Quote:
Originally Posted by Daedalus
Sadly what you think doesn't matter a jot when it comes to copyright. The line is legally drawn at zero files unless otherwise stated. Magazines and software publishers back in the day no doubt had licences in place for the files they included - the cost probably wasn't a big deal in comparison to the manufacturing / printing costs when you were distributing tens of thousands of copies.
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It's worse than that.
Cloanto also claim copyright over the
bootblock, so even a formatted disk with no system files on it is theoretically illegal to distribute unless you use an appropriately licensed replacement bootblock.
In the old days you got permission to include system files by becoming a registered developer, which cost $25. However in practice Commodore didn't care about non-commercial distribution of essential files like LoadWB that were needed to run your program, because the recipient was assumed to have them already and suing anybody who provided them with a backup of what they already had was impracticable and counterproductive.
Things are bit stickier now that you can have an 'Amiga' that is actually just emulated via software on a PC, and copyright holders can take other low cost actions such as hitting you with a DMCA takedown notice.
There are many solutions to this problem. The most obvious is to 'fly under the RADAR' and hope they don't notice, or if they do can't be bothered taking action against an 'infringement' that is of no consequence to them.
I find it
extremely ironic that back-in-the-day Amiga fans who pirated commercial titles with gay abandon (justifying it with such arguments as "I would buy it if the price wasn't such a ripoff" or "it's too crappy to pay for" or "I am too poor to justify spending the money on it so they wouldn't have made the sale anyway") now get their knickers in a twist worrying about whether they might be violating copyright on some inconsequential stuff that was created 30 years ago for a dead platform. To those people I say, Where's your bravado now?
Personally I am embracing the retro experience by 'pirating' everything in sight from that time, and I don't care if bloodsuckers like Cloanto theoretically have the rights to it. It they want people to buy their product they should consider giving their customers and
all classic Amiga owners (who are still legitimate licensees of the OS that came with the machine) the right to distribute essential system files that they know we already have the rights to. This wouldn't hurt their sales at all, in fact it might even
increase sales if buying their product gave you an automatic license.
If you are afraid that 'just doing it' is too risky then the next obvious solution is to write your own replacement code, which should be made free and open source so others can also use it without fear. That innovation is what copyright laws are supposed to promote! And if that results in Cloanto losing sales that's
their fault for not being reasonable.