-----Original Message-----
From: Mike St. Clair <mstclair@xxxxxxxxx>
To: stella@xxxxxxxxxxx <stella@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 8:00 AM
Subject: Are classic games "hardware"? (was Re: [stella] Piracy)
>The cartridge is hardware which *contains* software, and software is
>software. Before long we might have books, movies, and music on *chip*
>instead of disk or tape. Those works will not lose their copyrights 10
>years after being cast in silicon, I guarantee it.
I see you switched away from software to make your argument stronger. And
you didn't guarantee software. So you do at least have an intuitive
understanding of some of the difficulties of copyright law as applied to
computer software.
You see books, movies and music are quite different than computer software.
To be copyrightable, something must be a creative original work, derived
work, or compilation created by a human being. With books, movies and
music, it's easy for the average person to see or hear what they are, when
they are copies of something else and when they are original. The
"software" inside a rom is almost exclusively created by a computer. It's a
derived work. Derived from the source code created by a human being.
There's almost no way for the average person to tell if portions of object
code are actually original, or ripped from somewhere else. The best
evidence of originality is usually locked up in a file cabinet or in a
computer behind locked doors. We have to take their word for it when they
say it's original. Original source code is definitely copyrightable. If you
can demonstrate that the object code is derived from source code that passes
the originality test, then it's copyrightable too. When they don't publish
the source code, it's iffy. Or at least it should be. And at one time it
was. And if it isn't that way now, thanks perhaps to one bright-eyed young
rich kid who went around claiming that the holes that he had punched in a
strip of paper were actually his own creative work, well then maybe things
took a wrong turn somewhere. Wouldn't it be nice if you could go to the
Library of Congress and look up the source code to Pac-Man? Well MAYBE, the
fact that you can't means (you gotta know what I'm gonna say) ...
Regards,
John Saeger
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