Re: 1541 clone help needed

From: Mia Magnusson <mia_at_plea.se>
Date: Mon, 20 May 2019 01:51:38 +0200
Message-ID: <20190520015138.00002667_at_plea.se>
Den Sat, 18 May 2019 18:31:19 -0700 skrev Nate Lawson <nate_at_root.org>:
> Very interesting. Taking the instructions of the original and
> modifying them likely does not prevent copyright claims.
> 
> Remember the clean room approach to IBM BIOS that Compaq took? So if
> they had documented the addresses and what each function did, then
> another team wrote the code from scratch, it might be ok. But
> shuffling and tweaking existing instructions wouldn’t. 

It would probably delay a legal process.

Also the market for Commodore drive clones were international so you'd
have to go through a legal process in each country to outlaw a specific
drive. With a hard-to-follow paper trail the producer might be able to
continue to produce their drives, and then someone might sell them
under another brand (Blue Chip v.s. FD-148) and the legal process had
to be repeated.

We shall not forget that semi-small import businesses sometimes didn't
have much of a moral compass, and would do whatever they could to earn
some money. They seldom had any reputation to keep up to and mainly
sold stuff that could be resold to the customer relatively fast and
without much questions, i.e. usually accessories and such, and a disk
drive for a Commodore computer would be in the higher end of what they
did deal with. Worth remembering is also that in the 80's it was still
possible to get a random alcoholic sign a legal document in exchange
for a bottle of booze or so, so Commodore might end up having a
copyright case against someone who owns nothing and at best has welfare
as income, below the income level that can be taken from a person to
pay their debts. (After something similar happened a few times and
ended up in the newspapers I think it wouldn't be possible to do this
any more).

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Received on 2020-05-29 22:02:10

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