Funny, I was just about to post about the same thing. I work for a small
software development house, and I had a couple of minutes to talk with our
intellectual property attourney today, and I asked about the same things.
I would have liked to ask more, but he would have had to start billing me
$500 an hour =)
On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Greg Miller wrote:
> > >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
>
> > 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??
>
> Nope. But people who copied them 3 years ago can't be sued for it.
Yep. You are violating copyright every time you give or sell the stolen
software. A new infraction occurs each time someone obtains the stolen
software from the supplier, and the "statute of limitations" clock starts
ticking again.
> > But anyway, that wasn't my point... Here's a quote from The Copyright Book
> > by William S. Strong:
>
> > 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
>
> Correct, but the software is covered by standard copyright law. That
> makes ROMs a little different from other chips.
Right again. The attourney said that software copyright is not reduced or
negated no matter what medium they are published in, and whether the roms
are burned or fabricated with the software content is not relevant!
Software on chips is just as protected as that on disk or any other media!
For the record, I believe all creative property belongs to the creator,
and that the creator has no obligation to the public to make his/her
creations available, or keep them 'in print' or anything else.
I'm tired of all the sad attempts at rationalization around here. Instead
of all this pathetic scrambling around for justifications, it sure would
be refreshing to hear things like...
"I know it is illegal to freely distribute roms, but they'll never catch
me so I don't care."
or
"I'm not creative enough to make a wholly original work, and I'll do
anything to make a buck, so I'm going to sell some old games that somebody
else wrote for a profit!"
...instead. I bet the threads would die quicker too :-/
> > entitled to protection at all, anything after that gets 5 years. Why else
> > would Atari have encrypted cartridges on later models than the 2600?
>
> Because Nintendo-style licensing agreements for consoles are
> unenforceable in western countries.
Yep, the Lynx and 7800 encryption was to prevent unauthorized 3rd party
development (only Atari and Epyx had the encryption routines, and the
consoles would refuse to run unencrypted games), the encryption scheme
provides no copy protection whatsoever.
***Mike St. Clair***mstclair@xxxxxxxxx***irc:SaintMick***
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