> > 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.
I guess if it's just an added piece of hardware it's more gray than flat out bootlegging, but let's face it, it's just a trick to skirt the law. And surely their upgrade kit contained some original Pac-Man code? How could it not? Even if it replaced graphics roms completely, they weren't written from scratch, they were edited. The part where they got partial ownership of Ms., Jr. and whatever else crossed the line to me as well. I think it's mostly a matter of Namco being lazy and not making an official upgrade. Like it would have taken them very long to add a bow, a title screen update, swap the mazes around and add speed. Then it would have outsold the crap out of Crazy Otto.
> 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!
I guess people should hack up games today and sell their changes as diff files then and see what happens. It probably won't make much difference to me either way.
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