Full MagicWB

[Golem!dk]

My favorite thing in the MagicWB package is still the fonts.

[recidivist]

Put me down as one of those who believe and think  that if the originator of an idea(program,process,patent,movie,song,magic spell?,)  chooses to abandon  that idea ,having once  made it known and offered to the public,that the laws should  declare  that idea public domain.
 Once your CHILD reaches 18(possibly 21) you can no longer legally control  his actions nor are you legally responsible for what he does.And ,hopefully,you put much more effort into  nurturing that child than some computer program or novel.



 Under the original U.S. of A. patents and copyrights laws the authors' exclusitivity was recognized for a LIMITED time  which was ,at most,half the usual  author's life expectancy,in a time when  commerce moved much slower;now we have the  ridiculous laws that grant exclusitivity for two lifetimes ,in  a world where commerce and ideas move at the speed of light!

 So someone could invent  a new super clean,efficient energy source or better  car ,and then decide "people aren't worthy of it" and prevent its use ,to the detriment of all.
 Or write ,and  begin to sell,the  SUPER-APP that would  make people want Amigas again,but decide "the heck with it;I don't WANT people to use  Amigas anymore..." and use the government and courts to "protect his rights"

 NO invention,book,music,program, exists ,or came to exist ,in a vacumn;EVERY inventor and author lives in a world built upon earlier  people's work, and builds upon that work.
 
 I,and ,I believe,most people wish to see authors  receive compensation;we often differ in what we think is the proper amount.
 Perhaps SOME authors hate public libraries,fearing that having their work available to the public for free means  fewer books will be sold;yet libraries are widely accepted and promoted.

[Thomas]

So someone could invent  a new super clean,efficient energy source or better  car ,and then decide "people aren't worthy of it" and prevent its use ,to the detriment of all.
 Or write ,and  begin to sell,the  SUPER-APP that would  make people want Amigas again,but decide "the heck with it;I don't WANT people to use  Amigas anymore..." and use the government and courts to "protect his rights"

That's complete nonsense. You can as well develop a similar invention and sell it as yours. You just may not use *his* one.

In Germany it's even allowed to re-engineer another ones software, but only to learn how it works. You can then write a similar program, but you are not allowed to use a single line of code from the original software.

So what I want to say is, you can examine the MagicWB style and then draw your own icons in that style. Aminet is full of such icons. You just may not use the original MagicWB.

This has nothing to do with preventing other people from benefiting from a great idea. You just may not copy the original product. You can use the idea and create your own similar product. That's competition. But you may not copy the original product. That would be theft.

As a capitalism-oriented USA citizen you should know the difference.

[recidivist]

RCA had a stranglehold on patents for the  vacumn tube such that every U.S. manufacturer of radios in the  1920s and 1930 had to pay  RCA license fees.Thankfully  the patent protection at that time expired after a modest number of years.Or should be all still be paying  royalties to the descendants of the wheel's inventor.Sometimes the  patent or copyright  is so basic  there is no other way to do "it" I  maintain that the US digital Millenium copyright  Act which extended  copyrights to 5 or 6 times the length of the previous  laws is  the NONSENSE.And  the EULA  on U.S. software prohibits reverse engineering,de-compile,modification and yet there is no  warrant the software will be suitable as sold.
 There are legal precedence in real estate for "abandonware";if you neglect to  put your owned land or property to use and ignore it,AND someone else  comes along and uses it openly,after a period of time set by law,it becomes their property.

[Plaz]

Thankfully  the patent protection at that time expired after a modest number of years.

Thankfully patents are inforced for only 20 years. (21 possibly adding in a provisional patent application). U.S. Copyrights on the other hand have been extented to what I think is a ludicris amount of time. Life of the author plus 70 years if I recall accurately.

If I were allowed to set the rules, the length would be similar to a patent. More like 20-25 years. Then the origianal author (or current owner of the rights if sold by the original author) would have the ability to extend the copyright say... every 10 years. If the rights owner fails to reapply, the work goes to public domain. The copyright and the right to extent would of course expire along with the author if he hadn't sold the rights to some one else.

The humble opinion of one who holds a few copyrights myself.

Plaz

[recidivist]

My memory wants to say U.S. copyrights were originally 14 years ,renewable ONCE;surely 28 years is time enough  for an author to reap the rewards of his work.

Further I think  shorter,not longer, copyright periods make sense in view of the vastly  increased knowledge available to today's authors compared to those of 1800,plus ideas  are carried more quickly around the globe.

It is my observation that the if huge numbers of people view or feel  a law is unreasonable or made solely to benefit a particular class at the benefit of the general public,then  many,many, more people will choose to  ignore and violate that law.Despite  putting millions of people in prison,confiscating hundreds of millions in property ,and spending billions in  invasive law enforcement ,the U.S.  still has widespread use of illegal substances.And having broken  one set of laws ,it becomes easier for those millions to break other laws.

 I'd like to see the law of copyrights re-written such that  the author or holder had exclusive rights for the traditional first 14 years and possibly a 7 year renewal;but if at any time after making the work  available for fee,the holder then failed to  make the work available for a period of 7 years,then the work  be declared public  domain by operation of law.7 years is long enough to declare a missing person  dead in the absence of contrary evidence.I think it ought to be long enough to declare a holder's interest dead.

