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I couldn't just call my Playstation 2 game Tetris

Correct. I wrote a thorough essay on the legal issues surrounding Tetris. To sum up, TETRIS is a trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, but there are no U.S. Patents on the game itself, and the game's graphics are simple enough that any source code or audiovisual work copyright can be circumvented by a simple clean room cloning project such as freepuzzlearena, which produced the Tetanus engine (soon to be renamed to Lockjaw to distance it further from the TETRIS Mark).

Want a taste of LSD? Try TOD, a falling tetramino game with nine screen distortion effects. Includes static DOS binaries plus GPL sources for recompiling on Win32 or X11 systems. Only dependency is libc + Allegro + your window system's libraries.

just because there's no tetris on the game system yet

Apparently, you've never played The Next TETRIS for PlayStation and Wintendo9x.

Of course, nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice. See an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.

I couldn't just call my Playstation 2 game Tetris

Correct. I wrote a thorough essay on the legal issues surrounding Tetris. To sum up, TETRIS is a trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, but there are no U.S. Patents on the game itself, and the game's graphics are simple enough that any source code or audiovisual work copyright can be circumvented by a simple clean room cloning project such as freepuzzlearena, which produced the Tetanus engine (soon to be renamed to Lockjaw to distance it further from the TETRIS Mark).

Want a taste of LSD? Try TOD, a falling tetramino game with nine screen distortion effects. Includes static DOS binaries plus GPL sources for recompiling on Win32 or X11 systems. Only dependency is libc + Allegro + your window system's libraries.

just because there's no tetris on the game system yet

Apparently, you've never played The Next TETRIS for PlayStation and Wintendo9x.

Of course, nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice. See an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.

I couldn't just call my Playstation 2 game Tetris

Correct. I wrote a thorough essay on the legal issues surrounding Tetris. To sum up, TETRIS is a trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, but there are no U.S. Patents on the game itself, and the game's graphics are simple enough that any source code or audiovisual work copyright can be circumvented by a simple clean room cloning project such as freepuzzlearena, which produced the Tetanus engine (soon to be renamed to Lockjaw to distance it further from the TETRIS Mark).

Want a taste of LSD? Try TOD, a falling tetramino game with nine screen distortion effects. Includes static DOS binaries plus GPL sources for recompiling on Win32 or X11 systems. Only dependency is libc + Allegro + your window system's libraries.

just because there's no tetris on the game system yet

Apparently, you've never played The Next TETRIS for PlayStation and Wintendo9x.

Of course, nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice. See an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.

Software companies get to have their cake and eat it too. After the patent rights expire, they still have copyright control over the code, for a fantastically long time. MS-DOS 1.0's copyright should expire sometime around 2050 or so.

No, 95 years for works made for hire. Try around 2075. DisneyCo and the other MPAA studios are way too good at lobbying for effectively perpetual copyright.

Have you never heard of Pinnochio?

You mean Pinocchio?

a rip off of the original version ... The real one, not the disney one.

You can read (or print) the original novel by Carlo "Collodi" Lorenzini at PinEight.com. Thank goodness it was written before 1923, as Di$ney steals from PD to make its stories and takes deliberate steps (Sonny Bono act) to make sure it never has to give back.

those machine alien-type creatures

Echoes of the land of busy-bees from Pinocchio ?

Have you never heard of Pinnochio?

You mean Pinocchio?

a rip off of the original version ... The real one, not the disney one.

You can read (or print) the original novel by Carlo "Collodi" Lorenzini at PinEight.com. Thank goodness it was written before 1923, as Di$ney steals from PD to make its stories and takes deliberate steps (Sonny Bono act) to make sure it never has to give back.

those machine alien-type creatures

Echoes of the land of busy-bees from Pinocchio ?

Its very simple: if you want MSN, you must use Outlook Express or a web-based interface.

Both choices make it prohibitively difficult or impossible to filter spam.

1) Buy a Dell

Like Gateway is any better <cough>AOL</cough>.

2) Choose Windows on that Dell rather than Linux

A Dell box with Linux actually costs more (MS tax per box Dell ships whether or not Windows is installed, plus Linux media and printed manual costs), and the kids will eat you alive if you don't get them a new game machine, which Linux isn't at this writing.

