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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

What is Microsoft being defended from here, by these laws which prohibit this? This isn't a pirated work. This isn't distributing keys: they explicitly say you need to get your own key.

I'm honestly not sure your claims are at all valid, that the laws you are describing are the ones protecting against awesome works like this. If they are, then what a shame that those laws would be so overbroad, would threaten & wreck such innocent & virtuous remix-culture, would deny the world any of their agency & enforce top down corporate control.

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> This isn't a pirated work.

Distributing software without the permission of the author is the definition of software piracy. This is literally software piracy.

The laws that prevent what you consider awesome work like this also prevent people from stealing your work. If we didn’t have these laws, we couldn’t have a software economy. It would be nearly impossible to make a living as a software engineer. The people who created these laws had the prudence to judge that the ability for programmers to securely make a living for their work is more important than the ability for programmers to take someone else’s work and do whatever they want with it.

That sounds reasonably accurate. It seems silly that software that protects itself from unauthorized use via a key would be entitled to such prohibitions. It seems silly software which is generally downloadable (such as windows10 here[1]) would be entitled to such restrictions. But yes, the corporations have rule.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

You updated your post to add this after I said I agree:

> Distributing software without the permission of the author is the definition of software piracy. This is literally software piracy.

It's disagreeable that you'd make such a drastic change under my feet.

So to update my previous stance, I there may be some technical ground but I think users have a right too, to archival, to exploration. Leaving the software with all copy protection intact & in an unusable state for a user is pretty obviously difference than the hard fast clear case you make this out to be. This is pretty obviously different. Technically it's probably not up to snuff but the law is probably not competent in technics & needs to reel itself in to maintain legitemacy.

There is significant public interest in being able to look at & understand & see our past. Microsoft doesnt wish to be a part of that past but I dont believe it grants them the right to make the world forget & become ignorant.

> If we didn’t have these laws, we couldn’t have a software economy. It would be nearly impossible to make a living as a software engineer.

Considering that this was made more than a decade after Microsoft stopped selling Windows XP, I fail to see how playing around with such abandonware would destroy software companies. What a ridiculous hyperbole.

If anything, it's a good example of IP laws being disproportionally in favor of IP holders. Microsoft is already one of the richest companies on the planet, how much more penny pinching must we bear?

> Microsoft is already one of the richest companies on the planet, how much more penny pinching must we bear?

You’re not entitled to Microsoft’s property regardless of the amount of money they have.

We are not talking about property here, we are talking about information. And it is not Microsoft's but belongs to everyone. Microsoft has only been granted a temporary monopoly over this information in order to incentivize them to create more.

'Piracy' is a moralizing metaphor created to liken copyright infringement to murderously violent plunder of physical goods.

You don't have to call anything piracy, if you don't buy into that propaganda project. You're welcome to instead use a label that encompasses all of the facts in this instance, like 'nominal copyright and trademark infringement', which acknowledges both the stances of the relevant laws and the fact that there's no material harm involved here.

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