Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!dptg!ulysses!andante!mit-eddie!rutgers!rochester!kodak!sisd!athena!jeh
From: jeh@athena.sisd.kodak.com (Ed Hanway)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: "Demos" and piracy
Message-ID: <1990Jul16.123449.5416@sisd.kodak.com>
Date: 16 Jul 90 12:34:49 GMT
References: <3492@crash.cts.com> <1990Jul13.154213.11818@sisd.kodak.com> <3557@crash.cts.com>
Sender: news@sisd.kodak.com
Organization: Printer Products Division Eastman Kodak
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In article <3557@crash.cts.com> oleg@crash.cts.com (Oleg Rovner) writes:
>In article <1990Jul13.154213.11818@sisd.kodak.com> jeh@athena.sisd.kodak.com (Ed Hanway) writes:
>>One demo that I downloaded a few years ago (from a commercial service, no less)
>>included a file named 77, which turned out to be a verbatim copy of a
>>commercial 77 point Helvetica lookalike disk font (sold by Zuma, I think.)
>>
>>Granted, there are many more sources of public domain Amiga fonts today than
>>there were back then, and it's not out of the question for these demo authors
>>to design their own, but I don't see why the author of a program whose purpose
>>is to annouce new cracked 'warez' to fellow pirates should be given the
>>benefit of the doubt.
>
>I have a couple of questions about this. First, the "benefit of the doubt"
>thing. Is it my mistake, or do we live in a country where it is still OK
>to be innocent until accused of having anything to do with drugs? [...]
>
>Now a semi-serious question. It has been my impression that fonts/typefaces
>cannot be copyrighted, just their names. So, it is not legal to release a
>Times (c) font, but it is ok to use the data from that font or produce a 
>look-alike font.

As several people have pointed out, font data can not be copyrighted.

Adobe has successfully been able to copyright some specific implementations of
PostScript fonts, using the rationale that since PostScript is a programming
language, there are many independent ways to encode the same font; thus
copyrighting their particular implementation won't stop anyone from
independently producing their own representation of the same font, but it
should stop someone from ripping off Adobe's code and calling it their own.

I don't think Adobe's arguments could be applied to bitmaps.

To address this "benefit of the doubt" thing, my point, admittedly
weakened by the problems with fonts and copyrights, is that if a pirate
openly distributes a "cracked" commercial game, I'd suspect that he'd have no
qualms about hoisting someone's fonts or bitmaps or source code or whatever
without giving proper credit to make his scrolling demo look more slick.
In fact, I believe some of the more abusive language in the Wild Copper demos
is directed toward someone who ripped off other demos and patched his own
name into them.

Of course, lacking any specific evidence, I'm not advocating that we appoint
a software czar to start serving user groups with no-knock search warrants
or anything.  I'm not even suggesting that, without specific evidence, any
demos should not be distributed.  I'm merely suggesting that perhaps some of
these pirates are not the coding heroes that they've been made out to be.
--
Ed Hanway
(speaking for myself, not my employer)