art wrote:
A friend of mine wants to try out the AO program by Beazely.
The program is not in the commercial market now as it is not being
sold
He wants to make a copy of my disc to try something out that requires
AO
I suppose since it is not for sale which probably means copyrights are
now defunct

Copyright is (virtually)forever, regardless of any aspect of whether the
work was or is for sale or not.

One cannot, for instance, make a legal copy of an original (film) print
of Disney's "Snow White", if you happened to have such a thing, even
though Disney doesn't sell it (and never has, actually. prints are just
rented or loaned)


I don't see any reason to not acceed to his request.

Well, since its still covered by copyright, it wouldn't be either legal
or ethical to do so.


Ofcourse so few people pay for computor programs these days but I like
to do things right,
after all if a patent is abandoned then it is a free for all since
the advance of science cannot be stopped and it becomes freeware

Patents have a relatively short term (20 years now), and have a whole
aspect of "all infringers must be pursued", which does not apply in the
case of copyright. You do NOT have to purse all infringers of copyright
to keep the protection in force, and the term of copyright has been
extended over the years.. 50 years after the author's death, I think
(and Brian is still alive...)


Lest you be thinking of one of the "fair use" exceptions, you'd have a
very tough time justifying it for software. Same for the "library making
copies of out-of-print or hard-to-find books" exception.



Stanford University has an excellent site with summaries and gory
details on copyrights, particularly with respect to "fair use".

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

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Art