Amiga ROM to free use on the Internet *could* mean a loss of rights (maybe some, maybe all) to the operating system, and that may or may not include more recent released.
No it wouldn't.
I'm not sure what you are saying here, but no rights are lost, and later OS versions are competely unaffected.
Presumably you are a lawyer, not only a lawyer but Amiga Inc's lawyer who is completely familiar with the situation?
Thought not. Perhaps you shouldn't suggest that something is definitely so (or not so), when you don't know?
Note to everyone thinking about contributing to this thread: Let's not have a thread where people act like they're lawyers.
Well, obviously we're not lawyers. Otherwise, we'd be out making money, instead of bickering around on this post. But it only takes a basic understanding of copyright law to understand that you can give away something as "free for personal use" without giving up your copyright of it. This, alone, pretty much nullifies the argument of IP danger.
So, as for the question of should the 1.3 roms be released for free...Yes, they should. They are a over a decade old. Their value is no longer based on the quality of the code, but on the nestalga value that the users create.
It is a sad day when pieces of the worlds culture is lost, and with the current trend in copyright, we will loose large parts of our culture. The worst part of this is that we won't loose our cultural heritage because we cannot preserve it, and we will not loose our cultural heritage because people will not preserve it. We will loose our cultural heritage because of greed. The greed that has convinced the populous that copyright should last long beyond the real commercial value that lead to the creation of the work. That it should last forever because it MIGHT someday be worth SOMETHING.
I totally agree with where you're coming from here, Belial6. But I don't think it applies, in this case. The AmigaROM kernel is not in danger of being lost. It is quite easily available legally. It's still being published and distributed for a reasonable cost, as part of the Amiga Forever package.
For works that have no legal way to be obtained, I agree that after a short period of time they should be opened to be preserved.