 Perhaps we need a GNU/AmigaOS ?
 
 All these years of legal conniving  and wrangling by  various  incarnations of Amiga patent and copyrights holders sure hasn't benefited Amiga users or developers.

[recidivist]

A partial quote from my Adobe Sytems Photoshop EULA(End User License Agreement) : "...,you agree not to modify,adapt or translate the Software.You also agree not to reverse engineer,decompile,disassemble,or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software....."This is  a phrase commonly found in U.S. EULAs.

 SO in the U.S.,at least, one is not permitted to "peek under the hood" without breaking the law.The EULA makes no provision for curiosity,self-education,or customization for one's own use.

 It might be that you could deduce how to accomplish the  results of the Software by what you belived was your own unique code,only to find yourself in court because  your  code and theirs was identical in  a particular line.

 I believe that I am not alone in thinking we need adjustments to the EULa and  patent/copyrights laws that will  see the authors' interests protected and rewarded without retarding progress in the art or depriving the general public from the benefits of the wok.

[odin]

A EULA is not a law. If a law disagrees with a EULA, the EULA isn't worth anything. As far as I know reverse engineering is explicitly allowed by many national laws.

Anyway, I agree copyright laws in various countries have become completely ridicilous. An exclusivity on Mickey Mouse until the sun goes supernova...heh.

[Plaz]

I'd like to see the law of copyrights re-written such that the author or holder had exclusive rights for the traditional first 14 years and possibly a 7 year renewal

There would need to be some study/compromise here. Many authors benifit from their works for many years. (i.e. song writters, novelist) You would find it hard to gain supoort to pass a new law that essentially changes thier potential income from lifetime to some thing far less. A 7 year extention term sounds good, but I'd still give them the oportunity to renew that more than once. But at renewal time.... "if you snooze, you loose".

Maybe as an added stipulation to an extention, you would have to show there is a certain level of active promotion/development and/or commercial activity to the copyright. Just renewing it to bury would not qualify.

Plaz

[recidivist]

Sounds reasonable.

[Roj]

Does software actually qualify for Copyright protections? Sometimes I wonder why a word processor, clearly used as a tool to create other works, falls into the same category as the works it is used to create. The icons and other imagery, in their own individual cases, could fall under Copyright protections, but to declare the entire package an expression or work of art just doesn't fit. It's similar to a company sticking their logo on a hammer and declaring that no other hammers may be created by any other persons.

[Plaz]

Does software actually qualify for Copyright protections?

Yes, in many counties but not all. After all writting code is similar to writting a book or poem. What confounds most of us is that they also can qualify for patents. A patent makes no sense to me. It's like allowing some one to patent and "own" parts of a spoken language.

If they want to go that route, shouldn't all code written in C belong to the author of the C language? Same for C++, fortran, cobol.... How is it that Microsoft (and others) hold patents on code written in a language they don't own? I think they are looking ahead though and that's why they wrote their own language C#. Now they can own the language and all the code you write with it. Clever plan.

Plaz

[lauri.lotvonen]

How lame.  Can't you use Google to find a key or a warez version of it, then download it yourself?   Don't go asking on amiga.org site.  This site does not promote piracy the last time I checked this is against this site's rules.

Try to guess did I try to find it some other way than asking around here...
Not so serious, Amiga nerd's... But thank's anyway, got what I was looking for =).

[kickstart]

With all respect... i dont understand this, this guy just want a very old software after trying to contact with the autor and people just talk about piracy and the poor level of english, its a shame, some software is impossible to buy and isnt abandonware, then whats the option? rules need to be more flexible with this.

And yes... my english suks too.

[lauri.lotvonen]

With all respect... i dont understand this, this guy just want a very old software after trying to contact with the autor and people just talk about piracy and the poor level of english, its a shame, some software is impossible to buy and isnt abandonware, then whats the option? rules need to be more flexible with this.

And yes... my english sucks too.

Thank you, that's just what I was trying to say after all ...

[CSixx]

Get used to it if you plan on visiting here. People with flip out and get holier-than-thou and claim to be moral perfectionists at the sight of someone asking for old software. Software that was once considered commercial but that has long since been abandoned.

They will stand here and defend the US copyright law (even in places where it is irrelevant), and then turn around and bash it on other boards as an over-extended "broken" system.

The irony of it all is, most of these people have pirated software on their computers right now. Such hypocrites.

All those whdload slaves you have installed, yep those count...  When you downloaded those WHDLoad packs from KG, you knew you were committing piracy because you don't own the disks for them all. Even more, all the slaves were cracked, illegal also.

I always buy available amiga hardware and software, I've bought from, Cloanto, Red, Amigakit, and Softhut. I also don't consider myself a criminal, but if theres software I want, and it's not for sale, it doesn't bother me in the least when I download it.

Regardless of what you think, or how "pissed off" you get, get off your high horse, simply tell the people that their question is against the TOS. Maybe you'll make a new friend rather than making someone run off laughing at you.

See you at Amiwest 2009 jerks...