Re: Apple II Reference Manual ("Red Book")

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <38fa44d2.842863496@news>,
Jeff Blakeney <CUTblakeney@home.com> wrote:
 
> On 16 Apr 2000 08:51:36 +0200, pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)
> wrote:
> 
>> So why not let the copyright holder worry about this then?
> 
> All I'm doing is pointing out that making it available without the
> copyright holders permission is illegal.
 
Which of course is such an obvious truth that the point doesn't
even have to be made.
 
Likewise it's illegal to walk across the street against a red light.
 
> The only reason the conversation has continued is because people
> keep trying to say it isn't illegal
 
Those people are of course wrong.
 
> or trying to justify distributing it illegally or something similar.
 
Well, there are some justifications in doing this.
 
Why do people walk across the street against a red light sometimes?
It's illegal, so they should never ever even think about doing it,
right?
 
Well, things aren't quite that simple.  Just because something is
illegal doesn't imply it's always unethical.  The copyright laws were
written long ago, to protect commercial values, at a time when things
simply never did lose their commercial value as fast as they can do
today.  Back then that made sense.  But to protect something with a
copyright today, when it's lost all its commercial value and when not
even the author is interested in selling it anymore, is really
pointless.
 
>> OF COURSE you have the full right, and my sympathy, to defend the
>> copyright of any of your work.  But the "Red Book" isn't your work,
>> so why do you worry about it?
> 
> That is the problem.  I shouldn't have to defend ANY copyrights as
> people should respect those copyrights.
 
Likewise, people should never cross the street against a red light,
because it's illegal.  People should also never park their cars
illegally.  They should pay their taxes and bills, always on time,
and never ever try to evade doing it.
 
There's a lot of things people should do that they don't always do.
That's why we have that concept of "defend your rights".  That's why
we have police, prisons, courts, etc etc.  They shouldn't be needed,
right?  So why are they there?
 
> After all, that is the whole point of copyrighting something.  So
> that everyone will know that you own it and want to retain ownership
> of it.  Until the copyright is released or expires, it is still in
> effect legally.
 
And it will legally remain in effect even if you should lose any
actual interest in retaining the ownership, to the point that if
you encounter someone who wants to buy it, you wouldn't want to
bother selling it.  THAT's the situation I'm talking about here.
 
>> Also: suppose your copyrighted work is some 20+ years old, and that
>> it lost all its commercial value some 10+ years ago and it would be
>> very unlikely to ever regain any commercial value.
> 
> Commercial value isn't a factor.  That product is the property of
> someone else and is still protected by copyright law regardless of
> whether it is worth anything.
 
Do you really think it's sensible to defend your ownership of something
which has no value, even not to yourself ?????
 
But of course you're right: technically it's illegal.
 
>> Also suppose that
>> if someone would approach you with a request of buying your work,
>> then your response would be "Sorry, but we no longer sell that
>> stuff!"  (if someone would ask Apple Computer about buying some Apple
>> II stuff, a response along these lines would be likely).  Given these
>> circumstances, suppose someone "illegally" made copies of your work,
>> and you later learnt about it.  There would be no economic damage to
>> you since you no longer sold your work.  Would you still bother to
>> sue?
> 
> Depends on the product and the situation.
 
What do you mean by "depends on the prooduct and the situation" ???
It's ILLEGAL, isn't that enough?  You worry about the copyright of
others' products, and now you're not even sure whetehr you'd always
be willing to defend the copyright of your own product.... :-)))))
 
Actually, now you're starting to make some sense:  yes, it depends
very much on the product and the situation.  Reality is much more
complex than your simple-minded statement "it's illegal"....
 
> If it were something that I wanted to retain the rights to then
> I would take legal action if the situation couldn't be handled in
> another manner.
 
Would you want to retain the rights if the product had no value to
you?  E.g. if you didn't want to sell it to me even if I would be
prepared to pay for it?
 
> However, if you ignore the copyright owners decision and make copies
> available, you would be doing so illegally and that is the point I
> keep trying to make.
 
It's an obvious truism - you don't need to state that anymore.
 
>> In short: do you defend copyrights because they are of some real
>> value?  Or do you defend it as a principle in absurdum, even in
>> those cases where the copyright has lost all its value?
> 
> I simply point out that breaking a copyright, regardless of how old,
> is illegal.
 
Why do you avoid answering this question?
 
BTW copyrights do expire, some 50 or 75 years after the death of the
holder of the copyright.  Thus you're wrong, even technically, when
you say "no matter how old".
 
>> OK, if you're so deeply concerned about this, why don't you find the
>> correct person to contact, and then ask that person?  If you did
>> obtain permission, in the 100% proper legal way, to have the Red Book
>> posted, you will have done this ng a great service.
> 
> I'm not deeply concerned about it.
 
Then why are you discussing it so intensely?
 
> I just want people to know that it
> is illegal.  If a product is made available online and there is no
> mention of the fact that it is in violation of its copyright, then how
> are users who stumble across it or have it pointed out to them to know
> that they are breaking the law if they download it.  Not everyone in
> the world is comfortable with breaking laws regardless of whether they
> are likely to get prosecuted so you would be doing them a disservice
> by not warning them.  I simply help provide that warning.
> 
>> If you don't want to do this, but merely wants to make access to the
>> contents of the Red Book more difficult,
> 
> I don't want to make access to the contents of the Red Book more
> difficult, I simply want people to know that it is illegal.
 
Even if the copyright holder give permission?
 
>> I think you can spend your
>> energies on something more constructive.  For instance, defending
>> the copyrights of your own work (and of course also to sell your
>> work to people who are seriously interested in buying it).
> 
> Again, I shouldn't have to defend my copyrights.
 
You may ALWAYS have to defend your rights.  You may not like it,
but that's a fact.  People do break laws -- if they never did, we
would need no police, no courts, no prisons....
 
> By the way, this is one of the reasons I haven't spent much time
> trying to get things reclassified.  I am a programmer and can
> contribute much more by spending my free time working on my Apple II
> programs.  I'll leave reclassification efforts to others.
 
That's an inefficient administration of resources.  It took me a
total of perhaps a few hours to locate the authors of the S-C
Assembler and Flash! The Integer Basic Compiler, and then have an
email conversation with then to get their permission to release their
software to the public domain.  If I instead would have chosen your
path (yes, I'm a programmer too!), i.e. if I would have reimplemented
it from scratch instead of trying to get access to what was already
there, it would have taken me hundreds of hours instead of just a few
hours.
 
In the end, these authors too did get something in return: they had
since long discarded their software, so I sent them DSK images of it
all (or at least all I had), so they could run it on their emulators.
The other day Bob S-C ran his own assembler for the first time in
many years, and he seemed to thoroughly enjoy it!
 
 
BTW this focuses on another aspect of copyright laws: sure, they
protect individual ownership, but in the software world they also do
force people to "reinvent the wheel" a countless number of times.
That's a QUITE inefficient handling of human resources....  Breaking
copyrights is of course not the way to solve this problem; it can
only be solved if people realize it's often better to cooperate than
to compete.
 
-- 
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