Amiga PCs on the way....

[runequester]

I must admit, a commodore style PC case with AROS would be pretty rad.

[runequester]

A post like that and this guy is supposed to be a "ceo" ?

[runequester]

So I guess we went from

Commodore USA's CTO Leo Nigro announced today that their new Amiga branded computers will be fully AROS compatible, and that they will be supporting the AROS open source community in every way possible.

to
 

Commodore USA was not set up as charity to support the development of AROS. It holds less than nothing of interest or importance to me, or 99.999999% of our intended market. It is a product that I or any other company could not use at all, as it has NO commercial value now, as is. So why are you all so concerned??

So how does Barry define "support in every way possible" ?
 
Or does his dishonesty extend from copyright infringement to lying in press releases and to potential customers ?

[runequester]

Depends on what exactly he is that he's responding to. How diplomatically were the questions asked ? Were they asked in an accusatory manner, or politely? Much of the behavior a lot of "amiga" people showed would provoke a similar response from many people. The man has been personally insulted and his character torn at quite agressively since all this deal came to light. Sure, he may not be perfect, but who is ? What has he done that effects anyone here personally to a point that this insane behavior is even considered, let alone carried out ? Personally I'm more inclined to give people a chance than automatically dub them the anti christ.

I guess Im not stumbling over myself to send money to a guy who has a cavalier attitude to other peoples property, makes grandiose announcements... and now admits he was lying about it.

[runequester]

That is how it legally is. That doesn't mean that we all agree that is how it should be. Nor has it been like that for very long.

Copyright as it became inshrined in law in the US and most of Europe at least, was intended to provide a time limited incentive in order to encourage innovation and creation. Once it does not serve that purpose, it may still legally be wrong to reuse a work, but morally there is no longer any need for the work to be protected and there's little reason to be concerned about it.

It may not have been a very classy move, nor legal, but on the other hand I completely fail to get even slightly annoyed that someone took an image that has been floating around for years, that has minimal commercial value for the original artist, and put it on their site after allegedly trying to contact him and failing to get a response.

He's taking a legal risk, and that is all on him.

I'm even conflicted about the removal/restoration of the artists name. On one hand it seems disrespectful. On the other hand, is it better to leave the name on if the artist may possibly object to being associated with a commercial venture?

In many countries, such as Norway since that's the case I know best, copyrights and creators rights are separate. That is, you can give/sell/rent copyrights, but creators right *always* remains with the creator of a work, and they include both the absolute right to get credit for your work if you wish, but also the right to have your name taken *off* a work that you feel have been altered or used in such a way that it does not reflect you.

Arguably, in some cases, if you are prepared to take the risk of using a work you have not secured rights t - whether or not that is justified - it may be morally the right thing to do to consider whether or not to remove the name of the creator of the work as long as you don't know the wishes of the creator of the work.

As for restoring it - since the community has in this case plastered the name all over the place, that pretty much removed any reason to keep the name off the image.

Frankly, unless Marko Hirv shows up and raises hell over the abuse of the image, I don't see the point of caring about this.

Do you think he'd be as cavalier about me putting amiga stickers on some PC's I build myself, and selling them as CommodoreUSA ?

[runequester]

Yes.  I do.  I think he would either just ignore you and not feel bad about it, or call you up and hash out a deal where you paid to continue doing you rebadging.  Either way I don't think he would be upset about it in the slightest.  He would see it as pretty standard in the business world, and he would be right.

Maybe things are different if you run a theoretical business on the internet, but I can assure you that in the corporate world where money is changing hands and identity has monetary value, nobody thinks like that.

[runequester]

The rebadging of products and licensing of trademarks that happen all the time proves beyond a shadow otherwise.

If a product is licensed, then money is changing hands and the lawyers are happy.

Give it a shot though. Buy some cheap chinese knock off mp3 players, brand them as ipods, call your company "apple" and start selling them.

Let me know how that works out.

[runequester]

I don't want to be the one to break this to you, but Apple hardware generally is made in China with cheap labor (haven't you heard about Foxconn's employee suicide problems).

Most consumer electronics in the west are built that way. Its the only way to push the prices down.

It's entirely irrelevant to the point. Substitute any other company name if you will.

And that's not really to the point. If Apple was out of business and a holding company had the brand name in its assets, I'm sure you could work out a deal to brand your products as Apples.

You would do this by contacting the holding company first, and working out a deal.
Appropriating IP and then asking if its okay later tends to lead to lawyers.


Of course, at this moment, we don't even know if the amiga.inc deal was legal to begin with. Hyperion seems to disagree but we'll see what comes out of that.

[runequester]

apparently ATI released some new drivers recently so who knows. I've generally stuck with Nvidia and been pretty happy