Along similar lines, the Sega Genesis required games to trigger a routine in the console to show "Produced by or under license from Sega Enterprises LTD." at bootup time, attempting to use trademark law to force game publishers to pay for a license from Sega to build games for the console. The court ruled that copying the code to trigger the message was not copyright infringement and the message itself was not trademark infringement because Sega's own design forced those things to make the hardware work.
"The idea was that if you were an unlicensed Nintendo developer and you produced an unlicensed game you would have to reproduce Nintendos logo which is a registered trademark. This would in turn allow Nintendo to manually enforce anti-piracy measures through litigation."
I can understand why they would expect copying the code to be a copyright trap, but I'm confused why they expected merely displaying the message to be a copyright trap at all. Why world it be copyright infringement to falsely advertise the vendor? To my layman ears that sounds like claiming that lying about parking somewhere would constitute a parking violation, which makes no sense. If anything, wouldn't it be a trademark violation or false advertisement or something else?
Sega had implemented a measure to discourage unlicensed games for the Genesis/Megadrive. Upon boot, the console would ensure that the string "SEGA" was present at a certain memory location and then display that string as part of a longer message to the user asserting that the game was produced under license from [string]. The idea was that circumventing this would constitute trademark infringement.
Accolade reverse engineered and circumvented it. Sega sued for trademark infringement. Accolade eventually won. The whole thing only harmed consumers since by the time Sega implemented the measure there were already a bunch of games, both licensed and unlicensed, that did not pass the check.
30 years on and still unwilling to name the actual companies involved. I get that discretion is a thing but this feels like how history becomes folklore.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 27.3 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade
APIs are (generally…) not copyrightable for similar reasons.
https://knight.sc/reverse%20engineering/2018/11/19/game-boy-...
"The idea was that if you were an unlicensed Nintendo developer and you produced an unlicensed game you would have to reproduce Nintendos logo which is a registered trademark. This would in turn allow Nintendo to manually enforce anti-piracy measures through litigation."
Sega had implemented a measure to discourage unlicensed games for the Genesis/Megadrive. Upon boot, the console would ensure that the string "SEGA" was present at a certain memory location and then display that string as part of a longer message to the user asserting that the game was produced under license from [string]. The idea was that circumventing this would constitute trademark infringement.
Accolade reverse engineered and circumvented it. Sega sued for trademark infringement. Accolade eventually won. The whole thing only harmed consumers since by the time Sega implemented the measure there were already a bunch of games, both licensed and unlicensed, that did not pass the check.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code