Is it legal to download magazine cover disks?

[kolla]

There was a courtcase a few years ago, in France, where a consumer was sued for copying a movie from DVD to VHS, in order to use it in a video player at his mothers place.

So his mother told on him or what? :laughing:
I totally fail to see how this is even gray zone of piracy.

As for working around copy protections, this is done automatically by quite alot of hardware and software today, so what can a user do? My old plextor drive happily ignores most CD copy protection schemes that were popular for a while, my XBMC installation automatically works its way around various schemes of DRM etc.

[tomazkid]

If I recall it correctly, there was copy protection involved, and it might have been the customer who sued the company since he could not copy it over, think this was 4-5 years ago. anyway, the court did rule in his favor.

[Fats]

@ kix300r

So I applaud any site that freely makes all this old software available to those who still want to use them. It's only the greetin faced gits who crop up on sites like this and try to make out they're some kind of legal experts that do all the complaining which is pathetic really when the original copyright owners couldn't give a crap about all that old software and are quite happy to leave it gathering dust and be lost forever when there are still folk out there who would be only to glad to be able to get hold of it and use it...

I prefer the sites that get permission of original copyright holders to distribute the programs: Look at
Back to the Roots or at AmigaFuture downloads.

greets,
Staf.

[nicholas]

So what if you have the original disks?  Are you allowed to transfer the content of the floppy to the hard drive and make an archive?  Where are the Amiga owners who grew up to become lawyers?
 
Some years ago I wrote to one of the creators of 'Take 'Em Out' in Sweden.  He has very excited to hear that in this age that his game was still was being played.  He did not have the authority to freely release the game.

I think that is probably the problem in most cases.  The person responsible for creating the art in the first isn't actually the copyright holder, some faceless corporation is.

Copyright shouldn't be transferable IMO.

[motrucker]

despite what our anal retentive copyright "experts" here say, it may be completely legal. It will be a case by case basis however. There may well be one program on the CD that makes it illegal to pass it around.