even if you had the power to change law, making something legal won't make it any more right, and vice versa. and more importantly, orthogonal to each other.īy orthogonal I mean that given a choice, deciding whether it is right, should be done independently of whether it's legal or easier/harder. To be more exact, many people here seem to be incapable to tell right/wrong from legal/illegal or taking the easy/hard choice. That line of thought can get pretty dark pretty fast. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" is my favorite Star Trek quote, but I don't think it applies in this situation as it was intended as a motivation for a personal decision to sacrifice, not to force someone else to sacrifice. If I find someone's wallet I'd return it if possible, as I'd want someone to return mine. If the positions were reversed I'd want my property returned. Maybe you could claim some type of fair use but it wouldn't be transformative so I can't see how.Īs for morality, I apply the golden rule: if someone found the code I wrote for a groundbreaking piece of software, and I didn't want to open source it, I'd really like for them to respect my wishes and return it.Įdit: I'm unable to reply further, but to clarify I was referring to the maxim of reciprocity or "do unto others". It probably isn't strictly a legal obligation to return the physical disc barring stolen property stuff, but it would definitely be illegal to redistribute copyrighted code without a license to do so. My heart skipped a beat when we finally got a native OS X client update that wasn't a Carbon app - that was really going above and beyond in my opinion, and their support was great for it despite the hiccups on release. They've been real champs about these older games, like Diablo II getting updates. There is still a vested interest in protecting this game from Blizzard's point of view, and it sucks, but in this case they have a fairly good justification and have been holding up their end of the bargain (re-releasing) I would love to have it to, but it's hard to fault Blizzard here for anything but "hey it would be really nice if you." They're reviving support for the game, updating it for modern machines to receive, and making the previous iteration accessible. You can argue the reasons, I suppose, but this seems in line with exactly what copyright is supposed to be protecting here. In this particular and narrow instance, it does seem like Blizzard is making good on going back and updating and maintaining the old code.
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