Re: [stella] Piracy -- copyrights expired?

Subject: Re: [stella] Piracy -- copyrights expired?
From: "John Saeger" <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 08:41:09 -0800
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Cracknell <crackers@xxxxxxxx>
To: stella@xxxxxxxxxxx <stella@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sunday, January 11, 1998 9:41 PM
Subject: Re: [stella] Piracy -- copyrights expired?


>In article <34B97C6E.F331133B@xxxxxxxx>, you wrote:
>>John Saeger wrote:
>>>
>>> Maybe the copyrights on the original 2600 game cartridges have expired
by
>>> now.  The original games weren't software, they were game cartridges
>>
>>Depends... Have any of the authors been dead 75 years yet?
>~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~
^~


(---snip---)

>The statute of limitation on copyright violation is 3 years. If a work is
>pirated and not dicovered for 3 years or the copyright owner takes no
>legal actions to stop it within that time , then there is nothing the
>copyright owner can do about it

(---snip---)


Now this is really interesting.  The .bin files have been available on the
net for at least 3 years by now.  So their free now right??

But anyway, that wasn't my point...  Here's a quote from The Copyright Book
by William S. Strong:

By an amendment to the Copyright Act in 1984, Congress granted a truncated
form of copyright protection to the masks, so called, that are used to
create semiconductor chips. It was felt that these masks, being essentially
unitarian works, would not receive protection without specific statutory
language.

A mask lies somewhere between a design and a stencil, or perhaps more
accurately it is both.  In it the intricate circuitry of a semiconductor
chip is cut, and through it laser light etches the circuitry design on the
chip's silicon.  Because of its inherently unitarian character, Congress has
granted mask works a shorter term of protection and a narrower scope of
rights than other works.  And interestingly, Congress has specifically
authorized anyone to use the technology contained in a mask work, provided
he obtains it by reverse entineering and does not merely copy the mask.

(end of quote)

Anyway, the labels, documentation, packaging etc. are protected by standard
copyright law, but the silicon chips that are inside the game cartridges may
be in a different category.  Anything created prior to 1984 may not be
entitled to protection at all, anything after that gets 5 years. Why else
would Atari have encrypted cartridges on later models than the 2600?  (I
forget if it was the 5200 or the 7800)  To make them more difficult to
reverse engineer.  My guess is they knew that they were unprotectable.

John Saeger


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