
But the sentiment I'm seeing here on Slashdot is more like: "you're not using it anymore, so you should just give out the binary and source code to anyone who wants it".
Well, guess what - the author wrote it, and he is under no obligation to do anything else. I get so sick of the crowd that thinks they are entitled to everything. Go create something of your own.
SEAL
Yes. If you write a song, you have the absolute right to release the first recording of the song. After that, any other band has the right to "cover" your song on their album if they choose, or perform your song live, and they pay a royalty to you that is defined by law. You don't have the right to say "no."
:), most amateur and semi-professional musical performances would be illegal. Your band could be sued for performing, for instance, "Satisfaction", without the express written consent of the Rolling Stones.
This law was created to break up the player piano roll monopoly. It's an old law.
Why is this law still important today?
Without that law, each band that wanted to perform or record someone else's song would have to obtain permission from the original songwriter.
This would seriously harm up-and-coming musicians. Most bands don't start out writing a suite of completely original material. A bunch of guys get together, and they pick a bunch of songs that they all know and like, and that they think will play well to an audience. They learn those songs, learn the craft, and play the local bar. The bar pays the compulsory licensing fees to BMI and ASCAP. Then, hopefully, the band gets good and starts writing their own songs, becomes famous, and other new bands start performing their songs, and paying BMI and ASCAP in return. It's an important part of the cycle of how musicians are developed.
The Beatles started out as a bar band playing covers -- other people's work. So did the Grateful Dead, Phish, and probably nearly every musician in the world. How many musicians can you find that have never performed a cover song?
Without compulsory licensing (not "Compulsive licensing" -- an interesting concept
In short, Congress recognized that when the recording industry had the absolute power to pick and choose who was allowed to perform and record works, a destructive monopoly was created. This law has nothing to with Socialism and everything to do with preventing a destructive monopoly.
It has been debated on this article over the legitimacy of distributing "abandonware", and out-of-print books. But what of out-of-print magazines?
When PCVR's (see my site, if you want to know more) publisher (Joeseph Gradecki) decided to stop publishing (for whatever reason), I bought a copy of each of the back issues. As far as I know, Mr. Gradecki is still alive. I want to republish some of the articles (I would love to do the magazine, but I don't have the time or money) on my web site, to make them available for others, but so far, all attempts at contacting him to ask permission have failed (I even got his mail address from his last publisher - alas, the mail came back "Return to Sender/Address unknown"). I can't contact the authors of the pieces in most cases, since many didn't have email addresses or leave snail mail addresses, either.
Short of reading the articles, and writing my own distillation of the article (or building the device, saying how I built it, and referencing the article) - I don't believe I can legally republish the article (though I tend to wonder if doing so would bring Mr. Gradecki out of the woodwork, so to speak)...
Does anyone have any ideas on what I should do?
I have a similar collection of articles from BYTE magazine (though not nearly as complete), but the PCVR issues are more at stake, since you can still look at BYTE in hardbound form in library stacks...
Please advise...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Yeah, that's my point. 60+year copyrights are a relatively new thing. See When Works Pass Into the Public Domain-- I think it gives you rough dates of when the various legislation was enacted.
Also note that I said vastly exceed. If you're really careful with keeping books, even acidic paper will last you more than 60 years. You can't say the same for CDs -- 50 or 60 years, and you're most likely SOL no matter how careful you were. And the copyrights are now a LOT longer than 50 or 60 years. Try nearly 100, or possibly even more (see earlier link)!
I'm not talking about soley recorded performance art, either. A lot of materia go on CDs now that are more commonly associated with printed matter (encylopedias, novels, even some periodicals). Let's not forget software, either.
Some material is even more ephemeral -- for example, web pages. The reason my web site is licensed as a whole under the Open Publication license is so that if someone actually cares (well, unlikely for mysite, but...), they can (legally!) save material themselves, and preserve it, even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow and my account drops with nobody to pay the bills after I'm gone.
It used to be, at least, the responsibility of the culture/civilization as a whole to preserve and pass on such things, not the mandate of particular organizations or individuals. The bigger the civilization, the more impossible a task it is for an individual or organization anyway.
DNA just wants to be free...
I am surprised that Micro$oft didn't think of this: give the masses the source for Win 3.x, let open sourcers modify and improve the code. Once there is a very decent and stable version of Win 3.x available for everyone, with loads of addons and new features not even existing in Win 2000, start selling software for the new and improved Win 3.x Open Source version.
Here, in the good old U. S. S. of A.,* in the great State of Indiana, in Allen County, there is an Allen County Public Library that lends software. Seems libraries are allowed to do this under Federal copyright law. This is also the justification for the "digital libraries" known colloquially as w4r3z sites: their "due date" is 24 hours after the download.)
*USSA = United Socialist States of America<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
So how, in a civil action, does the copyright owner establish an entitlement to other than nominal damages?
You apparently fail to realize that "nominal damages" is anywhere from $500 to $150,000 plus all equipment used in the infringement. And if certain conditions are met, the damages can be trebled. How would you like paying a $500,000 bill?
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think that rather then spending money going after the abandonware pirates, they should look at the situation from a marketing standpoint. Just by the sheer number of sites, and hits these sites are getting, there is obviously consumer interest in abandonware. Realizing this, rather than trying to shut these services down, maybe they should sign some sort of contract with the site operators to provide the software the companies themselves are no longer willing to provide. The way I see it, it ends up like an outsourcing project: the company receives revenue, without any of the overhead cost for it. And I think consumers truly interested in the abandonware titles would be willing to pay a certain small amount to have access to the software. I think this is perfect example of not only how inflexible companies have become, but how copyright laws can be used for the wrong purpose. Somehow, it doesn't surpise me that the company quoted in the cnet article is Microsoft. I think they are one of the best examples of a company that doesn't know how to serve the consumer, nor what the consumer wants.
If you don't know, you better ask somebody
The important element is "not for profit" on the part of the infringer, I'd guess. As to whether third-party ads count, thinking aloud:
Third-party adds interpolated in your site to pay for your free space? I suppose one could say that the adverts are there because you're attracting visitors, which makes the ads valuable, for which you get something that is worth money, free web space.
At first glance, then, I'd say that those ads do count, since you're being paid for them in server space. The defendant's argument is that all the ads do is cover the cost of the webspace, and non-profit does not mean "loss-making". The notional payment for the ad space is the server space sufficient for the defendant to provide the wares on a cost-neutral basis - he therefore makes no profit.
It wouldn't help a claimant either if several users could be brought forward with tales of breach of contract in the shape of refused replacements of disks. But that's another issue, and one which has been well-rehearsed elsewhere under this article.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.