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LostMyWords • yesterday at 6:35 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

It is often very difficult or even impossible to locate who currently owns the rights to some intellectual property in order to re-release it legally.[0]

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3053050/how-one-company-is-bring...


Replies

the_af • yesterday at 8:48 PM

Yeah, that's part of the copyright mess. It's partly described by Lawrence Lessig in his book "Free Culture" [1].

It seems petty to me that copyright holders (or their legal proxies) aggressively sought to shut down abandonware sites without any plan to make the software available in any shape. I mean, these were marginal pieces of software, no longer money earners, and the abandonware sites served as digital museums.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)