mikeymike wrote:
It won't happen, and I'll give an example of the reason why. Currently the rights to ancient games (talking Atari 2600, Coleco 'ancient') are being bought up for the mobile market. Simple games with limited system requirements will always have a place in modern technology, even though while today's mobile technologies (mobile phones for example) are becoming more advanced and will someday be able to do handle more advanced software, all the old software will get its place on whatever new gadget fills the spot that mobile phones once had.
A good point, but this only applies if Amiga have any intention of doing so at some point. I'd love to play old Amiga games on my mobile phone, but I'm not aware of any plans for this to happen so it seems a bit of a weak argument for continuing to charge for the old OS.
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.
They don't even have to make it freely distributable - they could make it freely downloadable from their website (a potential way of advertising the more recent Amiga happenings to ppl), but still make retain full copyright and it would still be illegal to distribute anywhere else.
The way things are currently, everyone is holding onto software IP like it is solid gold, which may or may not be a good thing to do (I personally hope software IP gets done away completely, it's a stupid idea - patent/licence software implementations, not ideas), but that's the way it is.
Well, copyright which we're talking about here only covers implementations, not ideas. I think software copyright should still exist, but be far less restrictive, and I'm against software patents.
I was about to say that I felt the better approach might be for Amiga Inc to just turn a blind eye to unlicenced use of Amiga 1.x kickstart ROMs, but they can lose their right to defend it in cases of their choosing if they do that.
No they can't. You're probably getting confused with trademarks.
@Darrin, Cymric:
The question is should it be made free, not "Should I pirate it" - so whilst there are reasonable arguments for copyright law being less restrictive, no one is trying to justify piracy in this thread.