3) Choose to use the included MSN

When the only other online provider in your area is America Online?

So move.

Give me a break.

4) Choose to use MSN e-mail instead of a thirty-party mail sever

The affordable POP3 and IMAP mail providers don't advertise much; how are the consumers to blame for not knowing that they even exist?

5) Chosoe to continue to use MSN even after learning it was non-compatible.

Again, the only other choice whose modem is not a pay-per-minute long-distance call (i.e. America Online) is even worse.

dont' buy products from them indirectly (ala Dell)

Name one company selling x86 architecture workstations to the home market who is not subject to the Microsoft tax.

Anything they had done would be convered by patents, which, thankfully, expire after a relatively short period of time.

Not if the Big Faceless GGM Corporations Who Are Above Any Single Country's Law have their way like Disney did with its extension of copyright from 56 years tops to 95 and beyond.

And yes, I am writing my representative letters. "I vote. And so do thousands of librarians who want the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act repealed."

Some couple hundred years ago it was agreed that artists, authors, inventors, and others that used intellectual efforts to create works for the public good should be rewarded for that effort.

Rewarded yes. But is a government-granted monopoly the only way to reward creation of works of authorship? I'd say the future belongs to services and sponsorships. Instead of making money selling records, a would-be Britney Spears could be making money performing, or putting slick ads into her songs (though less flagrantly than "The Joy of Pepsi").

Not everyone agrees, and are free to lobby to change the law of our society

Lobbying is currently defined as donating millions of dollars to a politician's campaign. Who, outside of big faceless corporations with an interest in preserving their monopolies, has the money for that? Most people are so dazzled by marketing that they actively reject the truth about the way the system works (perpetual copyright terms, copyrights that act like patents, region price discrimination coding).

those that don't, can find other contries with a society that agrees with them in this area ... Maybe by being invited to move to someplace they think is better.

Who has $500,000 to spend to move a family and a career, including the cost of learning a new language and culture?

have yet to learn about the value of that compromise.

You call 125-year American copyrights (life + 70 years) a compromise? Take off a century and I'd agree. Bottom line: Write your representatives.

You forget every congress person has their price...

...that Michael Eisner and his DisneyCo are willing to pay.

What has changed since then is that networking is now ubiquitous and cheap

Unless you have to move house ($100,000+) to be able to even get Internet access faster than dial-up.

at least at some businesses, admins don't even like employees to keep data on their desktops, but only on servers - that way no one loses data when the random desktop goes blooey.

Yes, but there's a difference between working across a LAN and working across the Internet. For one thing, office LANs are 100 megabit/s Ethernet, but as rgmoore pointed out, try getting 100 KILObit/s out of your dial-up PPP connection. The characteristics of telephone lines make it just not possible. Businesses can also afford to maintain a few smb/nfs/ftp/webdav servers and a couple hundred workstations; home users would have a bit more trouble affording $100,000 to move the family to an area where high-speed Internet access is available, $50/mo for the high speed Internet connection that Hailstorm would require to make it even remotely usable, and $25/mo (based on previous retail license price divided by 36 months) for Hailstorm service itself.

Where is everybody getting that Tux 2.0 is a static webserver?

They're confusing Tux HTTP Server with khttpd.

pin eight

how many songs on the radio right now will still be performed 180 years from now

RIAA is in bed with MPAA, as the high performance of the Hollywood Soundtracks "artist" shows. This means they likely had a hand in Disney's buying off of Congress to squeeze perpetual copyright through a loophole in the U.S. Constitution. RIAA will probably help buy the 2098 copyright extension to 195 years just so they can use copyright to prevent radio stations that "get it" (if there are still any around) from refusing payola and playing the Real Music that RIAA labels are no longer pushing.

According to Walter Elias Disney's death certificate (source: Big Secrets by William Poundstone), he died of cardiac arrest due to a cancer arising from the passages of the left lung. Disney was cremated at Forest Lawn, Glendale, "and has a perfectly ordinary gravesite."

Eisner, however, should be **** for perverting the Constitution of the United States.

a work that is not copyrighted (like your classmate's essay).

