[Coco] Duplicating Copy-Protected Games (Z-89) (Was: Coco Digest, Vol 55, Issue 22)

[J.P. Samson]

At 05:44 PM 1/12/2008, J.P. Samson wrote:

>> As far as I know none of Steve's games, including Z-89, have been
>> released to the public domain.  Certainly I have seen no indication  
>> of
>> this on Curtis Boyle's CoCo games site.  To be honest, I'm not sure
>> what Steve's position is regarding his old CoCo games.  He obviously
>> makes no income off them anymore (i.e. you can't buy copies), so does
>> he take issue with people making unauthorized copies for personal
>> purposes, as long as no money is involved?

On Jan 13, 2008, at 10:16 PM, Steve Bjork wrote:

> You are right about the my games not being released to public  
> domain.  But there is more to clarify on the subject.
>
> First of all, I continue to sell and especially support all of my  
> games.
> As for making any money, what funds raised by a few games sales  
> offset the cost in supporting them. (Mostly mailing cost.)

It's good to hear that your games are still "in play", Steve--I had no  
idea you were still actively selling them.  I'm certainly interested  
in acquiring Z-89.  It's one of a number of games I was interested in  
getting back in the day, but the paper route money only went so  
far.  :-)

Yes, there is strict legislation in place regarding the rights of  
various media, software included.  Such legislation can be very hard  
to live by, however.  How many of us have acquired duplicates of CoCo  
software, software from original purchased tapes or disks, because the  
media was failing/defective (ahem, crappy Datasoft Zaxxon cassettes,  
ahem) or we moved on to new and better storage devices (cassettes to  
floppy disks to hard drives)?

How many of your CoCo games do you retain the rights to, Steve?  Some  
of your early games were created for Datasoft (e.g. Megabug) or were  
team efforts (e.g. Sands of Egypt).

JP