Ah yes, forgot all about this excellent FAQ cloanto has set up. See this:
An interesting read. At the very least, it lets us know (in the absence of Cloanto having ever made any posts in this thread) that they're very,
very sorry:
or, more regrettably, it could escalate all the way to the ISP and to local computer crime authorities. When this happens, we consider this a failure, and we feel very badly about this.See, Franko? They feel
really bad about it.
We believe that ROM and operating system piracy hurt emulation. Please consider what happened to so many emulators for other systems,You mean the emulators that are now free and unmolested because companies without such a burr up their ass realized it wasn't actually the end of the world? Has this page been updated since 1997?
It does not cost much to askbut you may never get any reply at all, in which case you should avoid ever taking any action, even if you have to wait until the end of time.
The difference in this particular case is that it is Franko's stated goal to prove that the Workbench disks are PD. Cloanto simply have to react to this. Or as Piru put it: They're a sensible business, so they have to protect their investment.
Do they? They don't distribute Workbench disk images for actual Amiga hardware, nor are they licensed to do so. What possible investment could they have in this?