Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

This is a cautionary tale for preservationists. My current preservation project is still not open because we are very slowly reviewing the code to make sure we don't accidentally include any IP when we open the source code. The real things that get you are similar to what happened here: codecs, graphics libraries, and a really big one to look out for is fonts. It'd be great if there was a scanner that could detect this stuff, but unfortunately, the scanning tools out there tend to go the other way like Black Duck: they detect open source code, not closed source.

I suppose it could be done, like those plagiarism databases used for academic work. Security would need to be tighter though. It's a hard thing if the source code needs to be protected I suppose.

The thing is, the vast majority of graphics libraries from 1992 the IP owner no longer cares about, and the code usually has nearly zero commercial value.

I wish more were brave enough to just publish it with an open license, and then if the owner complains you take it down and rewrite.

Any damages for distributing 30 year old source code are hopefully in the single-digit-dollars range anyway.

Unpopular opinion: preservationism shouldn't care about licensing and legal nonsense.

Because what is the point if something is distributed in a restrictive license, can't be preserved and then gets lost to time? Also, licensing is to avoid distribution, modification or outright copying by competitors; preservation is completely orthogonal to those concerns. It is to avoid losing a piece of craft to the sands of time. There is no reason laws should have power over anything in perpetuity.

As seen in other spaces, pirates ignoring the "law" will provide the greatest service to humanity.

The problem is you'll get crushed by legal fees in the meantime.

Completely incorrect. This work is being done under a non-profit, and whether or not the original owners care is irrelevant. Doing this would immediately open the non-profit to litigation and endanger the entire project. Just because we don't think anyone cares doesn't mean we won't get sued.

This project is preserving the source code around a distributed chat system from the year 2000, the E programming language, and the first real usage of JSON. Outside of those aspects, it's not about preserving fonts and proprietary code.

You are literally suggesting that we take proprietary, copyrighted code and release it under an open source license with no standing, rights, or ownership. It's insane to even suggest this. If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes.

When we want to open source proprietary code, we work with the rights holders. This code was all given to us under such an agreement, and the agreement ONLY covers the code owned by the people who built this thing. The deal was contingent on us not opening any of the code the original owners didn't own, as that would ALSO incur risk for them.

but if courts gave out damages of $10 for this sort of offence (taking into account the very low commercial value of the IP stolen), then very few people would even bother pursuing it in court.

Courts do not do that. The people suing would offer up a big old list of damages into the millions and then negotiate down from there to something like 6 figures AND the loser covering the court costs. The American legal system is completely broken, and amounts to two people piling up money, then the one with the bigger stack wins both stacks of money. This is completely untenable for a non-profit to even think about, let alone to incur the risk.

>preservationism shouldn't care about licensing and legal nonsense.

If it is reasonable that someone needs to preserve something because it has been abandoned, then the thing should automatically be in the public domain.

If you are not actively using IP for a reasonable amount of time, any patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc should be permanently expired.

This fixes problems with patent trolls too: you effectively would not be able to own a patent unless you were using it in your business.

Great idea except it won't make anyone money. Therefore it will never happen. Copyright law in America is not based on good ideas, reasonability, or even preservation. They are based on profit. Your idea is great, but we do not live in a world where good ideas matter at all. Only money matters here, and this idea will not make anyone money.

> There is no reason laws should have power over anything in perpetuity.

Laws are simply rules chosen and enforced by a given society. Having power over things is what they do. (Also, "in perpetuity" seems untrue, as all copyright expires eventually.)

You clearly disagree with the laws (and I'm inclined to support you there), but what is special about preservation that it should automatically override the will of society? Nearly all the combined work of humanity has been "lost to time," and society seems pretty okay with that.

I have the same problem..

I have been trying to preserve a game engine which has had an important following. But there has just been so many hands in the code, there is a lot of trepidation of the risk it could open the companies up too. Not sure how to progress from here.

You're focusing on the wrong part.

That argument is almost entirely about the length of copyright, and you're dismissing that with a quick "eventually". It's not about trying to "override" the intent of copyright.

Also copyright has a clear purpose, and the purpose is to promote culture and science, not to help things get lost. When works that people care about get lost, that's a flaw not a feature.

