🚀 go-pugleaf

>I reckon that when
>the legal stuff is over with, Apple will have plugged that leak.  But one firm
>said that they may try to get "Mac ROM clones", whatever that is.  What's your
>opinion on all this stuff, Chuq?  Sounds kinda borderline to me.

My personal opinion? There are a few places (Brazil, Thailand for instance)
with copyright/trademark/open_piracy laws that might allow a company in that
country to legally make copies of the Mac ROMs. However, exporting those
ROMs to a country with a real proprietary information protection system
would be another matter.Even if you *could* find a haven to make the ROMs
without immediately being shut down, I wouldn't want to be the person trying
to bring them into the states through Customs. 

There are any number of ways to get ROMs or ROM reproductions. I certainly
wouldn't want to base a products sales on their availability, though. While
you can probably find a dealer to sell you a ROM from a dead machine,
scaling that up from a onesie-twosie to the kind of volume needed to make a
clone product worthwhile would be somewhere between hard and impossible. If
you sell 10,000 clones, you need a distribution channel for 10,000 ROMs,
too, and that would be something that I'd think would be rather hard to keep
quiet -- and there's no way to manufacture or distribute those ROMs in the
U.S. without violating Apple's rights (or at least spending a lot of time
explaining to various judges why those rights aren't violated -- and I
personally doubt there's a lot of chance of being convincing...).

[[[[massive disclaimers. massive disclaimers. etc. etc.]]]]

Chuq Von Rospach       -*-      Editor,OtherRealms      -*-      Member SFWA
chuq@apple.com  -*-  CI$: 73317,635  -*-  Delphi: CHUQ  -*-  Applelink: CHUQ
      [This is myself speaking. No company can control my thoughts.]

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