I don't think there would be a legal basis here. If I sell a pen, I can't claim ownership of the things people write with it, no matter what EULA I make people sign. The same holds for a Xerox machine. And similarly it holds for a tool to copy bits or flux transitions.
Not quite. As I understand it, the hardware rips disks and encodes them in proprietary SPS flux image formats (.IPF, .STREAM, and .DRAFT) subject to a very weird license agreement.[1] SPS does not assert ownership of the encoded content but does assert that content encoded with their software can not be used for commercial purposes. I suspect this “bit coloring” is at the root of why the Internet Archive made the decision to no longer accept Kryoflux based images and why it is not a good candidate for archival purposes.
Comments
I don't think there would be a legal basis here. If I sell a pen, I can't claim ownership of the things people write with it, no matter what EULA I make people sign. The same holds for a Xerox machine. And similarly it holds for a tool to copy bits or flux transitions.
Not quite. As I understand it, the hardware rips disks and encodes them in proprietary SPS flux image formats (.IPF, .STREAM, and .DRAFT) subject to a very weird license agreement.[1] SPS does not assert ownership of the encoded content but does assert that content encoded with their software can not be used for commercial purposes. I suspect this “bit coloring” is at the root of why the Internet Archive made the decision to no longer accept Kryoflux based images and why it is not a good candidate for archival purposes.
[1] https://www.kryoflux.com/download/LICENCE.txt
It's a shame they're doing this.
But at least, there is hope that fully OSS+OSHW solutions will effectively replace it.
What they're doing is certainly not magic. Warpers existed in the 90s already.
It doesn't matter if it's legally enforceable.
All that matters is that they tried.