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Getting Creative With Crippleware | 26 comments (26 topical) | Post A Comment
No, you don't know about "copyrights..."[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#8)
by kbiel on Fri Apr 11, 2008 at 12:46:36 PM PDT

First of all, the law does not address your intentions when you solicit money with other peoples' IP.  It doesn't matter what you intend to do, if you are asking for money in return for distributing someone else's copyrighted material, you are violating the law.  Creative is well within their rights to stop Mr. Kawakami from redistributing their copyrighted material.

The Compaq situation was different.  Compaq reversed engineered the BIOS to discover how it interacted with the other hardware and then produced their own BIOS that mimicked IBM's.  That is why they won their case.  Had they just copied the code out of IBM's BIOS, they would have lost.

There is a very simple solution to this problem.  All Mr. Kawakami needs to do is distribute a patch file (preferably with an installer).  At this point, he would be distributing his own creative works which would not violate Creative's copyrights.  Then Mr. Kawakami could distribute it legally and even ask to be paid for it.

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What copyright?[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#9)
by Anonymous User on Fri Apr 11, 2008 at 12:56:39 PM PDT

Bad analogy. The IBM PC was a totally open specification.

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IBM PC was a totally open specification[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#11)
by kbiel on Fri Apr 11, 2008 at 03:27:56 PM PDT

Um, the BIOS wasn't.  That part was non-published, intellectual property of IBM.  Compaq could have just copied the code out of the BIOS, but that would have violated copyright law.  Instead, they blackbox tested it (reverse engineered) and then wrote their own BIOS code to mimic it.

But you are right on one point, it was a bad analogy.

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Try again![ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#17)
by sconeu on Sun Apr 13, 2008 at 10:10:44 AM PDT

BZZZZZZT!!!! And thank you for playing.

IBM published the entire contents of the BIOS in the Technical Manual.

They did the same for the XT and the AT.

--
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the United States of America.
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IBM's published Bios[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#20)
by byelen on Mon Apr 14, 2008 at 07:20:27 AM PDT

IBM published their pc/xt/at bios in order to make it MORE difficult for reverse engineering. By having the code published, a company reverse engineering the bios would have to prove that their engineers NEVER saw the published code. Compaq had two teams of engineers reversing the bios. Team one (working with the hardware) created a set of specs for the bios calls and actions. Team two took these specs and wrote a "new" bios. Neither team had contact with one another.

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No doubt...[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#21)
by sconeu on Mon Apr 14, 2008 at 07:36:44 AM PDT

But kbiel claimed that the BIOS was unpublished.

--
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the United States of America.
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Publishing the BIOS[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#23)
by ObviousTroll on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 05:54:04 AM PDT

and giving third parties the right to copy it are two different things. Actually, IBM deliberately published the BIOS to make it harder for companies to legally clone it - they could claim the other company read the publication and used that knowledge to write their own. See, those of us who are old enough to remember 1982 remember this story.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]


Getting Creative With Crippleware | 26 comments (26 topical) | Post A Comment
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