Re: "legal" advice required
Rob Riggs (rriggs@tesser.com)
Mon, 30 Dec 1996 21:54:19 -0700 (MST)
On 30-Dec-96 Olaf Titz wrote:
>Grant R. Guenther <grant@knot.torque.net> wrote:
>> I suppose I ought to take the conservative path and consider this byte
>> stream to be "code", and not part of a protocol transaction. My
>> understanding of situations like this is that to be subject to copyright
>> protection, code must clearly carry - in plain text - a notice of it's
>> copyright status. No obvious rendering of this bit stream produces any
>
>Wrong. The code is copyrighted in any case as of the Berne Convention
>(see the "Copyright Myths FAQ").
>
>The safest way would probably (no legal advice, I'm not a lawyer etc.)
>be a user-mode initialization program that reads the original EXE file
>(which the user has to provide) and uploads the code.
It doesn't even need to be user mode. The way the sound driver
does this for the Turtle Beach Maui code is to read the file
containing the initialization code and converts it into a
data structure contained in a header file.
This does mean that the user must have the initialization file
already and any module or kernel created with this data cannot
be distributed.
You could always ask the company that makes the hardware if they
would let you distribute the binary initialization code... You
really have nothing to lose by asking.
Rob
(rriggs@tesser.com)