Email me at alex@themade.org and we can chat about options and methods. I've done this a bunch and we can usually figure out a way to meet the needs and keep risk at bay, but we will need to talk to the original rights holders, even if the thing was sold off 5 times to new companies. Usually, when I cold call the head of legal about this type of thing, they have absolutely no idea what IP I am talking about, even when their company owns it 100%, and this usually helps a lot to get them to open up. "We own what? Oh, and a museum wants to work with us? Cool!"

>> The people suing would offer up a big old list of damages into the millions and then negotiate down from there

You're assuming an awful lot with this.

- No defendant is going to negotiate a settlement out of court. They would force you to hire an attorney and force this to a trial because of how absurd it is.

Then you would be left with other major issues:

- One that any IP law firm would take a case like this on to begin with.

- The little upside for any firm litigating a case where the software is 30+ years old, effectively abandoned and has little if any resell value.

- Then even if some firm did want to take a swing at it, getting this in front of a judge who would even consider the case would be a huge hurdle as well. We're not even considering having to deal with a jury trial either which would also be even harder to win.

- Even if the defendant refused to negotiate pre-trial, and you somehow managed to finagle yourself into a civil bench or jury trial, trying to convince anybody that the plaintiff has somehow sustained financial damages on 30+ year old software that is no longer being used and has no resale value is almost impossible.

The US courts are not perfect, but these kinds of cases rarely see the inside of a court room and for good reason.

> If it is reasonable that someone needs to preserve something because it has been abandoned, then the thing should automatically be in the public domain.

Yeah, you go ahead and get that through every Western government. We'll fix the rest.

> but what is special about preservation

Because it's the only thing that will be left of us in 100, 500, 1000, 10000 years. Whatever we care to preserve today will be what will be left to our descendants. It always matters more than the profits of some company today that won't be around in 10, 20, 100 years. And before you try to argue that not everything is valuable, that's fucking not up to you to decide for our descendants.

> Nearly all the combined work of humanity has been "lost to time," and society seems pretty okay with that.

Works that were lost through things like war, conflict, migration, etc. Not through conscious choice. Copyright is a deliberate decision to prevent the collective preservation of our modern culture in favour of enriching corporations and the handful of people who own them. But that doesn't make it moral or right. And "society being okay with it" doesn't make it okay either.

> Nearly all the combined work of humanity has been "lost to time," and society seems pretty okay with that.

Pre-digital age, preserving the combined work of humanity was actually quite difficult. The cost to preserve everything outside of "obviously important" artifacts would've been preventative (or even impossible) for society as a whole.

I believe many (if not most) folks native to the digital age believe that digital artifacts should be preserved indefinitely by default - as the cost in doing so is comparatively trivial - and laws in democratic nations will catch up to that.

OK, so my non-profit with a budget of about $200,000 a year is now expected to lawyer up and take on this risk, where some random company can just sidle up to us, sue us for X, and automatically win because we cannot possibly afford a lawyer to even respond to their litigation?

I love how utterly diconnected from reality HN comments are. Y'all seem to think that just because you can rationalize something on paper that we should all just go out and do the thing because the laws are "Stupid." If the world ran like HN thought it did, we'd have no copyright laws, no patents, and infinite free legal advice and services. Yeah, yer right, maybe we could get a sympathetic judge or get the case tossed. After we spend $100,000 on lawyers to get there. Oh, the prosecution would have to pay our legal fees you say? Great, now I'm out $100,000 waiting on the appeal, and it could take years for them to pay up. That's like giving them a $100,000 loan with 0 interest and no defined closing date.

And what's even the upside? I ruined my non-profit so I could spuriously open source some random crap I don't even want to preserve. I have the binaries already, I don't need to recompile. But hey, no one is using this stuff right? Fuck the law!

The world does not work this way. If a lawyer shows up and wants to kill a small non-profit, they can do it in a day, very easily. They don't even need the courts, they just have to sue you and then bomb you with 50,000 pages of evidence. This is a REAL tactic. How do you counter that without paying a lawyer to look at all 50,000 pages? The key is to not give them a reason to do so. You know, by not breaking the fucking law.

Just because the whole is more or less abandoned (although I still use winamp, currently running a build from Dec 21, 2022), doesn't mean the licensed parts are.

If the rights holders of the licensed bits haven't abandoned them, then it's not really fair to distribute them without their consent.

This. I cannot believe people are telling me to just open everything. It's nuts. Imagine if someone found your personal code and just decided to open it without your permission or knowledge!

