-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Tuesday 2005-11-22 at 09:06 -0500, John Coldrick wrote:
I think this is all quite hypothetical. Given the nature of law, absolutely anything is *possible*
That's what I meant. There are precedents: the copyrights do expire, classical music, for instance.
The example of the company having endless critical docs in a proprietary format really just says two things: it's a good lesson for a company nowadays to be using an open format, and there's a market for programmers that can reverse-engineer file formats.
Very true. At least all file formats should be documented. But is not only software that matters, but hardware; for instance, the records of old NASA space missions are in magnetic media (tapes?), for which there are [almost] no readers now, or so I heard. Same thing can happen to digital libraries. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFDg2zhtTMYHG2NR9URAkwrAJ9mOcfOJsco9oPdrNgxchToR8cfVACaA2We iqoRS4pV95xwqo8I+7nARP0= =YbtM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----