If memory serves, the copyright mafia started when the Amiga was still a popular home computer, citing "Piracy is killing the Amiga" as their cause, & while I believe that those still developing for the Amiga deserve our support I can't see how distributing 1.x - 3.1 constitutes piracy today. Who could claim to be losing revenue ?
All the same, I know it's not as simple as that because copyright law would still have been technically broken.
The problem here (as I see it) is that the period of time that copyright is granted for has been outstripped by the advance of technology & the "Digital Age", which has rendered obsolete a timeframe that seemed reasonable in 1709.
Today, Technology is obsolete often before it becomes mainstream, so it has a short lifespan & then the world moves on. It's time, I think, for the copyright mafia to get real & stop trying to tell us that we're taking bread from the mouths of Amiga developer's starving children.
I say Go For It, Franko.
Actually, originally copyright was somewhere around 14 - 18 years range. It was the idea that what you copyrighted was like a child you had given birth to and you had the oversight over a child up until such time as by law they became considered an 'adult' so copyright followed this principle and the same amount of time. The issue became that companies like Disney wanted to make money and hold off people copying their works longer. Since big corporations have big interests and big money, they were able to get the government(s) to steadily increase the duration of Copyright. I may not agree with the long duration someone can hold on to and try to squeeze money out of a work (often the person continuing to do so had nothing to do with the people who did who are in the ground already) but laws are laws. I can tell you I don't agree with the overly long duration of copyright that at some point ceases to protect the work and only stiffles creativity by preventing open use of it in other works (listen to how many songs way back used the same music but each had different lyrics to see what I mean). Not agreeing is not carte blanche to disregard them.
Would I get mad at this person for putting up old Workbench disks? No.
Would I be surprised if Amiga.org removed his links as links to a site with pirated software if he did put them up without rights? No.
@GobanToba I only mentioned Cloanto since they are someone I know has rights to distribute Amiga OS and don't certainly know everyone who ever has or will in perpetuity and in any time or all time has or had or will have those rights.
So yes, I should have said 'and end-around companies
like Cloanto who have obtained those rights legally and likely paid for them'. Hyperion would not be in the same class doing an end-around Cloanto who obtained the rights if they also obtained the rights legally. Thank you for allowing me the time to correct that. Yay for the minutia gestapo!
Lastly if Petro gave rights to distribute 3.0, then assuming he had and still has that right fine. That doesn't give rights somehow automatically to 1.x-2.1 and 3.1 if only for 3.0 (cant check that site from here to see exactly what it says).
