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.
Have the advantage of hosting content on Plex and other media servers that you can play them remotely. I can be on the other side of the Earth and still access my media. This is an extremely common use case.
Aside from money, I think one of the major issues I had with toll booths was... Well the booths. Stopping, having to fish out exact change, planning ahead to make sure you had enough change, etc.
Nowadays we have those boxes that we can put in the windshield that automatically bill us later. And that's made me far more willing to take a trip via the highway. Removes a lot of anxiety. And, so far, at least in my experience, they work.
In the northeast I regularly see idiots slowing down for the high speed toll lanes that have explicit signage not to slow down. People going 65-70MPH, then as the toll approaches one car brakes down to 45MPH because they’re afraid their transponder won’t be read or something.
It's definitely interesting seeing him physically morph from his younger days to today. When he first came on my radar as a director, I wondered if it was just another guy with the same name, I had to go look it up, and I was surprised. Seemed like a really great guy. :(
You know, sometimes things just work. They get whittled way at until we end up with a very refined endpoint. Just look at cell phones. Black rectangles as far as the eye can see. For good reason. I'm not saying don't explore new avenues ( foldables, etc. ), but it's perfectly fine to come to settle into a metaphor that just works.
To be fair, modern KDE has more-or-less the same taskbar.
And the taskbar is also not optimal. Having text next to the icons is great, but it means you can only really have, like, 4 or 5 applications open and see all their titles and stuff. Which is why modern windows switched to just icons - which is much worse, because now you can't tell which app window is which!
The optimal taskbar, imo, is a vertical one. I basically take the KDE panel and just make it vertical. I can easily have 20+ apps open and read all their titles. Also, I generally think vertical space is more valuable for applications, and you get more of it this way.
It also allows me to ungroup apps. So that each window is it's own entry in the taskbar, so one less click. And it works because I can read the window title.
More or less, yes; Trinity Desktop is basically KDE 3. But KDE has added on a lot of other cruft since then that has no value to me.
> Having text next to the icons is great, but it means you can only really have, like, 4 or 5 applications open and see all their titles and stuff.
That's what multiple virtual desktops are for. My usual desktop configuration has 8. Each one has only a few apps open in it.
> The optimal taskbar, imo, is a vertical one.
I do this for toolbars in applications like LibreOffice; on an HD aspect ratio screen it makes a lot more sense to have all that stuff off to the side, where there's more than enough screen real estate anyway, than taking up precious vertical space at the top.
But for my overall desktop taskbar, I've tried vertical and it doesn't work well for me--because to show titles it would have to be way too wide for me. The horizontal taskbar does take up some vertical space at the bottom of the screen, but I can make that pretty small by downsizing it to either "Small" or "Tiny".
reply