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Comment by zanderwohl | Hacker News Reader

There's a book of BASIC software I have. I'd like to publish the programs online. I've tried to contact the author, but he's dead. I tried to contact the publisher, but they were acquired. I tried to contact the acquiring publisher, but they went out of business 20 years ago. The trail is cold there, and I imagine it's nearly impossible to figure out who owns the rights now.

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Archive.org is full of copyrighted software without known authors. I know it because i'v found a lot of Pocket PC & Palm software from studios/companies that don't even exist anymore.

It's not ideal but it's better than losing it.

Those are either "flotsam" or "derelict", definitively not "pirated".

Upvoted for use of the correct terms from marine law. Nice.

Someone else mentioned archive.org, check to see if they have a copy of it already - if not, you can always send it to them. They've got a full archival copy of all Nintendo 64 games (and others) so they seem to have some kind of legal protections / exemptions.

They're relying on the DMCA liability shield by allowing user uploaded files and removing them upon request by a the copyright holder - and then someone else uploads the same file.

At that point, I'd publish them: nobody's going to come after you, either.

Publish first and ask for forgiveness later

what's the title/author or some other identifying info?

"Methods of Orbit Determination for the Microcomputer" by Dan Boulet.

I think I found a PDF scan once, though even with OCR it wasn't exactly copy-pastable into a BASIC interpreter. I'd like to clean up the programs and put them on github, or something. Might end up just re-implement the algorithms (which are explained in the book), because there's no copyright on algorithms.

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