Licensing Kickstart ROMs for Raspberry Pi

[dammy]

Well, I've left a message with Cloanto. I'll report back if I get any useful clarification.

They can sell it to you per unit, but the actual owner is Amiga Inc which Cloanto has a license agreement with for the WB/KS 1.0-3.1's IP.

[dammy]

The truth, the real truth is no one can prove legal ownership of the kickstart roms. If someone could, they would have done so. Instead, each time this question comes up, the amiga grave robbers still profiting from selling these ancient rom files are deadly silent.

Someone has to own them, and that would be Amiga Inc.  If it's not Amiga Inc, it would default to Commodore Holding as the last owner.  With the release of the AROS 68K and AROS replacement kickstart, Amiga Inc's IP has significantly devalued AI's WB/KS files but that does not remove ownership.

[dammy]

Okay, I'll try to sum it up for you (believe it or not, the following summary is the simplified version):

There is only one entity that claims to own the Kickstart ROMs (amongst other things): Amiga Inc., available (sometimes) at amiga.com. There are several problems though:

1. They licensed most of the rights regarding the Kickstarts, including the right to distribute them in anything but simple emulator-autostarting-a-single-game packages or Amiga-in-a-joystick type hardware, to another entity exclusively: Hyperion Entertainment.

Did you forget about Cloanto's license?  So much for exclusively.

[dammy]

No I didn't. If the original poster is legit, he's searching for a way to distribute Kickstart ROMs with/for the Raspberry Pi. Distributing an emulator package on DVD is probably not what he has in mind - but that's all Cloanto have to offer.

Like Cloanto can't make a deal for the kickstart images alone.

And please don't get nervous that CUSA might not be able to distribute proper ROMs. They're not going to do that, ever. They wouldn't even know legit ROMs if they bit them in the ass. You may keep daydreaming about it as much as you want, but it's not going to happen. Period.

Like I would expect you to know jack on what C=USA's contractual options are?

[dammy]

They haven't done so for the last fifteen years they've been selling Amiga Forever - draw your own conclusions.

I would chalk that up to no one asking who went through with a contract.

I know Barry.

And your a mind reader, gotcha.

Look, I'm not happy about the situation as it is - but ESCOM did buy the rights, I have no doubt about it (and neither did they, or anybody else in the community - until recently). Heck, they bought the whole company. Even if there is a hole in the paperwork (which is not proven by the outcome of the lawsuit in Germany), trying to use that against any ESCOM follow-ups would just be as petty and miserable as the performance of said ESCOM follow-ups.

And AmigaOS still wouldn't be "free", there would still be an owner, and he would still be as dumb and greedy as all other owners have been.

Why don't you go ask the Bahama Court appointed Trustee for C=?  If someone else had owned the kickstart (or the rest of the OS for that matter), they would have been screaming about violating their IP when ESCOM produced additional Amigas and sold off Amiga to Gateway.  Or is it to your belief that the Bahama Courts still retain control of that IP?

[dammy]

Perhaps determining who is licensing holds more weight at this point than any proof of ownership.
One thing we know from the Jens Schoenfeld posting about negotiating recently...it sure wasn't with Amiga Inc.

#6

The smart move would to be just use AROS kickstart and be done with it.  There is no reason to pay out money any more for the original kcikstart.

[dammy]

have there been any single instance of a ROM site being shut down for hosting amiga ROM's?

The late Gary Peake use to love shutting down Amiga IP pirate sites.

[dammy]

The USPTO has a nice searchable patent database (use "quick search" then search for "Assignee name" = Commodore). The list of results is sorted chronologically. start at the bottom and then go up the list.

For somewhat complicated reasons, the patents in question expire either 17 years after the issue date or 20 years after the filing date - whatever is the longer term. I count 6 patents which are still active, all of which will expire in the next year.

But the copyrights last nearly forever: http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html