Re: Lets talk about the requesting of stuff on this forum
@4: Thanks for the insight. I am not in the US and this site is in the Netherlands, but I am quite sure that if the forum received a notice from a copyright owner, we'd gladly take the content down. After all, the notice would confirm the holder's continued interest. But I'm pretty confident this would never happen very often, if at all, because the nature of the content concerned is usually that it was once freely available and it has since simply disappeared from the Net, or it is something for which the requester already has the license of some kind which they otherwise couldn't exercise. It would I think be foolhardy to deny that this happens, for the most trivial of reasons, like somebody not having the right runtime installed, or needing to use an older version of a program for an older OS. From an ethical standpoint, I think causing the copyright holder in such extraordinary circumstances the small added inconvenience of filing a complaint is probably th e very least we can do. I am no lawyer, though, so maybe we should actually consult the site's administrators, who have the relationship with the web host that would act on any complaint received. In any event we will always refuse to promote piracy for its own sake and defend creators where we are aware that there are clearly legal avenues for getting the content. A general rule might be that if you can Google it, we won't tolerate discussion about distributing it on this board. We always err on the side of caution and do not simply assume commercial content is freely available simply because it can no longer be purchased since the author might still have a copyright interest in it. We generally require that the software be declared abandonware wherever possible, and use our best judgement (usually based on the extended length of time since last release or update) in other cases. I recall one instance where we linked to another page with some abandoned games on another ma instream site. As it happens, that game collection was ultimately later published as a mobile app, so maybe I should track that link down and purge it, and it's evidence that age is not always an indicator. In any case, as we cannot possibly claim to be the ultimate oracle on which obscure content may or may not still be available long after it was thought to be defunct, we are of course glad for any reports we get about content you think infringes, or discussion of it (please use the Report function for this). In general, we try to walk the fine line as best we can, and it's worked out just fine so far.
As for copyright in general, I think it is one of the few things we can reform for the better after Brexit. The EU copyright directives, even as amended by the most recent package of reforms, are still thoroughly corrupt--worse than the US DMCA on technical protection measures for instance (US trade representatives heavily lobbied, of course)--and there are far fewer exemptions. In the UK, our Personal Copying Exemption was overruled by the European Court of Justice, to the delight of copyright maximalists everywhere. Still, it is really not copyright I hate, as such, but this hard-line neoliberal interpretation of it. In itself, copyright is absolutely necessary.
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