4 ms·

A lot of the material on archive.org doesn't have permission to be archived. They did not seek out each copyright holder of GeoCities when they made their archi

by dalke 12y ago

A lot of the material on archive.org doesn't have permission to be archived. They did not seek out each copyright holder of GeoCities when they made their archive, available from https://archive.org/web/geocities.php https://archive.org/web/geocities.php . Are you going to say that that was stolen? Or was it saved? And, sorry to break this to you, but we never really cared about copyright and permissions in the first place. Look at the uproar over TRAC when Mooers couldn't get copyright for it at all, so tried to enforce trademark protection over it. Look at the Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists in the 1970s. Look at the sheer joy of people using the original Napster in 1999. The games industry of the 1970s and early 1980s didn't even really pay attention to trademarks, which is how we ended up with the classic BASIC game "Star Trek".

orionblastar 12y ago
I wrote some things, I had a few Geocities web pages, I worked on some DOS Games, I wrote some games in Commodore 64 BASIC, I helped make text files for a community college BBS in 1989. All of which got used without my permission. I never saw one penny for such things. But I see how it works now, I don't own my own works, and they are free to be copied and put on display for others to use for free. In the early 1970's and 1980's there was still a 'fair use' clause in copyright. For non-commercial use, for educational use, for parody/satire, etc. The DMCA changed that so after 1999 copyright law and IP law was more strict. That is why you could have a game in BASIC named Star Trek and not have Paramount care that you did. That is why there were several versions of the old BBS game Tradewars, originally written in BASIC for a TRS-80, and then converted to IBM BASICA, and then in Turbo Pascal, and then Tradewars 2002. Because all of that was done before the DMCA passed. I can tell by the downvotes that the community here does not care about permission and encourages the copying and saving of older material as some sort of library. Stuff I worked on as side projects way back in the day, appear to be part of Archive.org and other sites. Yet nobody cares. Will the side projects people write today get copied and saved in the same way? Will all of the time we spend on working on side projects go to support some archive site?

by dalke 12y ago

orionblastar 12y ago

I wrote some things, I had a few Geocities web pages, I worked on some DOS Games, I wrote some games in Commodore 64 BASIC, I helped make text files for a community college BBS in 1989. All of which got used without my permission. I never saw one penny for such things. But I see how it works now, I don't own my own works, and they are free to be copied and put on display for others to use for free. In the early 1970's and 1980's there was still a 'fair use' clause in copyright. For non-commercial use, for educational use, for parody/satire, etc. The DMCA changed that so after 1999 copyright law and IP law was more strict. That is why you could have a game in BASIC named Star Trek and not have Paramount care that you did. That is why there were several versions of the old BBS game Tradewars, originally written in BASIC for a TRS-80, and then converted to IBM BASICA, and then in Turbo Pascal, and then Tradewars 2002. Because all of that was done before the DMCA passed. I can tell by the downvotes that the community here does not care about permission and encourages the copying and saving of older material as some sort of library. Stuff I worked on as side projects way back in the day, appear to be part of Archive.org and other sites. Yet nobody cares. Will the side projects people write today get copied and saved in the same way? Will all of the time we spend on working on side projects go to support some archive site?