Hey I agree 100%. We live in a time and place where we could put about 10-Refridgerators-worth of computer and storage into the basement of every library in the world, and fill those drives with every book, painting, movie, song, etc... EVRYTHING all in one place, replicated around the world a million times over..

We could do this. The technology exists. But we, as humans, as a society and as a race of beings, have collectively decided that we will not do this: It doesn't make anyone any money.

For the first time in history, we could store all of human knowledge in a safe replicable way, world wide, for everyone. But we specifically choose not to do this.

It's not a great idea, because law and policy are designed to privilege makers rather than takers. It's a subversive degenerate kind of morality to argue that things belong to the people who desire to consume them.

My personal code isn't licensed, so there is nothing that stops you from doing that if you get your hands on my hard drive. What has licensing got to do with it?

Also, we're not talking about personal code either, but something that is arguably a product humanity, or a part thereof, would want to preserve for posterity.

Lastly, no one is telling you to open anything. I am saying that if someone decides something you have created need to be preserved, they should go ahead. You can protest, you can sue, the point is it shouldn't stop anyone from trying. Which doesn't apply to this case, as the owner of Winamp actually wanted to make it open source.

OK, but again, people are telling me to take code I do not own the rights to, and to release it under an open source license. That's 100% illegal. This is the equivalent of me taking a Stephen King novel and pasting it into a webpage and attaching a Creative Commons license. That does NOT make the Stephen King novel open source. It just gets me in trouble and sued.

And the license matters. We're talking about something owned by a company somewhere, legally. Humanity's concerns don't matter in business and legal affairs. As I stated above, I agree that we should be able to save everything. But this has nothing at all to do with what's good for humanity. This is about money and copyright law.

Also, OK, your personal code is not licensed. Great, now I can take it and license it myself, copyright it myself, and then sue you for hosting it in your github account. Hey, I'd be in the wrong, but if I lawyer up I can just win by spending money and waiting you out. This is the world we live in. It's not good, but it's reality.

Are you willingly ignoring the Internet Archive which is exactly doing that, and is not a for-profit operation?

We need more of those, agreed, but it makes no sense saying "no one is doing that."

At least in the US, loser doesn't pay count costs for the opposing party.

No, I am not ignoring them. I know Archive very well. They do not preserve copyrighted content deliberately, it just gets uploaded, and when no one comes and complains it stays up. They remove things ALL the time. All of the Atari 2600 games from Atari itself, for example. Atari's current owners showed up and asked Jason to take those down, and he did. And he thanked them for the privilege and said they were very nice.

I ADORE Archive. But guess what, they're being sued into the ground over doing EXACTLY what we all want them to do: preserving things. If anything, this absolutely 100% proves my point: we have 1 example of a modern Library of Alexandria, and it is in danger because someone is upset they didn't get paid. This is even more than choosing as a society not to save information and our culture. This is being outright HOSTILE towards the idea.

This is entirely within the realm of the judge to do. They do it fairly frequently as punishment to people who bring bad law suits and lose.

> My personal code isn't licensed, so there is nothing that stops you from doing that if you get your hands on my hard drive

This is not true. You can't redistribute someone else's IP without a license from the owner.

> If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes.

The Windows NT 4 source code exists in multiple public repos on GitHub, and the one from the first Google result has been there for at least four years.

preservationism allows you to bypass "legal nonsense"? That's some entitlement you have. So basically, laws don't matter to you. People's life work don't matter? It's ok for you to take what somebody created in the name of preservation. I bet you wouldn't be saying this if you created and released something that you rely on as your income.

Damn, I wonder what book you read to make you so smart?

...and the ones for later versions are easily found on GitHub too --- GitHub, which is now owned by Microsoft.

On the one hand, great, but on the other, that's how much (little) they care about Windows as a source of revenue.

The copyright clause of the US constitution, at least, is explicit that the artifice of temporary monopoly for copyright holders exists for the benefit of society as a whole, not (supposedly) for the rightsholders themselves. The benefit for rightsholders (who are only sometimes the 'makers' anyway) is merely instrumental.

It's the notion that IP is about protecting some kind of natural right that is a perversion, both historically (evinced in such language as the copyright clause) and ethically (I assert).

Justine is an impressive hacker, several of whose projects have made their way to the front page of this site before. She's plenty smart and that's plain to see.

Calling her stupid isn't a good way to show her (or anyone) that she's wrong about this.

