Thank you very much! I never heard about this.
But, technically,
they surely didn't own the written permission of Shanghai's author (1) to do the changes (2) to distribute in on a cover tape (3) saying that it really is a PD (public domain title)
Let's imagine that somebody take Manic Miner, change the in-game text to let it say "this is Manic miner by p*ssoft, it is public domain", and then give it to Your Sinclair. Do you think they are allowed to publish it? (And change the name of "author".) I think they need a written permission in each case, regardless what's written in in-game text.
Frantisek Fuka aka. Fuxoft told me today, that he don't know that Shanghai was ever published in any magazine. It is a completely new information to him. (I didn't ask him whether he is lucky, or angry... :-)
He just told me that he remembers they published another his program without a permission, and changed the text too, especially removing any notice that the author is Franisek Fuka and his origin is Czechoslovakia. We both think there is no reaon of removing the country name. Is Czechoslovakia offensive? [This must be a joke.]
---------------------------------------------------------- Mgr.(MSc.) Aleš Keprt (also known as Aley) [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** www.keprt.cz *** ICQ: 82357182 Dept. of Computer Science, VŠB Technical University Ostrava, CZ - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - www.cs.vsb.cz ----------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrew Collier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2005 8:22 PM
Subject: Re: Still no tapes received
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/ ---
--
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