More on manuals plus rescue

[Fred Cisin]

>> > 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"

On Thu, 20 Aug 2015, tony duell wrote:
> 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.