BrendanJNorman wrote:Does an active legal copyright currently exist for Diep? And would Vincent gain anything in court, assuming an initial cease and desist notice was ignored?
Exactly! The judge would laugh and fine Vincent for making the court waste time.
The main thing is that Vincent can't sue for damages because he's not selling Diep!
You might have known about ROM sites, that have old video games available in a format that can be played in "Emulators", that allow people to play them in a convenient manner in their computers.
Well, it turns out some ROMs are actually hard to find, as those sites have actually removed them from download, because they've been contacted by Nintendo and such, because those games hosted there are potentially hurting Nintendo's sales, because they're currently selling them in their Virtual Console, Nintendo/Snes Mini, and such.
But those sites are still full of ROMs, most owned by Nintendo, why does Nintendo doesn't care about them? Why isn't Nintendo protecting their copyright? They could easily demand all their games to be taken down.
Well, they're not selling those games anymore, they're abandonware, and as such, Nintendo knows that if they tried to sue those sites for hosting their ROMs "illegally" (without permission), they would lose, because no damage is being done.
In fact, it's free promotion, I've actually read anecdotes about people buying Nintendo's games on the latest consoles because they played a ROM (without owning the game) and they wanted to continue the experience in the latest sequels. Nintendo has won money thanks to ROMs (heh, at one point they directly benefitted; there was a bad rip of a ROM from some game that had bugs in it that didn't happen in the original game. When they released that game in their virtual console, it had the ROM's bug! So instead of bothering to rip the thing from the original source, they just downloaded a free ROM and re-sold it.)
Another example is the Yamaha Softsynthesizer S-YXG50. They stopped selling it, and it became abandonware. Now you can download either the driver version (WinXP) or the VSTi version (VSTHost), and it makes Midi music sound awesome, and Yamaha isn't going after the sites that host the things.
What makes Nintendo or Yamaha different than Vincent? That he doesn't know he would lose the case, unless he put Diep for sale again.
In any case, I'm glad to see people deleting the engine from their hosts, I say, let them bury it, hopefully, the less people know about Diep, the more chance of an actually deserving engine being used.
) to pick flowers.