The rant was rather unnecessary. In fact it almost caused me to fail to read your last paragraph which showed you do mean well at heart. Your rant, on a careless glance, almost sounded like you are accusing Peter Spada of being mindful of copyright issues.
I would think from the discussion of this thread, and the board in general, that it is clearly possible to keep Lemmings alive while being completely free of copyright issues. Indeed, I'd even daresay it sparked some creative musings, such as considering alternative character designs besides the same-old pixelated green-haired stick figures.
I believe most of us here, me included, probably "agree" with your rant to some extent, especially in action. Most of us have little qualms with Custlemm for example despite the fact that it is just a hacked version of the ONML binaries, and hence a pretty unambiguous copyright violation. Yet it's sitting happily on my computer and I have little intention of removing it anytime soon.
Yet at the same time, I do respect the law, and understand that while it is difficult to draw the balance between protection and overprotectiveness (with abandonware the archetypical example of where copyright laws are doing a great disservice as you noted), as long as the line is there, there will be a place for some form of copyright laws.
I could certainly turn your argument around and say that the same copyright laws that (theoretically) prohibits you from, say, using the original Lemmings graphics is enhancing creativity by forcing you to seek out alternative graphics designs of characters and settings.
So anyway, ahem, let's get back to
character design, shall we?
