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Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

There’s eventually going to be one question on the lips of everyone involved, though: is this legal? And the only real answer is nobody knows and really, nobody should care.

I can understand having an urge to preserve something that is in danger of decaying past recovery — I feel the same way when I see an interesting building or a classic airplane rotting away somewhere — but the usual course of action is to choose what you find most worth saving, purchase it from the owner, and restore your new possession. Any other course isn't legal, in most cases, and it isn't here either, in most cases. I care about that, and some of the game creators will care about it too.

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Here's the thing. A lot of the games being saved here are games that the original publishers/developers no longer care about - that or the original creators don't even exist anymore. That throws a large portion of Flash games into the gray area of abandonware, although that's a different discussion entirely.

This is actually a place where I differ with BlueMaxima (BlueMaxima is Flashpoint's creator and the writer of the article linked here.) Personally, if I were running the project I would remove a game if the original creator asked, simply out of respect for them.

However, I think that most of the staff involved with Flashpoint would disagree with me here. It is more of a "for now, just go go go and we'll worry about organizing everything and dealing with the repercussions later." There's a lot of Flash games out there to say the least and Flash being discontinued in 2020 leaves us limited time if we hope to save as much as possible.

If we care about legality when it comes to media preservation, more often than not works will end up lost or destroyed one day.

Today's pirates are tomorrow's historians.

That is true. Other people's rights are often an inconvenience.

It's there to limit publishing and distribution to only those with the legal document saying they can. It's more of a anti-right. In fact historically it was created for the purpose of censorship.

People have a right to the fruits of their labors. I don't care a tinker's mother about the history of copyright — the principle is simple, and copyright is a flawed protection of that right.

Though it may be used by industry on some occasion to protect someone's ability to profit. Copyright and the right to the fruits of your labor are not the same thing.

In cases like this disregarding one isn't equivalent to infringing on the other.

I expressed the contrast between copyright and the right it attempts to protect above. Notice that I didn't say anything about profiting from the fruit of their labors, but the right to them, no matter whether they choose to profit or let it rot. It's just as much an infringement to preserve it without their permission as it is to sell it.

Yep that's the definition of copyright. Seems like more of a anti-right as it's about limiting others rights.

I see the problem here: you don't know what a right is.

Say you somehow have advance knowledge of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Is it legal to steal as many books as you can from the Library prior? Of course not. Is this the only way to save unique volumes from irrevocable destruction when you have no way to convince the librarians of its imminent fate, or even to contact them at all? Yes.

And then return them to the owner once the emergency is over? Yes. I don't see that happening here. What you describe is an emergency response; what's happening here looks like looting.

(Edit: soften what could be read as an outright accusation.)

> And then return them to the owner once the emergency is over? Yes. I don't see that happening here.

The emergency is very far from over, they’ve only just begun the salvaging operation.

To clarify, I should have said, "I don't foresee that happening here." I predict, based on the attitudes the article expressed, that the writer has little interest in the owners of these games, and even less interest in their rights.

I think when it comes down to a conflict between an individual's property rights, and the entirety of future human culture having access to a work to learn from and build upon; I say fuck your individual property rights.

Especially in situations where a work is entirely digital, and preserving the work does absolutely no harm to the owner of said work.

You see, that's how you discourage an innovator: if you let society benefit from his work to his detriment, he's likely to tell society to innovate without him and go get a nice office job.

Strongly disagree, at least in situations where the works are abandoned, largely unmonetizable and on the verge of disappearance.

I believe that the risk of discouraging innovators who would be upset at the idea of their works existing in some form, years after their relevance is a reasonable trade off in comparison to the value that the sum collection of these works could provide to the future.

Especially when you consider that every innovator working today is building off of the preserved knowledge of past generations who's works have similarly fallen into the public domain. Disney didn't have to cut a check to Shakespeare Holdings, LLC when they made The Lion King; for example.

That's not to say that I am an anti-IP absolutist in this regard. I think that the ideas of copyrights and patents aren't inherently bad. I think it makes pragmatic sense to offer a temporary monopoly on works. I just think that the balance point between serving the creator and serving society needs to be evaluated.

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