Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!bnrgate!bigsur!bcars241!brad
From: brad@bcars241.bnr.ca (Brad Shapcott)
Subject: Re: Legal action against STrabble game.
Message-ID: <1991May28.140645.2069@bigsur.uucp>
Keywords: Scrabble, STrabble
Sender: news@bigsur.uucp
Reply-To: brad@bcars362.UUCP (Brad Shapcott)
Organization: Bell-Northern Research, Ltd., Ottawa, CANADA
References: <1991May24.125450.17582@lsuc.on.ca> <4cVH31w164w@ersys.edmonton.ab.ca> <1991May27.210009.16927@lsuc.on.ca>
Date: Tue, 28 May 91 14:06:45 GMT

In article <1991May27.210009.16927@lsuc.on.ca> jimomura@lsuc.on.ca (Jim Omura) writes:
>In article <4cVH31w164w@ersys.edmonton.ab.ca> mforget@ersys.edmonton.ab.ca (Michel Forget) writes:
>>As a side note, it has happened in the past that an author will take a 
>>story, change a few superficial details, and then re-release it.  On the 
>
>     A nice general statement without specific facts to back it
>up.

Actually I was just reading a collection of essays by Isaac Asimov in which he
refers to an incident in which a plagairized story was published in his maga-
zine (or at least the one that bears his name) without the editor's knowledge.
This sort of thing does happen quite often (well, compared to the frequency
with which I would suspect that people would be stupid enough to think they can
get away with it).

>Look, take this discussion to 'net.legal' or whatever it's
>called.  You're not saying anything that's "special" to the Atari
>community, so you may as well talk to people who are more likely
>to be interested in the discussion than those in this group.

I think the legal issues related to software have always been of particular
interest to the Atari community, from piracy to copyright and so on.  Because
the Atari market is so heavily dependant on shareware, legal decisions regard-
ing copyright status and licensing do have a special interest for us.

For instance if a licence is held by a large software corporation for a part-
icular application which has done quite well on other computers, yet the
corporation has no intention of developing it on the Atari, to what extent
would a piece of shareware which closely approximates that application be a
copyright violation?  And how close do you have to come before you are 
infringing on a copyright?  Reverse engineered?  File compatibility?  Look-
and-feel (see Unix Review, Vol. 8, No. 12 on that one)?

I mean if it is obvious to the court that Scrabble is just a variant on
crosswords, and while entitled to its particular format and graphics the
company owning this game cannot extend its copyright to EVERY crossword variant
(regardless of medium), then close duplicates would have legal grounds to
refute the owning company's claims.

So this particular issue does have a lot of relevance to Atarians, since it is
a piece of software for their machine being jeopardized, and because these
alternate distribution systems (shareware, etc) are so important to the Atari
community.  While I haven't generally been interested in playing computer games
since high school, and so have never even seen STrabble, I AM interested in
the legal results in this case.

>Jim Omura

brad
