In the sense that the company I work for would be financially harmed if copyright infringement of software was freely allowed. I benefit from the ability of people being able to sell rights to use software.
It's one thing to digitize and archive ancient software, it's another thing to allow people to freely use it without acquiring the proper license for it.
I’m normally one defending copyright on this forum. But dude, this software is half a century old. Nobody is buying or selling this software. Nobody’s business or livelihood is threatened by this.
>Nobody is buying or selling this software. Nobody’s business or livelihood is threatened by this.
Because the media was no longer in the rights holder's possession. This is a dangerous line of reasoning where someone can steal a copyrighted work and then be allowed to profit off of it because the artist has no way to do so.
Being able to see a long lost UNIX version is interesting and I could imagine it being worth paying to see it or play with it similar to how people pay money to see things at a museum.
Dangerous line of reasoning??? Allowing time for an author to monetize a work is the legal rationale for copyright protection. There is no commercial value to this software.
Here is a hypothetical. You see someone on their iPad making a nice drawing. You then steal the iPad and then start making prints of that art and start selling them. To me the artist should be able to disallow such prints from being sold.
But your line of reasoning says that since the artist is unable to make money from the print, then there is nothing wrong with someone else doing so as the artist isn't missing out on any profit since they have no way to sell prints.
That scenario is materially different. The details matter a lot in IP law.
Also please note that I have not said that the copyright is not valid. However, a case for fair use is not unfounded here.
> your line of reasoning says
It ain’t my line of reasoning. I’m paraphrasing the actual law:
As 17 USC § 107 says:
> 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.
This is a false equivalence. The iPad would have to be 45 years old and, after the artist had sold the art many times before to others, had the iPad rediscovered by someone after it had been lost in their mom’s attic.
The people who preserve vintage software typically respect boundaries in order to avoid cases where the copyright holder would be financially harmed. It is not a perfect guarantee, but it is a reasonable one.
Hardline stances usually cause more harm than good anyhow. I remember collecting Apple II gear in the late 1990's and early 2000's. The people saying that any form of copyright infringement was bad were either ignored or flamed since a lot of people just looked at their collection of software from the late 1970's and early 1980's and said, "we're at risk of losing this if we don't make it available, and the copyright holders won't lose anything if we do make it available." Which wasn't strictly true since there were some software developers who created software in the early 1990's who were still selling it. Unfortunately their absolutist attitude did not earn them many allies, so it became a lost cause.
