>the lawsuit in the early 80's which they clearly should not have won.
I dunno... I'm no expeert, but I did sleep in a Holiday Inn Express... and since they weren't distruibuting proprietary code (you still had to have a pacman cabinet), but instead merely an add-on board... which introduced new ideas and concepts... I think it's all fine and dandy.
In contrast, I think today's inturpretation is bogus... where a title claims copyright on any modification to their game... really? How so? Unless you own the rights to the actual machine language/platform... how can you claim rights to code that isn't written by you? That's like Automakers claiming rights to aftermarket modifications to it's stock muscle cars. SEMA, look out!