Your classmate's essay is an original work of authorship and is subject to the same perpetual copyright as anything else original. The contract between the student and the school determines which works belong to the student and which are considered "works for hire."

IIRC, a sheet of common dead-tree printed paper should last ~70 years

And copyright lasts 95. Therefore, the publishers have succeeded in making literature disposable by making the copyright outlive the paper the out-of-print book is printed on. Preservation societies such as Project Gutenberg are having a hard time with this fact.

Write your representatives in your particular federal government and tell them that effectively perpetual copyright has got to go.

I hope you will join the Project Gutenberg efforts, then.

Project Gutenberg's goal is to place in electronic form every work that was first published on or before January 1, 1923, the effective date of perpetual copyright in the United States. When PG runs out of pre-1923 works, what will happen?

Imagine if Shakespeare's works and the King James Bible were still under copyright. That's what the Bono Act amounts to in the long run, a situation where very few people can understand the language in public domain works because the English vernacular has evolved so far from 1923 to (say) 2400. (Works from before about 1500 are in Middle English, which sounds a bit like Dutch; see also The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.)

Personally, I think it'd be nice if people starting archiving classic old shows in the DivX ;-) format.

No. The United States copyright on all works first published on or after January 1, 1923 (before the invention of broadcast television), will not expire until The Walt Disney Company does. Congress has an unwritten agreement with Disney to pass a law every 20 years that extends copyright terms by 20 more years, resulting in effectively perpetual copyright that has been upheld by a district court and a court of appeals.

How exactly is this suit "against U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft"?

Read the filing. Rights advocates often sue the the Attorney General in order to overturn a bad law; see also the case formerly known as Eldred v. Reno , which seeks to overturn the Sonny Bono Effectively Perpetual Copyright Act.

Whether he realizes it or not, Dibbell is right to point out that Tokien, along with Lucas and a host of others who worked their way into the popular culture, has specified the architecture for the imagination-space of our culture

And if they don't allow us the benefit of generous fair use (including transformative use), then that means Tolkien's estate or Lucasfilm could pull the entire structure out from under us at any second. Just look at what Paramount has been doing to Trek fan pages with all the damage the monopolists have been doing to the concepts of "fair use" (DMCA) and "public domain" (copyright extensions that keep even "Happy Birthday" under AOL Time Warner's exclusive control).

Old English, by the way, did have more letters than are found from modern english ("thorn" letter for "th", and couple of others).

The letter thorn looks like (U+00DE; Alt+0222; capital) or (U+00FE; Alt+0254; lowercase).

Thus, "Ye olde ..." is a kind of a typo; the first letter wasn't Y, but was close enough visually that it started at some point to be thought to be Y...

Except DisneyCo (famous for buying bad legislation) actually does the opposite: using instead of y in the corporate logo.

Whereas most phonetic alphabets consist of ideograms recycled as phonetic symbols, Hangul seems to be the only one to consist of symbols constructed purely for phonetic meaning.

If you like hangul, you'll probably also like J.R.R. Tolkien's tengwar. Regular changes to the shapes of the consonants denote stop/fric/nasal and voiced/less. The structure of the script is such that unused letters (after t series, p series, and k series) can be used to represent sounds unique to a given language. It's available in both vowel-pointed (like devanagari and biblical hebrew) and vowel-letter (like greek/latin/cyrillic) modes.

I'm not 100% sure about the legal status of a post-1923 script. Can a script be copyrighted or trademarked? Probably not. (Patents don't apply; it's been more than 20 years since the entire system was disclosed in RotK.)

Few swpat applications contain a working implementation, most do not even give enough information for a skilled programmer to implement what is described.

That may be true for some software patents, but (for example) the United States patent on Nintendo's Dr. Mario game gives a full description of every variable and subroutine. Of course, I stumbled upon this patent after I had worked it out in my head after about two days of non-stop Dr. M play and after I released my clones of Tetris and Puyo Puyo.

The first claim of the patent also seems to cover Tetris 2, Blastris B, and some popular variations on Columns and Klax. Prior art? Not only that, the recent Dr. Mario 64 doesn't mention a patent number on the box, in the manual, or in the credits. (Dr. Mario 64 sucks anyway.)

