Subject: [stella] ethics From: Glenn Saunders <krishna@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 23:57:16 -0700 (PDT) |
On Thu, 11 Sep 1997, Nick S Bensema wrote: > That's why they call them "pirate" web sites? Stealing from companies with no web presence is one thing. The usual rationalization of "they don't care, and they don't even know" are common. But in my FAQ and elsewhere I have already stressed the point that the Starpath CD contents remain copyrighted works and are not to be spread around without the consent of Bridgestone and/or Atari. Thankfully I haven't seen any more Starpath sites after Bob graciously took down the WAVs, but it bothers me that Polo is up there given the above. Russ went out of his way to clear its release on the CD, and he couldn't include Wizard, and in return the game is now JUST another pirate .BIN. Piraters really hurt their own cause by doing this sort of thing. My hat's off to anyone who attempts to sell a commercial 2600 product. I certainly wish you luck that your cart sales don't go down the crapper because of piracy. I once though of a software "wrapper" to be used to prevent piracy. It's something to think about. Most shareware requires a registration key to enable its full features. If you wrapped your .BIN in a special version of makewav that contains a decrypter with registration-key encryption, then you could enable your copy (permanently) and when you double click on it, it would then automatically load into your Supercharger. You'd never get a BIN to copy. It would also link to your drive so that if you attempted to copy it it would go dead. Such a game would, of course, not be playable on emulators, at least not unless you packed the emulator in with it, which would be bulky. Piero should consider going that way if he makes a 6K enhanced version of Oystron. The game is commercial quality and I see no reason why he shouldn't ask to be paid for his hard work. Noone is going to go bankrupt from having to keep up with the constant flow of new 2600 software. > Indeed, some of the source code on my web site was reverse-engineered > in-house at Avalon Hill. Freeway, I think. I believe in breaking the letter of the law for the greater good of the community as far as source code is concerned. That's a different story. Few people even know how to recompile source code so it's not really the same thing as people who just want to play the FN games spreading around .BINs. Those who are interested in source code are those who want to write for the 2600, and that's what's important to me. And the fact is that there _ARE_ stock ways to do certain tricks on the 2600 that are not copyrighted by anyone. Maybe someone is recognized as the inventor, but others took the ideas and noone was brought to court for it. It was acceptable to do this--to a point of course. The Dragster kernel, for instance, can only work when it is done exactly as David Crane did it, and after a while it was used a lot throughout the industry (with some variations, like single line res in Dragonstomper). They took code from eachother and they had to, because the 2600 _needed_ these tricks to survive, so if there was only one way to do it, you HAD to to it that way, and I don't really see that as piracy as much as it is a "convergent evolution" of programming. These tricks became the "Ever updated basic playstation C library files" of their era. I wouldn't want people to have to reinvent the wheel when they will just come to the same conclusions. Learn from the masters when you can, then come out with something that builds on it and adds something new. Being able to do a graphical trick is one thing. Making a game out of it is another. -- Archives updated once/day at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsubscribing and other info at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/stella.html
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