To Al Kossow at bitsavers

[Peter Cetinski]

> On Nov 15, 2015, at 2:01 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Nov 15, 2015, at 12:00 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at Update.UU.SE> wrote:
>> 
>>> ...
>>> Personally?  I think the rightest way is to eliminiate the legal
>>> fiction called "intellectual property", as a good-sounding experiment
>>> that has failed.  It is not producing the effects it was put in place
>>> to produce and it is producing a lot of other, ill, effects.
>> 
>> Agree. I think the whole concept of intellectual property is weird. Calling some thought in your head a "property" have strange implications. If I say some words that makes you think of something, can I then make you violate my intellectual property? When if you thought of the same idea independently? How did you violate my intellectual property in that case?
>> 
> 
> There are a lot of diffent ways to approach copyright questions.
> 
> The second is to use what is readily available but stop when told to.  This is what google seems to do; it also seems to be the bitsavers approach.
> 

The “second” approach is what we are using for the TRS-80 Model II archive that Mark mentioned (https://github.com/pski/model2archive <https://github.com/pski/model2archive>).  While we have received explicit permission from copyright owners that we can determine, such as Scott Adams for his Model II versions of the adventure games, the rest is made available until someone says “please take this down because I own it and don’t want it distributed”.  It seems to be the best balanced approach for rescuing the software from oblivion while also respecting authorship of no longer commercially available software.