Re: Free Apple // Software!!

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <4089774079.36595036@lamg.com>,
Robert Roehm <Robert_Roehm@lamg.com> wrote:
>Decommercialized Software!

   Some is. Most isn't. Just because it's publically available doesn't
mean jack **** about the legality. This issue has come up many times
before, and unless the company explicitly puts it in the public
domain, it's still copyrighted, and downloading it without currently
owning a legitimate copy (if you are to count that downloaded copy as
the one backup copy you are legally entitled to) is a violation of
U.S. Copyright law, as well as any other country's copyright law thaty
subscribes to the international Berne convention.

   This issue has come up before, and the maintainers of Asimov don't
have the decency to admit that the software that they have certainly
may be breaking the law, especially if you never bought it in the
first place. [A public notice presented to people who want to try and
download things that they may be participating in an illegal activity
might be a nice basic courtesy, but that'd mean that the maintainers of
it had a *tinge* of conscience. It'd also prevent people like you from
getting misinformed about the site.]

   There's also the fact that with gzipped disk images, the programs
are damn hard to unpack on anything but the emulator-only crowd, but
that only helps to keep Apple II piracy of crud from asimov down a
bit.

>This has tons of decommercialized software... However, you won't find
>software that has been "renewed"... i.e. Broderbund's LodeRunner(R) is now
>owned and maintained by Sierra On-Line(TM) Software

   Tim Shoppa just posted where on Lode Runner is at Asimov. Thus,
you're wrong that Asimov supports copyrights or "renewed" titles at
all. Now that you know the truth about asimov, will you take the
opportunity to post a public retraction about the true quality of the
_still_ commercial software at Asimov? It'd only be fair.

Nathan Mates

--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
# What are the facts? Again and again and again-- what are the _facts_?
# Shun wishful thinking, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors
# think-- what are the facts, and to how many decimal places?  -R.A. Heinlein