[Coco] ROM Copyrights... copyrights in general...

[James Ross]

Yes, that is a good point Salvador.  And equally good point by Dennis; I agree w/ his assessment and informative article.

What is interesting, is this is taking place way back when Tandy/MS etc were still making money selling CoCo's and so were the authors of the Unraveled Series of books. But in this case the re-distribution of Copyrighted material by the books was probably helping them sell more CoCo’s, not less.

James

________________________________________
From: Coco <coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com> on behalf of Dennis Bathory-Kitsz <bathory at maltedmedia.com>

On Thu, June 8, 2017 11:33 am, Salvador Garcia via Coco wrote:
> As a
> possible precedent, I look to the Unraveled Series of books. These present
> in-depth information about the ROMs that could be considered proprietary.

On the other hand, this might be considered a transformational use, and in
those early days of software copyrights (remember software copyright wasn't in
force until 1980), this would have been difficult to address. The
transformation of binary object code to commented assembly code might have met
this test. See below for examples:

<http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-transformative.html>

Dennis



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