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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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

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

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.

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

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