Right, it is an iMac at my home behind an ADSL line. It's not really made for Hackernews size traffic. Interested persons might come back later, when the traffic died down. Typically Lisp Machines are only interesting for a few persons - so the average traffic is not really high.
You might be surprised at the interest something like this could generate if more people saw it. I can imagine a lot of things that people might want to do with these images. Not just the obvious historical interest, but I can imagine even stranger things, like it showing up as prior art for some patent. Don't laugh. I forget which computer, but I remember reading about how someone brought out a (working!) computer from the early 80s as a demonstration at trial. Makes me think I should see if that 8088 of mine still works or not....
Anyhow, please put them on a photo sharing site somewhere and consider putting them on Flickr/Picasa/whatever and giving them a CC license. I was tempted to mirror them myself until I saw the 'Terms of use: no crawlers, no wget, no site copying, use of pictures and text only with permission. No excessive rss feed checking.' bit at the bottom.
I'm at -3 and you're at 9. I feel deeply ashamed on behalf of Hacker News for your aggressive ignorance of copyright law. Hacker News, you're usually better than this.
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A screenshot is a document like a photograph or essay or article; it's not a physical object. Cars and iPhones are not copyrighted. Software and software UIs and documents mechanically reproducing them are.
Tell me, do you think the copyright on the text in a software UI just magically goes away because it's a screenshot? How about the icons? Or the fonts? Or any images? What if the software is displaying a photograph or book? Did you just discover a way to make anything under the sun public domain? (An amazing discovery!)
I apologize if my question came off as presumptuous and/or snarky. My question was genuine. I assumed from the up-votes that my question's underlying basis was indeed correct.
Clearly, taking a photograph of an art work does not automatically create a copyright free version of the art. Nor does scanning a book.
Just to clarify: A photograph wherein a copyrighted image appears but is not the focus of the image might likely classify as fair use, I assume?
Modders, please upvote parent and downmod my previous comment.
> Just to clarify: A photograph wherein a copyrighted image appears but is not the focus of the image might likely classify as fair use, I assume?
It might, but there you are getting into vagaries of fair use. Dialogue, music, trademarked goods - all these things can creep into a video or a photograph and taint it with derivativeness. (Is there a trademarked Coca-Cola prominent in your photograph? You may be in trouble. Is there a TV in the corner playing _The Simpsons_? Lessig gives an example where copyright-clearing a few seconds of that TV crippled a documentary.)
For example, a sculpture is copyrighted and photographs thereof derivatives & copyrighted, except in Germany which has specially granted the photographer protection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama
Your point is well-taken, but I think that Symbolics is now defunct? Granted, the copyrights don't vanish, but who knows where they transferred to, if anywhere.
The thing is, if these screenshots are interesting, they'll spread from HN to blogs to the programming subreddit, and your iMac will just keep failing.
Even just an archive of these uploaded somewhere with a server would make them accessible.
I think you might be underestimating the click-happy masses (myself included) who will happily pump the middle mouse button to queue up some even potentially interesting reads!
