From: "Al Kossow": Tuesday, October 02, 2012 7:47 AM I don't think he knows us well enough to tell us these things in "private", either :-). Nor do I have an answer to his question, unless the special dispensation for "libraries" is relevant. Vince

But, "the guvmint" is ill-defined. Please don't forget this is an international mailing list. Fair dealing provisions are one of the aspects in which copyright law varies significantly between jurisdictions, and it's entirely possible that someone in jurisdiction ABC could entirely legally put up a disk image that would be a copyright violation if done in jursidction XYZ. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 2 October 2012 20:52, geneb <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote: It doesn't seem to be there any more! Does that mean my old BBS software has been archived in the Library of Congress? -- Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems: "The Future Begins Tomorrow" Visit us at: http://www.yoyodyne-propulsion.net -------- "I'd like to hold off judgement on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in. " General "Buck" Turgidson

I've never been fully clear on whether there is a "fair use" law regarding software (think that's what it was called) that allowed for a personal backup /copy for personal use. I've heard folks use it as their excuse on media like tapes, vhs and the argument about dvd encryption. -----Original Message----- From: Richard <legalize at xmission.com> Sender: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.orgDate: Tue, 02 Oct 2012 10:06:49 To: cctalk<cctalk at classiccmp.org> Reply-To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: Re: disk image server This raises an interesting question.... aside from popular freeware and open source repositories, are there *any* disk images that are legal? At best what I've observed is that they might live in a qausi-legal grey area. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book <http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline> The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org> The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals.classiccmp.org> Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

On Oct 2, 2012, at 12:06 PM, Richard wrote: Certainly. Where companies have issued a blanket license for the acquisition and use of their software, there's that. DEC's PDP-11 operating system library and the historical Unices are two good examples, though they were probably not all legal images to start with). - Dave