[Coco] Copyright

[Aaron Wolfe]

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.

that'll be $0.02
-Aaron