Early Piracy Theory - Okay to Copy but not Disseminate

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goldenband
Posts: 766
Joined: April 8th, 2015, 10:29 pm

Re: Early Piracy Theory - Okay to Copy but not Disseminate

Postby goldenband » June 26th, 2018, 11:45 am

scotland wrote:What's kinda funny is that this snippet is in a commercial version of the Star Trek Text Game written in BASIC. The game is a version of the original BASIC game that was written around 1971 by MIke Mayfield and friends, and was in no way authorized to use the Star Trek franchise. The game was ported and published here and there, including by David Ahl as Super Star Trek which made it well known. The game required some adjustments to run on a TRS-80, but the basic game was already public domain - yet Lance Miklus claims a copyright based on a set of relatively minor modifications. That would seem pretty debatable - like tuning up a car gives you rights to it.


That's very, very cheeky on his part to lecture his buyers about copying a game he didn't write and that infringes on someone else's trademark and intellectual property. :twisted:

BTW I disagree somewhat with the VGC about floppy disks not being fragile. In perfect conditions, yes, they can last a long time, and the vast majority of mine do still work -- but one poorly-timed power failure, write error, or excessively dirty head and they're toast. It's so frustrating to play a game and have it crash halfway through with an IO error...


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