Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!convex!swarren
From: swarren@convex.com (Steve Warren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Atari ST emulator for the Amiga: Atari's position
Message-ID: <107341@convex.convex.com>
Date: 19 Oct 90 13:49:10 GMT
References: <6737@castle.ed.ac.uk> <2712@atari.UUCP> <5799@harrier.ukc.ac.uk>
Sender: news@convex.com
Organization: Convex Computer Corporation, Richardson, Tx.
Lines: 26

In article <5799@harrier.ukc.ac.uk> dac@ukc.ac.uk (David Clear) writes:
>If you wrote a commercial piece of software and someone, without your
>permission, ported this software to another machine would you not be
>phoning your lawyer the instance you discovered it? Even worse, if your
>software wasn't even ported - just binary copied and the target machine
>hacked a bit so your software would work...

No, it doesn't matter, as long as the user has purchased the commercial
software from the true owner of the copyright, or from someone else who
got it legitimately (and didn't keep any illegal copies of it).  There is
no provision in copyright law saying that software may only be run on a
particular machine.  If I purchase a legal copy of TOS and decide I want
to run it on an Amiga, Atari can do nothing about it, as long as I am not
running it on any other machines and I am not distributing any copies of
TOS to anyone else.

Of *course* Atari's position is going to be that it is illegal.  Nobody wants
their machine to be successfully emulated by a competitor.  But they can't
really do anything to people who follow the rules, their whining to the
contrary.

--
            _.
--Steve   ._||__      DISCLAIMER: All opinions are my own.
  Warren   v\ *|     ----------------------------------------------
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