If you're willing to take on such an economical risk, why don't you pony up the money and start serving the content?

> OK, but again, people are telling me to take code I do not own the rights to, and to release it under an open source license.

Who is telling you that? Literally no one. In my original comment, the preservationist is NOT the author, as it's the author that is liable to be sued by releasing proprietary material.

In my comment, the preservationist is a third-party that should NOT be concerned with such matters, even if being forbidden by copyright law. Imagine the Internet Archive, which already operate this way, and I applaud, because the service they offer is better than if they had to respect all legal nonsense.

No one is telling you to do anything with YOUR code, and code you are legally liable for. No one is putting a pistol to your head, so I don't get why you are being so defensive to my admittedly unpopular opinion. Do whatever you want.

In which country? What if the owner has passed?

Efen if the owner has passed, you can't still legally copy around The Twilight Zone from the 50's in the US.

In my country it's legal to do so -if there's no profit- on media, but not for propietary software with sharing restrictions.

As the video games people know, piracy is preservation and preservation nearly always requires "piracy". It's very clear from the way the Internet Archive works that pre-emptively taking a copy without permission is the only way to guarantee that copies actually exist.

> You are literally suggesting that we take proprietary, copyrighted code and release it under an open source license with no standing, rights, or ownership. It's insane to even suggest this. If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes.

Yeah, legal preservation efforts will probably never get that. The torrent is still out there if you just want to look at it, though.

I agree and privilege is one of the ways you solve that.

Like the privilege of being less bound to engage in survival and political struggles. Evolution produced a world where if you want something, you have to take it. Makers aren't good at taking things because they're too busy making. The natural order is that makers would be marked for deletion, which is how it was for million of years before economies came into being that could support them. Since we know that life is good for everyone when stuff gets made, society is better off as a whole when it goes out of its way to support its makers, since giving makers more means they'll make more. OTOH if you lift up takers they'll just use it to take more.

The greatest most successful takers all know this, which is why many of them become philanthropists. Since there's not much point being a taker if there's nothing left to take. Once you've taken everything, the only way you can take more is by getting makers to make more. The supreme takers also set up things like governments, which claim dominion over all the makers and punish all the little takers who try to take from them. The little takers of course weep and wail about why the makers get a special set of rules, but that's where they get it wrong, because rather than being angry at the makers, the little takers should be modeling themselves after the supreme takers.

In modernity, the set of rules that the supreme takers put in place hundreds of years ago to protect the makers included things like intellectual property. However those rules are just that, arbitrary rules, and they don't cover up the underlying reality of what they sought to accomplish, which is privilege. If those rules don't work anymore, then the system will simply do something else to achieve its goals, which include elevating the universe to a higher state of existence and creating a better life for everyone.

I see what you're saying now. Your brief analysis has a lot in common with analyses of class conflict and progress that are common in Marxism, though with some stark differences from many as well (e.g., pessimism about the likelihood of self-conscious class activity for makers, no indication of the possibility or goal of a "makers' state" or classless society, maybe a more whiggish or teleological notion of dialectical progress than is fashionable in contemporary Marxism).

Not exactly how I see things, but insightful and concisely put. Thanks for taking the time to write it out!

I don't have a horse in any race, so I aim to be descriptive rather than prescriptive in my analysis, and I make an effort to choose neutral language that will resonate with people from many backgrounds and beliefs. I'm glad you felt my analysis shared common themes with Marxism. I've studied them and know a lot about them. I also hope capitalists would find things to feel inspired about in my words too.

> You are literally suggesting that we take proprietary, copyrighted code and release it under an open source license with no standing, rights, or ownership. It's insane to even suggest this. If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes.

What's isane is that you are not legally allowed to release code that hasn't had any commercial value whatsoever for ages or where it takes a full legal team to even find out who might "own" the rights. Copyright is positively bonkers.

Ancient Windows NT code being available hardly threatens Microsoft's revenue from Windows sales.

Stop doing drugs.

Civil disobedience is a good start.

Except "once it has been abandoned" is often too late because the source code/artwork/whatever has been lost by then. We need to make sure that things can be and will be archived before that.

> Humanity's concerns don't matter in business and legal affairs.

Then it's only fair for humans to not concern themselves with business and legal affairs.

Entitlement is thinking everyone in the world should have their speech restricted because the business model you want relies on a legal fiction.