Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

I think one need to view everything that happens with a time lens.

Locally at the time the content is produced it be seen as evil by corporations to copy it and distribute the titles for free. For one thing income from selling the software funds the next releases from the software company. So if there is no funding due to piracy there will not be a next release.

From a long term perspective and that of preservation. Pirates and crackers have done a very good deed. If no one could copy the content from an old disk system to a new system how would it be preserved? How will DRM protected content be copied and preserved for the future? How will content from online platforms like Netflix, HBO, Steam be preserved? Maybe it will be preserved by crackers and pirates? Is that a bad thing?

How will the content of online software as a service companies be preserved for the future?

It's too bad that societies haven't done a better job of exploring codified (and in turn universal) solutions to this. For example, having the law only allow technological copy control measures for a period of 14 years from release, and requiring that in order to use them a clean copy of the software had to be submitted to the Library of Congress (or similar) encrypted with an LoC key. When the software technological control period expired it would still be under copyright, but the public would be assured that even if it was abandoned (as is likely) legitimate owners would not be prevented from running it by a decaying DRM system.

For that matter I think encrypted source/asset escrow should also be a requirement for copyright period, so that when it becomes public domain someday (currently effectively forever, but a simple act of Congress could shrink copyright times back down to something sane) the source and assets will be part of that and can be modified and improved, just as copyright was always supposed to be and was a given for books. I can recognize the trust issues this would create, but I still think the public interest (the whole purpose of even allowing IP in the first place) should have strong weight.

These are all good points. National Libraries in several countries do however preserve software as a mean of digital culture preservation but the public as well as the private sector are generally unaware of this.

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