But Mike, that's so... (gasp!) ..illegal
No, that isn't so (gasp!) illegal. Unless of course it's illegal to have a backup copy of a piece of software that you obtained legally.
The fact that someone shouldn't put it on the net in the first place is still the wrong thing to do, and they're doing something illegal, which is wrong in the moral sense as well, but if you obtained a copy of a piece of software (originally) legally, that copy goes wrong, you obtain anther copy to replace the now dead copy, it satisfies the following conditions:
- you haven't "spawned" another copy into existence. One is now dead and the other is to replace it. You're back at square one, your legal copy of a piece of software.
- you haven't encouraged someone to do something which is illegal (and if anyone comes up with "but downloading it is encouraging them!" then I put it to you that most people don't have access to their web server logs let alone read them.)
- it isn't ripping anyone off, not even potentially (regardless of their still being in business or not).
The copy of Workbench 3.1 on my WinUAE setup is downloaded off the net, as is the Kickstart 3.1 ROM image I use. I legally own an A1200 and legally own the kickstart 3.1 ROM and WB 3.1. The fact of the matter is, I can't be arsed to transfer the images manually over when I can so easily download it.
There's also a potential argument that I could potentially be running and taking advantage of both versions I have running at once. Well, if people consider it legal to copy the ROM image from my Amiga to my PC, then so is this.
It's beside the point that I physically cannot run both my A1200 and my PC at the same time anyway :-)
