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Comment by maxton | Hacker News Reader

I think a better comparison would be the lover of an old e-book whose publisher has shut down their DRM validation servers wanting to be able to read the book again in the future.

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The thing with Abandonware/orphan works legislation is that a lot of the people most opposed to it aren't those you would think. Disney doesn't care that much. Their lawyers aren't going to forget to renew a copyright. Rather, it's various professional societies representing photographer, authors, etc. who figure that the individual creator or their estate will let copyright lapse through inaction and big media will come in and snatch up their work at no cost.

I'm definitely on board with copyright terms being too long and, in most cases, "abandonware" doesn't have a lot of value for the original creator anyway, but abandonware isn't primarily a big corp issue.

Interesting take on it, I hadn't thought of that angle. Maybe they could add some kind of non-commercial use clause (if they haven't already) to cover this case? ie. you can't swoop in and commercialize some indie preservation effort but you can host it and supply to others free of charge (or for the 'cost of distribution')?

The really weird thing about eBooks is that you're not really buying the book. It's more like giving you a license to view the book. You can't really resell an eBook, or a Steam game.

Just because it is currently like that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. You can still read physical books even after hundreds of years.

This I agree with!

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