I didn't read the whole thread but I read the point Franko made and he does have a point in American Copyright Law.
While a copyright exists for anything a person creates they must also protect that copyright to maintain it. Some famous examples:
Asprin was a trademarked name but when the public started to use it as a generic term for wanting an analgesic they lost the right to Asprin.
These companies were scared to death of this:
Coke, Kleenex, and Xerox.
Xerox went so far to put ads in magazines telling people to stop saying "I need to Xerox my documents." They pushed for "Photo Copy" in the public mind.
People would say, "I want a Coke or what kind of Coke can I get you?" Meaning a type of soda.
On Star Trek The Next Generation, they thought Sherlock Holmes was in the PD when they did their first show with that character. The estate made a lot of noise that it was not in the PD and they still owned it. They were very nice to Paramount but they banged that drum pretty hard.
If you don't protect your IP a court can rule that you have let it slip into the PD.
The point I'm making is that I wasn't aware that Ainc (or whoever owns AOS) wasn't sending C&D letters to people hosting Kickstart/Workbench files. That is bad, bad, bad for them.
If you can prove that X many sites have had Kickstart/Workbench files for X many years with no action taken by the owners I think you could argue that they have not protected their IP.
I'm not a lawyer, I'm just speaking from my understanding of all of this...
Cheers!
-P
