Is Amiga Inc's claim to AOS valid?

[lsmart]

If they or whomever had and they felt they could prove this in a court of law then I'm pretty sure they would have taken action long ago to shut down such sites.

If this is the whole reason for the discussion, I´d say with a lot of respect: "you guys are retarded."

[lsmart]

But that quote from one of the brothers is telling.
How useful would the source code be?

Source code is the ultimate spec. If you have the source, you can write a better replacement than anybody else. It doesn´t have to be in your results, but having access to the sources makes a big difference!

[lsmart]

Defending the rights to various kickstarts & defunct OS versions seems to me like claiming copyright over the Ox drawn plough - It might still have it's uses, but you're never going to make money from selling them.

Defunct? Are you out of your mind? What do you think is the main reason Amiga Forever is so popular? The demos or the ridiculous games? No, it is the best source to legally obtain all the Kickstarts & Workbench files.
Without them Amiga Forever wouldn´t be worth talking about.

[lsmart]

...one of our legit disks went bad and we downloaded a copy.  While that isn't illeage you were glad to find it.

I don´t think it´s legal, but I believe copyright should be modified in a way that it becomes legal. You´d be a real tuna head to sue for such a copy and if I were a judge I would urge the parties to settle so that the infringer pays no more than the cost of the media & shipping for the new disk.

Law should advance to the point it actually makes sense. However AInc paid for the AmigaOS IP and they paid the one, who paid for it to the one who paid for it to get it from ESCOM/Gateway. (I am a bit confused about all the details, there may be some confusion along the way) So that is a very strong indication that these rights are not in the property of Joe Random and they certainly aren´t free of rights or public domain.