vice in extras

Michael Schwendt bugs.michael at gmx.net
Sun Feb 27 21:26:11 UTC 2005


On Sun, 27 Feb 2005 14:52:13 -0600, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:

> On Sun, 2005-02-27 at 15:39 -0500, Chuck R. Anderson wrote:
> >On Sun, Feb 27, 2005 at 02:52:39PM -0500, seth vidal wrote:
> >> On Sun, 2005-02-27 at 19:54 +0100, Lars wrote:
> >> >hello
> >> >
> >> >it would be nice to migrate the vice commodore emulator package from
> >> >fedora.us to the official extras repo.
> >> >
> >> >in true oldschool-gaming-spirit,
> >> 
> >> vice was removed from fedora extras b/c of potential legal issues.
> >
> >Aww shucks.  That rules out all vintage emulators, then, one of my
> >favorite pasttimes :(  Kegs, stella, uae, ...
> 
> Unless you can get written permission from the original
> trademark/copyright holders, they're all forbidden. :(
> 
> Hey, maybe someday, they'll slip into the public domain. When I'm 370.

Although I'm not aware of any legal actions against authors of Commodore
home computer emulators, such as VICE or UAE, who include the original ROM
contents, these emulators are a grey area.  For the trademark/copyright
holders, it's a trade-off between seeing the emulators, and the scene
surrounding them, as advertizing (e.g. some either pretend or believe that
there's still a real market, a target group of nostalgia fans, who buy
new/related products and software for the old technology) and as
infringement of copyrights or patents. Occasionally, there have been
reports of a few cease-and-desist letters to web sites, which offer
copyrighted games for download.

Excerpt from an explanation I posted elsewhere:

The copyright for these images is with Commodore International BV, a
subsidiary of Tulip Computers, Netherlands. The old 'Commodore' trademark
has been bought by Tulip, and recently they've signed a letter of intent
with California based Yeahronimo Media Ventures Inc to sell their entire
Commodore subsidiary. YMV's business model increases the likelihood of
actions against emulator authors and copyright infringement.




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