Subject: RE: [stella] Are 7800 demos legal??? From: "John Saeger" <john@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 14:47:00 -0800 |
I'm deferring technical questions to Eckhard Stolberg. All I can say is that I've seen it work. Russ Perry Jr wrote: > You're right -- you have every right to use that code while designing your > game. However, posting that part of the source/image, or selling games > including it would NOT be legal, in my opinion. Tricky distinction. I don't know. I think that in the absence of a license agreement you'd have to look at what common practice in the industry is, and what a reasonable expectation of having a development kit is. If you buy a compiler from Microsoft and use it to develop programs, the resulting programs typically have lots of Microsoft copyrighted library code in them. Microsoft typically gives you royalty free right to redistribute this stuff as needed. It's *fair use* of a development kit. So I think it's reasonable to link in some code from the dev card and distribute the product. Publishing source code may be a little trickier. For sure we can publish source code to to the original parts. The other stuff is more of a problem. One thing we can do is to publish directions on how to combine the legal demo source code with the object code of the complete demo that we publish so others can write their own demos. In fact it would be perfectly legal to write a program to turn the relevant portions of the object version of our demo into an include file to use with the source code that we legally publish. But I can't guarantee that demos written by other people are legal. At least not if they assemble them themselves. But I can't say for sure that they would be illegal either. If they publish source code, then for all practical purposes, we could do the assembly for them. That would be legal. But given that effectively anybody could easily end up with the complete source code anyway, it's seems to be a fairly pointless exercise to jump through these nit-picking hoops just for a technicality. I don't think it really matters. > Well, as someone else suggested, you never know if they might throw up > their hands and say "do what thou wilst". You know Russ, the more I think about it, the more I think maybe this already happened. I mean, this stuff used to be *top secret*. The only way to get to see it was to sign your life away. I didn't sign anything. As far as I know it was obtained legally in good faith and good money was paid for it. How is it possible that something that was so jealously guarded can now be bought on the open market? I think the *do what thou wilst* happened a long time ago at Atari long before Hasbro ever got involved. If this stuff was trade secret, and the cat got let out of the bag, then the cat's out of the bag. >From a practical standpoint, I don't think Hasbro really cares about this stuff. They're more interested in writing a new Pac-Man or something like that. So even if they could prove that they still have a proprietary interest in this stuff, it would not be worth their while to waste any time on it. But if we publish a demo, I think we'll put a notice to *use at your own risk*. > There's a problem with that too... The originator has a > copyright regardless, > but they'd have a hell of a time proving it. Hmmm... Well if the originator has a copyright regardless, then that would mean public domain documents are no longer possible. ;-) I think lack of notice used to mean it's public domain. These days, lack of notice doesn't mean anything. It *could* have a copyright. Or not. But I think you're right. At this point in time, it might be tough to prove one way or the other... John -- Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
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