Randy wrote:
This 680C62 thread reminded me of a clever thing
Compaq put in their BIOS,
the string "None of this code is copyright IBM"
IBM's software would not run on a machine that did not have "copyright
IBM" in the BIOS.
The Vectrex home game console, developed my GCE and later sold by Milton
Bradley, would not run a cartridge that didn't contain at a fixed offset
near the beginning the string [copyright symbol]GCE 19xx. It became
standard practice to fill in the xx with 00, to produce an obviously
invalid copyright message that would nevertheless convince the Vectrex
to run the code.
In a legal battle (possibly Sega v. Accolade?), a court ruled that
if the manufacturer built into a product a mechanism that looked for
a specific data pattern to enable functionality, that the data pattern
could not benefit from copyright because it is purely functional rather
than being any form of protected expression.
Eric