On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 18:41, Aley Keprt wrote: > I really don't understand how "publisher's PG language guidelines" can allow > change of the copyrighted material. It seems to me like Italian Load'n'Run - > they also changed everything they got and re-published without allowing with > changed names. I remember "Il Meccanico" instead of "Automania" and many > other titles. I don't like these warez "releases"!
I don't know whether it was Your Sinclair who changed the name in that version, or released the changed version; I just mentioned that whenever his name came up in the pages of Your Sinclair (in the PD demos column for example) it became Franksoft. When someone wrote into the letters page to ask why the name got changed, that was more or less the reason they stated. It doesn't matter whether that the name wasn't chosen with any intention of being offensive, it's just that to an English reader, there's only one way of pronouncing the word spelt "Fuxoft" and that is clearly inappropriate for the pages of a magazine intended to be suitable for children and teenagers. Your Sinclair *did* have a history of changing some of the programs which went onto the Smash Tape - for similar reasons, removing swearwords from scrolly messages, for example. Now - those demos were usually referred to as "P.D.", a legal term which would give YS every right to make those changes. But are they really Public Domain? The authors usually called them such, but also put copyright symbols on it. This is legally inconsistent, but a lot of people did it, and I can see how YS would have difficulty making the distinction between PD and Freeware, especially in the case of an author (who had done P.D. Spectrum demos in the past) releasing a product, but expecting the copyright terms to be different without explicitly saying so. Was Shanghai ever intended to be distributed commercially? Andrew -- --- Andrew Collier ---- ---- http://www.intensity.org.uk/ --- -- r<2+ T<4* cSEL dMS hEn/CB<BL A4 S+*<++ C$++L/mP W- a-- Vh+seT+ (Cantab) 1.1.4
