-----Original Message-----
From: Mike St. Clair <mstclair@xxxxxxxxx>
To: stella@xxxxxxxxxxx <stella@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tuesday, January 13, 1998 11:43 AM
Subject: Re: [stella] Piracy -- copyrights expired?
>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.
Obviously this is ridiculous, not if one is paid for one's time. In that
case, it's up to the owner of the property, i.e. whoever paid you, to decide
what happens to the property.
>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!"
Allow me to explain. This group is a conundrum. A dichotomy. A
contradiction. On the one hand there is the desire to preserve an ancient
software culture. On the other hand there is the desire to respect the
intellectual property rights of the owners. More often than not, it seems,
they are incompatible goals. We want to play the games, we want to study
the source code, we want to write games just like the old ones. But the
reality is, it's difficult to do without treading on the toes of the owners.
So what's the solution? Perhaps there is none. But if it turns out that
there is some aspect of law that causes some of the old software to fall
into the public domain, perhaps a bit sooner than it otherwise might have, I
think it's a good idea to know about it.
John Saeger
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