NINTENDO: THIS IS YOUR INVITATION TO SUE ME UNDER U.S. PATENT 5,265,888. HERE'S THE EVIDENCE!

Few swpat applications contain a working implementation, most do not even give enough information for a skilled programmer to implement what is described.

That may be true for some software patents, but (for example) the United States patent on Nintendo's Dr. Mario game gives a full description of every variable and subroutine. Of course, I stumbled upon this patent after I had worked it out in my head after about two days of non-stop Dr. M play and after I released my clones of Tetris and Puyo Puyo.

The first claim of the patent also seems to cover Tetris 2, Blastris B, and some popular variations on Columns and Klax. Prior art? Not only that, the recent Dr. Mario 64 doesn't mention a patent number on the box, in the manual, or in the credits. (Dr. Mario 64 sucks anyway.)

NINTENDO: THIS IS YOUR INVITATION TO SUE ME UNDER U.S. PATENT 5,265,888. HERE'S THE EVIDENCE!

Amazing that people will pay $70 to register a domain to point at goatse.cx.

.org .com .net domains for under $12 per year at GANDI. Services offered include URL-rewriting redirection and email redirection with NO ads. The terms of service are among the best in the industry.

Why pay more? Register your domain at www.gandi.net before it's squatted.

disclaimer: they're not paying for this plug; i just have two domains (pineight.com and misunderestimated.net) with them.

What you speak of is called a restriction, which means that the freedom in restricted in one form or another.

If you lived in an area such as Afghanistan, with nothing restricting guerrillas from the other side from killing you, would you consider yourself free? In order to have freedom from, say, being murdered, people need restrictions on them such that they do not murder each other. Those in charge must balance freedom and security to create an optimal symbiosis.

(Insanely long copyright duration is not balance.)

"Windows XP: eXtremely Pathetic." -- Anonymous Coward

Assuming I were to live forever, why should I want to?

Every 20 years, DisneyCo lobbies the world's major powers for yet another 20-year retroactive extension on its monopolies under copyright law. Assuming you live longer than DisneyCo, you'll finally get to see copyrights expire into the public domain.

Anyway, on to my question:

Say I'm buying rings for aging patients in the hospital. Would you guarantee that they wouldn't die in the next 90 days with the rings on? Would you guarantee that you'd have enough money in the bank to cover all the refund checks?

"aspirin" used to be a registered trademark?

According to this Flash map, ASPIRIN® is still a trademark in many jurisdictions; Bayer had to give it up in the U.S. after WWI.

trademarks slopping over into public domain even before the 75-year trademark expiration date.

Bullshit. Trademark registrations can be renewed every 10 years. This renewal is legitimate, unlike the 20-year across-the-board renewals that Disney keeps buying for copyrights that severely erode the public's end of the bargain under which the Constitution authorizes certain government-granted monopolies.

And yes, I do like the taste of SPAM luncheon meat and SPAMBURGER sandwiches.

Work does not go into the public domain unless (1) the content wasn't copyrightable in the first place, (2) the copyright runs out

Do copyrights even run out anymore? I thought Congress and Disney Co. had a deal: every 20 years, Congress retroactively adds 20 years to all copyrights.

Boycott isn't something that 10-year-old kids are going to be playing in an airport terminal.

But it is something with which 16-year-old kids are going to be developing Free Software demos and games, to sell to such 10-year-old kids (as is their right under copyright). For example, I use the LoopyNES emulator to help me develop my GNU GPL licensed NES software. Nintendo doesn't like this, as it cuts into their console software licensing revenue stream. Games are the blades for the GBA hardware razor, which nintendo sells at a slight loss so it can make up the difference in software.

But in this case, the emulator probably isn't even much of a bigger deal than the original NES emulators.

While we're temporarily on the topic of NES emulation, I'd like to warn that you should delete your copy of Bloodlust NESticle right now because its emulation accuracy is so shoddy. Use LoopyNES instead.

Well at least this article isn't about boycotting the Game Boy Advance hardware.

