vice in extras

[Hans de Goede]

2 questions:

1a) Are vintage hardware emulators all dubbed grey-area and thus not 
distributable, or only those which need / are shipped with bios ROMS?

1b) And what about those for which the BIOS / ROMS have been set free 
explicitly?

2) Since atleast a number of emulators are dubbed gray area, is anyone 
willing to host a Fedora compatible (but not Fedora) RPMS repository 
like livna, but then specific for emulators? I'll gladly volunteer to 
maintain a couple of emulator packages, xmame comes to mind :)

Regards,

Hans

p.s.

I know this might be best discussed elsewhere due to legal concerns, so:
- the above is strictly my personal opinion and in way related to RedHat 
and/or the Fedora project
- please keep possible legal concerns in mind when replying and/or reply 
with a private mail.




Michael Schwendt wrote:
> 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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