I wrote 'Nuke Redmond'

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Sun May 7 18:22:31 2000

"Bill Dawson" <whdawson_at_mlynk.com> wrote:
> If you look at the legal aspects of the Apple vs. Franklin lawsuit, back in
> the Apple II days, you can see that had Franklin properly argued, they would
> have won. It *was* impossible to separate the software from the firmware at
> the time Franklin copied Apple's ROMs. Even though Apple had the approved
> set of firmware entry points for third party software development, they
> looked the other way as all parties used every and any useable subroutine
> they could find in the firmware. Franklin had no choice to do anything
> *but* exactly duplicate the Apple firmware to ensure software written for
> the Apple II would run on their machine.

I don't see why you think that they would have won.

Copyright law does not have an exception that makes it OK to duplicate
copyrighted works without the author's permission if it's necessary to
do so in order to be compatible. The entire *purpose* of copyright law
as set forth in the US Constitution is to grant authors for a limited
time the *exclusive* rights to their writings.

[There is such an exemption in the DMCA for reverse-engineering, but that
doesn't extend to distributing verbatim copies.]

Eric
Received on Sun May 07 2000 - 18:22:31 BST