21 Aug
2015
21 Aug
'15
3:45 p.m.
On 2015-08-21 17:42, Paul Koning wrote:
Right. Thanks for pointing it out, Paul. The DEC permission to reproduce
and distribute out-of-print manuals was in no way a waiver of DECs
copyright, and the documents are all still under copyright.
Johnny
On Aug 21, 2015, at 11:27 AM, Johnny Billquist
<bqt at Update.UU.SE> wrote:
On 2015-08-21 17:21, Peter Cetinski wrote:
Please remember that, in general, a general permission to copy is NOT a waiver of
copyright. So those manuals for which there is a permission to copy ARE still under
copyright (assuming they were in the first place, which is likely). What you have there
is a specific permission granted by the owner (the copyright holder), which allows you to
do the things granted, but doesn't allow you to do other things. For example, there
may be permission to copy and distribute the document as it stands; that permission may
(or may not) include permission to OCR it and distributed the resulting text in different
forms. But it may very well disallow creating derived works.
On the other hand, if an owner did indeed release a work to the public domain, then you
can do anything you want with that work.
This may not matter very much in practice, but if you want to apply copyright correctly,
you'll want to be careful to use terms like "public domain" and "still
under copyright" accurately. This discussion on the legality of sharing
manuals, PDFs, etc. leads me to think about the vintage computing hobby as a whole. While
we all encourage the hobby to grow, the downside is that as it does, the software
copyright holders may start to take notice. As a developer of modern systems who expects
to be paid for my work (except what I share with the community of course) I am in a
conundrum because the hobby cannot succeed without the large collection of easily
accessible vintage software available yet there is no way to ?buy? most of it today. But,
we would also not expect or would we pay 1980s retail prices. I know some generous
copyright owners have allowed unrestricted use of their old software, like Roy Soltoff
from Misosys, but many others have not or have disappeared. I?m fairly new to the hobby
so maybe this has already been hashed out years ago. Just wondering what the community
thinks.
My opinion is that people should not try to pretend that their actions are legal when
they are not. While I support work to preserve things, we really need to get permission
from copyright owners before just letting thing out freely.
I know DEC made a general permission to copy and distribute out-of-print manuals. They
also made some software freely available. I believe pretty much all PDP-8 software is in
there. Some restricted distributions of PDP-11 software was also made available, but the
majority of PDP-11 software is still under copyright and with no permission to
redistribute (DEC sold it).