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Comment by Mindless2112 | Hacker News Reader

This seems illegal -- for example TOSEC [1] is in there. Unless I'm missing something, the copyrights on the software in that collection haven't expired. (The article author notably skips over this question [2] in the comments.)

[1]: http://archive.org/details/tosec

[2]: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3947/comment-page-1#comm...

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This is likely technically true, but this is an area where the term of copyright so far exceeds the commercial viability of the work that it makes extinction a near certainty. A little calculated civil disobedience seems like a moral action.

Copyrights are an area of law where "might makes right" and the Archive can take care of itself. No one is going to war to stop people from playing games on an emulated Bandai Wonderswan.

On a recent Shop Talk Show episode, Chris Coyier mentions that he had a conversation with Jason Scott that archive.org has notes around saying that when person X passes away, they post file Y, because they are the only person that cares about the copyright of said file.

It seems that they are willing to skirt copyright information if no one is likely to challenge it.

And society is better for it.

Even Apple does not enforce Copyright on early versions of Mac software from the early 1980s. What would really be the point? To stop a few people from running it on an Android phone using Mini vMac? What would Apple get out of that except to look like a spoilsport dick?

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