New pirate eBay goods: demo DVD

[Hattig]

It doesn't look illegal to me.

The demos were public domain.

It seems a couple of people can't realise this fact.

When I bought PD disks back in the 90s the fees were higher than disk+postage - they covered the time and effort in running the PD library. In this case £4 seems to be a reasonable price for the effort involved, seeing as around 20 people will probably buy it in the end.

It isn't piracy - this type of behaviour is exactly what the scene encouraged back in the day.

I doubt we'll ever see an apology though. I left AW.net to get away from this type of crass "i'm right, despite the facts" behaviour.

[Hattig]

I don't know why anybody bothers to create anything these days - too many people who are ready to jump on it and make the effort not worthwhile. It's all too common these days, sadly.

I don't have an Amiga any more, but I'd like to watch the demos again (although it wouldn't be quite the same watching them on a DVD than the real thing). Heh, maybe the Oddysey megademo, my third disk was corrupt so I never saw it all.

I think you should contact eBay and explain that the DVD was merely containing videos of the output of Public Domain material, it would be like banning someone selling eBooks of Shakespeare. Maybe courtesy would have dictated that you contact the groups, if they were contactable, but no-one at school ever did that when we copied the demos for each other.

[Hattig]

@Savan

He can't, the people with a thorny stick up their bums here will keep on reporting it as 'copyright infringement' to eBay and it isn't worth the hassle to him.

Yes, the copyright is owned by the creators. However they released these things quite some time ago, and it was always under the assumption that they would be spread wide and far. If there was such a thing as a Scene Licence back then, it would have been "Copy this to everyone you know so they can enjoy it, we're not liable for any damage, blah blah, blah, please keep original attributions intact".