20 Aug
2015
20 Aug
'15
9:59 p.m.
> I suppose
they started to use the term due to the "sea of information" that
actually is internet, but technically the act of copying a software is
closer to making good fake copies of an item ( bags, shoes, etc ), at least
this is my personal view
That's usually called "forgery" Not really. Forgery (at least of items) normally has
the idea of using
inferior materials or construction and passing it off as an product of
another company.
For some items, it is provenance, not inferior materials.
For example, high denomination currency, or original works of art.
Some, art forgeries in fact, might be more detectable by NOT being the
inferior materials that the original was created with.
For example, if you wrote an 8080 BASIC with lots of
bugs, with many
functions missing, etc, and then tried to pass it off as the Microsoft
BASIC that would be forgery I think.
If the bugs and broken functions were all
fixed, then it would no longer
match, but still be an infringement.
But a copy of the Microsoft product _is_ identical to
the genuine
article. It is the same bit patterns. Once loaded into your 8080 system
memory it works the same way. So IMHO it is not really a forgery.
Being identical
does not make it not a forgery. A dollar bill that is
indistinguishable could still be a forgery (a good one), if the only way
to tell it apart was the presence of another with same serial number.
In the original dispute between Apparat and Tandy, Apparat
originally argued that because their documentation was a
bug-fix list, and that they TOLD their customers that they
HAD TO have a copy of TRS-DOS. When that didn't hold up,
they tried to claim that their modified product was SO
different, with SO many bugfixes, that there was nothing
left of the original. At that point somebody (Randy Cook's
lawyer?) demonstrated an easter egg copyright message of
"RANDY COOK". (The next release from Radio Shack, which
Randy Cook was not involved in, corrected that to
"TANDY CORP"
The final settlement included Apparat discontinuing it,
and releasing a rewritten from scratch "NewDos-80"
Don't know the other terms of the settlement.