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Comment by anyfoo | Hacker News Reader

Even better is to create a kryoflux image, as that is not only disk format agnostic, but pretty much the most faithful digital preservation method we have right now.

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The Kryoflux company claims ownership of all images created with Kryoflux hardware.

To quote Internet Archive's Jason Scott, "I wouldn't use a Kryoflux to pry open my last can of beans."

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/buyj9f/ti...

IA's Archive Team have guidance for anyone wanting to archive floppy disks:

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_...

and optical discs:

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_optical...

Unfortunately copyright law doesn’t even remotely recognize that claim.

Whether it does or doesn't, it's the attitude of the company that keeps me far, far away.

Agreed,.

Even if their claim is legally dubious, they may be inclined to try to legally enforce it through a lawsuit. Defending a lawsuit is an expense, hassle and risk that many people would rather avoid. That's why many would prefer to choose other products whose vendors don't even try to impose these kinds of conditions.

Agreed.

I claim to own Iceland.

> The Kryoflux company claims ownership of all images created with Kryoflux hardware.

From the links provided, the issue is regarding documentation of the image “flux” file format and the availability of software tools to manipulate the images. Jason Scott probably doesn’t want to use a proprietary format for archival of disk images, and that’s fine. For someone to say that Kyroflux is claiming ownership of images created by its customers, however, is just misleading.

Coming in late to say that Jason Scott has explained to me that at some point in the not so far past the way the copyrights were set up it DID give them total control but it's been changed to be still obnoxious but not quite as bad.

That's bad if true. bdowling points out that this only concerns the format itself, which while very different from "owns all images", could still be detrimental to preservation.

I think the answer then would be to come up with an alternative that works on approximately the same level.

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