[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

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.

Ouch, I missed the bootblock part (or maybe it's a relatively recent addition there...). Interesting...

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.

Yep, as I said, it was cheap and easy for magazines etc. to have such a licence in place. Just for information, the current licence fee was quoted at $99.

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.

Indeed, and for freely distributable stuff, ignoring the issue is probably a reasonable approach. But for a commercial release things get a little more tricky because there's a genuine risk of legal issues for publishers and distributors.

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?

I'm going to take it that's not aimed at me.

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.

Except you've no way of knowing which OS version someone might have a licence for. Yes, it's a minor point, but if someone owns an A500 with Kickstart 1.3 for example, they don't have a licence for Workbench 3.1 or its system files.

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.

Meh, I didn't bother going that far, generally lacking the time/motivation to do it. If I did (or do in the future), it would probably be available for others to use. Instead, for this project, we just released it on a non-booting floppy so it needed to be run from Workbench, and included instructions on how to make it bootable if needed.