How to deal with preservation of software with unknown author and licence?

Some even very old educational software is still of value today and it is worth preserving.

The problem is that nowadays the licence rights are very important topic, but 20 or 30 years ago it was not considered important for many programmers, who have made such software peaces, don't placing any licence or even their names. But how can you tell if such program, found in some archive in school workshop was intentionally made without credits, or such credits were removed by someone?

Can the archiving such software for preservation theoretically and practically violate someone's intellectual or material rights? Note that such software is to be considered coming from unknown source, because no one is going no to tell, where such program come from, and who have copied them? It may be some student's work or pirated software of some company who doesn't exist anymore.

lechlukasz

• software
• law
• copyright

Comments

• gmcgath: This is an example of what's known in the general case as "orphan works," works that may be in copyright but to which there are no known claims. It's a problem that big institutions have wrestled with, without much success.