Re: Mimic Spartan(s) for me!

["Sheldon Simms" <sheldon@semanticedge.com>]

Im Artikel <3b0b2d88.18690832@news1.on.sympatico.ca> schrieb "Jeff
Blakeney" <CUTjefbla@bconnex.net>:

> On Fri, 18 May 2001 12:28:55 +0200, "Sheldon Simms"
> <sheldon@semanticedge.com> wrote:
>
>>Well it sounds to me, then, that if I download an sector-edited copy of
>>Appleworks from some web page, then I haven't done anything wrong...
> 
> If someone went to all the work to reorder the code of a program like
> AppleWorks so that any of the remaining code pieces were small enough
> that they wouldn't be considered stolen from the original code and they
> could somehow prove that they didn't create it directly from the
> original code and you were willing to entrust your data to a program
> that might have just had a bunch of really nasty bugs introduced into it
> then you could probably use it legally.  However, the person to do all
> this work would also be taking a big risk of being penalized if it is
> found that they did create their version illegally.  This also brings up
> moral issues but I won't go into that.

But this rationalization of yours is just plain wrong. If the starting
point of the exercise was a binary image of Appleworks, then no
matter how much "rearranging" was done, the result is a derivative
work of Appleworks. Creating a derivative work is illegal without
permission from the copyright holder.  There's not a question of
"whether" the work is illegal. It is.

Unless the Spartan ROM was produced without reference to the
original Apple ROM, then it is an illegal derivative work, and you
are in possession of it. Therefore, you can be true to your absolutist
copyright principles and destroy the Spartan ROM, or you can
admit that there are times when it's ok to acquire and possess works
that are, technically, violations of copyright law; which is just what
I've been saying all along.

-- 
sheldon@semanticedge.com  "The term (denotation t) denotes the object denoted
                           by the object denoted by t." -- KIF