7 May
2000
7 May
'00
6:22 p.m.
"Bill Dawson" <whdawson(a)mlynk.com> wrote:
If you look at the legal aspects of the Apple vs.
Franklin lawsuit, back in
the Apple II days, you can see that had Franklin properly argued, they would
have won. It *was* impossible to separate the software from the firmware at
the time Franklin copied Apple's ROMs. Even though Apple had the approved
set of firmware entry points for third party software development, they
looked the other way as all parties used every and any useable subroutine
they could find in the firmware. Franklin had no choice to do anything
*but* exactly duplicate the Apple firmware to ensure software written for
the Apple II would run on their machine.
I don't see why you think that they would have won.
Copyright law does not have an exception that makes it OK to duplicate
copyrighted works without the author's permission if it's necessary to
do so in order to be compatible. The entire *purpose* of copyright law
as set forth in the US Constitution is to grant authors for a limited
time the *exclusive* rights to their writings.
[There is such an exemption in the DMCA for reverse-engineering, but that
doesn't extend to distributing verbatim copies.]
Eric