On Sun, Feb 20, 2000 at 09:36:05PM -0600, David Starner wrote: > Moving to Debian-Legal... > > On Sun, Feb 20, 2000 at 08:11:49PM -0600, Zed Pobre wrote: > > I've been having a conversation with the > > upstream authors of VICE, and they believe that the rights to those > > firmware ROMs have been released. > > Released? By whom? And how? Copyright law is usually very explict - By Commodore, presumably when the company ceased to exist. They admit not having any proof of this. However, it's been a very long time since I've heard anything about Commodore, and a quick web search on Commodore Copyright came up empty of anything indicating that anyone still existed. > copyright transfers must be in writting, and you can't lose > copyright just by ignoring abuses of it. How about by ceasing to exist? > > I note further that those ROMs are > > currently being distributed within the US on such major mirrors such > > as metalab.unc.edu. > > Irrelevant. Cf. the whole KDE incident - "they do it" is not a sufficent > excuse. My memory of sunsite/metalab is that they were pretty strict about not distributing restricted materials. If this has held true, that they distribute it is an indication that someone there believed that the CBM 8-bit firmware ROMs were not classified as such. BTW, if you're making a posting only to debian-legal, make sure to CC me on it, since I'm not subscribed. -- Zed Pobre <zed@debian.org> a.k.a. Zed Pobre <zed@resonant.org> PGP key and fingerprint available on finger; encrypted mail welcomed.
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