[jakebasile]

Selfish for following the law and respecting the wishes of the authors of a work? Jesus, people are really performing some mental gymnastics to justify the hypothetical theft of property in this case in order to arrive at the conclusion that the finder is somehow being selfish.

[Dylan16807]

Sometimes, not most of the time but sometimes, the wishes of an author are bad for the public. In a hypothetical scenario where an author wants to destroy all traces of their work, it's a bad thing to help them.

And this is about the data, and possible copyright violations, not the theft of property. Him returning the physical disk is perfectly fine. So throw out that argument.

It's really very straightforward. No gymnastics.

[yomly]

Brahms destroyed a whole bunch of his works out of his own insecurity that they were not good enough. Brahms is now long dead but his (that were not destroyed) works live on.

[acuozzo]

> Selfish for following the law and respecting the wishes of the authors of a work?

Shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Fox_vault_fire

Happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_MGM_vault_fire

If something is truly culturally significant then it should be preserved regardless of the wish(es) of its author(s) and these two hyperlinks rather easily make the case that preservation requires distribution.

[corobo]

1937 and 1967? I'd hope Blizzard have figured out some sort of offsite backup in the past almost century.

[ue_]

>respecting the wishes of the authors of a work?

How do you know it is the wishes of the authors? Blizzard didn't write the software, individual programmers (labourers) did, working as a team. Though I'd be interested to know if there's any statement from the developers of Starcraft if they did or didn't want the code shared.