Fri, 07 Mar 2003

The Digital Dark Ages

Games anti piracy bot fingers ZX Spectrum archive site. And worryingly, it doesn't sound like it was a mistake [The Register]

This is the kind of thing that really bothers me about the whole copyright regieme. Stuff that has been abandoned, and/or pulled from ther market being witheld and squirrled away for no good purpose whatsoever. To quote from the article:

Anti-piracy is kind of simple if you see it this way. Somebody, once, owned practically everything World of Spectrum has for download. Since the games were current the rights will have gone every which way, but quite a lot of the rights will be somewhere in the vaults of several IDSA members, even if they themselves won't be aware of it until they go through the old filing cabinets. They're not making any money out of them, unless they're proposing to retread them for mobile phones, but that is not the point - anybody thinking "some piracy is benign undermines respect for... intellectual property rights." Exterminate...

/Copywrongs | 0 writebacks | permanent link

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