In my day job I develop embedded firmware. There are a few pieces of GPL'd code I'd like to include in my product. But, since the whole firmware image is linked as one monolithic executable, I can't without having to give away the source to the entire ball of wax! ... I wouldn't mind providing the source to the GPL'd modules. I wouldn't even mind providing any modifications I made to those modules to get them to compile on my platform. But that's not good enough for the GPL.

I looked into this issue when thinking about how to license my GPL'd NES games for use in a "pirate" multicart image. You can probably cover parts of your embedded image as mere aggregation under the GNU GPL if you create an abstraction of "an executable" that can be extracted from the monolithic ROM image and be replaced independently. NES has such a concept; it's called a "program bank" that can be bankswitched into the address space.

People are using JavaScript to prevent viewers from using the right mouse button to save a picture

Blocking contextual menus is more trouble than it's worth (read more). (Circumvent it in IE by holding down the right mouse button and pressing Enter, or choosing File : Save As... : Web page complete. Circumvent it anywhere by wgetting the page and its images.) And it pisses some people off enough to make them write right-click shit lists.

If all file sharing were stopped at the ISP level, people would find new ISP's

Once you're booted off both your local cable provider and DSL provider for running a bandwidth-hogging server (even if you're serving up Free content) on their severly oversold network, the only option left is to move to another area. This can cost six figures (or, in your case, eight Japanese figures).

I don't have to worry about any of this. I live in Japan

Whose copyright law doesn't even recognize a right of "first sale." For example, it is ILLEGAL in Japan to sell used video tapes, DVDs, and entertainment software.

The tabs on the site are transcribed by people that listened to the music.

But they're derivative works of the original musical composition.

This can be compared to running a program and then making your own that is similar without looking at the source code.

Cloning software is legal, but cloning music is not. They differ in the amount of paraphrase (copying of ideas with new expression) between the original and the copy. Copying the behavior of a program is copying ideas and not restricted under copyright law. Raw music itself, on the other hand, contains hardly any content that could be considered "idea" (you can be sued for four notes), and the lyrics that normally accompany tablature are generally copied verbatim.

It never-EVER made sense to me that there is a difference between Japanese and American console units.

<apologist>
Mostly because copyrights are licensed regionally. How else are you supposed to keep American rights to a movie franchise from being infringed when you have licensed only the right to distribute in Japan? And what if someone asks for tech support or game tips for an obscure Japanese game with which the American subsidiary is not familiar?
</apologist>

<honest>
The translation doesn't even have to be good. I just want all Sony's Japanese game to be belong to Americans.
</honest>

porting linux to the X-Box

Is not viable. The Xbox will have anti-piracy measures. Anti-piracy in the console sense means anti-third-party-software, with copyrighted boot loaders that must match a copy in ROM bit-for-bit or "no boot for you." Would-be Linux developers would need to buy expen$$$ive SDKs in order to develop for the beast. And the console model is incompatible with the GPL, as there is no way to load end-user-compiled software onto the machine.

OS X is open source. look at it all you want.

Darwin, the kernel of Mac OS X, is almost-free software. The theme editor lies squarely in Apple's proprietary domain (Quartz/Aqua/Carbon technologies). If you want themes on Mac OS X, run GNOME or KDE with XFree86.

How do you propose to compensate companies that develop new drug formulas and such.

By giving them a government-granted monopoly that lasts just long enough to compensate the company for the money spent on R&D. This works in the domain of drug patents, but it's falling apart in the domain of copyrights, which last 96 years (or life + 71) thanks to the Walt Disney Company, which every 20 years lobbies for another retroactive 20-year extension to copyright terms. It completely goes against the spirit of the "for limited times" language that the Framers wrote into the Constitution.

I know there is a compiler online for the nes and the snes

There are common assemblers for NES and SNES. NES's 2A03 is a 6502 (same arch as Apple II and C=64) with an on-die sound generator. SNES's 65816 is nearly the same as that of the Apple IIGS. Neither is C-friendly. The 32-bit 68000 in the Sega Genesis, on the other hand, has a version of GCC.

but their cart based so you couldn't just trade them

It's relatively easy to make an EEPROM cartridge for NES; start here. Edit, compile, emulate, edit, compile, emulate, ... burn on to EEPROM, test for bugs tripped up by emu inaccuracies. Just make sure you never use NESticle for testing.

