Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 11:56:26 +0100 From: "Marco van de Voort" <marcov@stack.nl> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: yamaha japan relationships anyone? Message-ID: <20000221105916.60F132E804@hermes.tue.nl> In-Reply-To: <38B0C98B.5F84A431@newsguy.com>
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> > I've heard nothing about that. > > > > Was this done in relation to the whole controversy about the DVD decrypt > > software? > > No, it was wrt to Playstation, Nintendo, Sega or something like that. > Mmmmm... I thinking it was probably wrt to SEGA, because there was also > a trademark dispute related to a small string. :-) An american company > tried to get a license to distribute games for the game console, but the > japanese company only licensed under the terms "We'll hold exclusive > distribution rights to all games you produce", which was deemed > unacceptable. So, the company went ahead and did a straight clean-room > reverse engineering. They were later sued for the following (roughly): > > * Trademark violation. Later versions of the console required the string > with it's trademarked name to be located at a certain point in the > game's memory; this string was then displayed for a couple of seconds on > the string. > > * Copyright violation. The company used a some hardware to sniff the > object code, then disassembled and produced printouts of it. > > They lost on a lower instance, but have just won on a higher instance > under the merit of "fair use", since they had no legal alternative to > obtain the specifications to the console (other than engaging in a > contract deemed unacceptable). Unfortunately, the link with the ruling > did not have the complete ruling for some reason. I don't know how the > trademark thing was ruled. Afaik, this story is illegal in Europe too. You may reverse engineer to create a substitute, but you may not distribute, let alone sell it (as a gamecreator will probably do) This could be the case for reverse engineering drivers too. So probably drivers which contain information collected with reverse engineering may not be distributed, and are for personal use of the one that did the reverse-engineering (r-e) only. Afaik the only way to circumvent this is, (and this is a wild guess, I'm not a lawyer) is if the r-e is done within an organisation. (e.g. GNU), and all users donate a penny to GNU to become a member. And members may use the driver. Marco van de Voort (MarcoV@Stack.nl) <http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/xtdlib.htm>; To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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