[Coco] Copyright

[gene heskett]

On Saturday, January 15, 2011 10:09:26 pm Aaron Wolfe did opine:

> On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 7:53 PM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> 
wrote:
> > Two cents... With so many 8-bit style and 80s retro games coming back
> > and making money on cell phones and Xbox Live marketplace and Wii
> > compilations, I can see why folks don't want to release "old" stuff.
> > 
> > Today you can still buy, new, Space Invaders (70s), Pac Mac, Frogger,
> > etc.
> 
> Unfortunately nothing on the CoCo ever saw the kind of wide spread
> popularity that those games did.  "Dungeons of Daggorath" is probably
> the most popular original game the coco had judging by the number of
> references and websites devoted to it (even has a modern PC port).
> And still there isn't any attempt to monetize that game.
> 
> We have some ports of popular games but as you point out, the
> ownership of those is probably complicated.
> 
> > And Zaxxon isn't owned by Datasoft/Tandy/Bjork. They just own the port
> > they did with some kind of arrangement to allow distribution.
> > 
> > �I wonder if when the rights to distribute expire, it becomes illegal
> > even for the author of the port to give out copies...?
> 
> I think the bigger issue here is respecting the wishes of the authors.
>  We pretty much all know and respect each other in our small
> community, so regardless of what the law says, if one of us doesn't
> like people copying something they made, we should respect it out of
> decency without the need for copyright law to define out morals for
> us.

200% agreed here.

> that'll be $0.02
> -Aaron
> 
You missed a sure bet there Aaron.  I might have said $0.02 in 1934 
dollars, please adjust for inflation...  ;-)

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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