It would be nice if they did opensource their development tools.

Standard "why don't they just free the software" response: For one thing, they might have licensed technology and not licensed the right to sub-license it to the community. (This may be much of why NVIDIA hasn't freed the drivers for its video cards.)

For another thing, game companies sell software. They don't want competition from software designed to run on their older consoles. This is why Nintendo is going after not only ROMs but also emulators, even when such emulators are used to develop free software for old consoles.

Also, there are trademarks and copyrights on the games' content itself. If you have a devkit, you can rip graphics from Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon and use them in your own games.

the great thing about consoles is that the programmers can't just throw in a little extra and say "Oh, they'll upgrade".

But that's exactly what Nintendo did for the Super NES. The programming model for the Super NES CPU and picture generator wasn't that much different from that of the NES. Even though the sound was radically different (NES had 20 registers in CPU address space; Super NES had a mini-DSP in the space of a separate processor with an extremely obscure instruction set), most game publishers just used Nintendo's sound driver from Super Mario World (it was provided with the dev kits). In fact, backwards compatibility with NES games was planned but later dropped.

NESdev, the center of the NES scene

When's the last time you've been able to use a computer with off-the-shelf games

My games are so off-the-shelf that they've never even been on a shelf. Am I correct in inferring a hierarchy analogous to that of New York theater, i.e. "shelf," "off-shelf," and "off-off-shelf"? Besides, there are still some very popular games that don't need a GeForce or a 1 GHz Athlon. For example, TETRIS® and TETANUS(TM) both run just fine on my 25 MHz 486DX. If game makers can't make their software gracefully degrade on old hardware, that's their problem.

and Windows applications, as well as Windows itself, for more than a year or two

Most popular proprietary apps require Windows 95, or Windows 95 with Winsock 2. M$ Office, on the other hand...

And most of all, that foot just looks COOL

If you wish to continue this flamewar, please do so on the NES. GNOME vs. KDE: Battle of the Desktops is an original game for NES emulators that pits a gnome against the old (pre-dragon) KDE mascot.

It was distributed by Artisan Entertainment

At least Artisan doesn't practice the price discrimination that is region coding.

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

The guys who run Everything2 and stand to make some money from it think it is better than the competition.

Of course they do, but the fellas who run E2 (Everything Development, a unit of Blockstackers Intergalactic LLC) aren't the same guys who run Slashdot (OSDN, a unit of VA Linux Systems Inc).

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

I remember that Clinton was able to do something on the federal level about assault weapons. Is this being challenged, or did they have some sort of loophole (anti-loophole?).

The second amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." USese adults have a right to bear arms in general, but which arms we may bear is "well-regulated" by Congress. Want a handgun or a recreational firearm? Wait a week and you can get one. Assault rifles are hard to keep "well-regulated" when they're sold on an open market; if you want to bear one, all you need to do is join the Army.

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

While representatives' votes are certainly a matter of public record

Not for an anonymous voice vote; both the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act[?] and the DMCA were passed this way. What are they supposed to record publicly, the decibel levels of the ayes and nays?

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Imagine sending your content in a universally accessible fashion, rather than a proprietary format that requires a plugin.

What vector animation format doesn't require a plugin? Flash is the most universally viewable vector animation format on the Web today. (This may change with SMIL+JS+SVG but we'll see about that.)

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Then someone on a 56k or less dialup has to download the heavy content site...just to switch it to lite.

That's easy to solve: place the link to light content at the top of the page, outside of any nested tables.

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Then you have the cgi return a single pixel gif.

And face a lawsuit from Unisys. But s/gif/png/ and you're fine; however, single-pixel PNGs are a bit bigger (byte-wise).

Anyway, what are you going to set as the alt="..." text (now a required attribute in <img> elements) for such a web bug? A more l33t way to do this would be to make your site logo a web bug; users wouldn't notice as much. This also sidesteps the "1-pixel PNGs are huge" problem.

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

If the scenes are cut maybe they were not so important to the artistic value of the movie?

Three words: Eyes Wide Shut.

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.