[NTLK] h*cks, kr*ks, SN

[Tony Kan]

Folks

A lot of this discussion revolves around the morality of the matter but not too
much about the technicalities of the applicable laws in this area.

Discussing the morality of it might be useful if we were designing the law for
the first time or we were entertaining notions of petitioning that a bill be
drafted to amend an extant law, but in this case I wonder if we have sufficient
familiarity with it to have a sensible debate.

There was a reference to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) earlier and
that it contained some exemptions for obsolete software and other classes of
software that might be relevant to this discussion.  I presume that exemption
means that copyright protection no longer applies?  Wikipedia's DMCA entry
refers to these exemptions too.  Since much of the software we are wanting to
preserve was written in the US, let's start with this piece of legislation.

Can anyone shed any light on where we can get a hold of the text of this
exemption so that we can see what we need to do to comply with it?

Warm regards

Tony Kan

Christchurch
New Zealand