Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

Is it safe to say we're in the middle of the Software Wars? The headlines have been littered with stories like this lately. From major open source contributors taking down their projects, to Apple, Adobe, and Blizzard.

It's only a matter of time until it's a critical piece of software that can cripple a nation or beleaguer it's people.

If you're looking for positives, maybe this will finally force people to rethink digital ownership.

It's serendipitous all these events are happening now for me personally. I was recently burned by a piece of very useful and well crafted software (closed source). I did a fresh install on my machine and went to find their website which to my dismay had completely disappeared! I followed whatever breadcrumbs were left and found a whole thing had happened while I wasn't paying attention where the copyright for this software was now in complete limbo and noone who had recently purchased a license could redownload it.

This is allegedly where the software exists now.

https://audiofile.engineering/

Which contains absolutely no trace of the program Myriad Pro.

This is the discussion from kvr about it.

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=525534

On the plus side I doubled down and learned SoX which I wrap up in some python now and it's fast, open source and others can develop on my efforts.

Same thing happened with Tridef. The company went under, didn't release a free version of the software, and now people who bought it legally have to resort to using a crack.

I've said it a few times, but it's worth repeating IMO: copyright is a deal, where a creator gets a time-limited monopoly in exchange for works entering the public domain.

If a company have arranged things so their work can't enter the public domain (eg DRM) then they should not get copyright protection, fundamentally it's wrong to get the benefit of copyright without giving up your work to the public domain.

This can be solved by a requirement to register an unhindered copy, whilst they're at it orphaned works should be made copyright free, IMO.

I'm glad to hear that others have the same opinion regarding software copyrights. I'd even go one step further and say that the source code must be included in that unhindered copy. Otherwise, the public's right to make derivative works from things in the public domain cannot be upheld.